At Forest Lake Area High School in suburban Minneapolis Pete Hegseth And Meredith Black seemed like the perfect couple. He played varsity football and basketball; She served on the student council and was nominated for the title of Homecoming Queen. They were both academic all-stars headed to elite schools (Princeton for him, Barnard for her). The Class of 1999 voted the couple “most likely to get married.” A yearbook photo shows Hegseth wearing a football jersey with his arms around Schwarz’s waist. They look like lovestruck teenagers in a John Hughes movie.

As her classmates predicted, Hegseth married Schwarz in 2004 at the Cathedral of Saint Paul in Minnesota, according to two attendees. At this point, Hegseth transformed into a culture warrior. His growing interest in right-wing politics seemed to coincide with his waning college basketball career. (Princeton’s student newspaper reportedly described him as “a recruiting afterthought” who “worked patiently in obscurity” during his time with the team.)

After 9/11, Hegseth enlisted in Princeton’s ROTC program and became a company commander. He also wrote opinion columns for The Princeton Tory the campus’s conservative publication. He expressed strong views against feminism and LGBTQ+ rights. “By advocating for government support of the traditional family unit, the return of acceptance of the homemaker profession, freedom from oppressive government oversight, moral responsibility, and the revival of religious faith, conservatives provide a working blueprint for a free and prosperous family Future.” Hegseth wrote in 2002.

Hegseth and Schwarz’s young marriage was short-lived. In December 2008, Schwarz filed for divorce after Hegseth admitted to cheating on her, according to four sources close to the couple. (APM Reports previously revealed that infidelity was listed as a reason in the couple’s divorce proceedings.) The sources told me that Hegseth’s infidelity left Black emotional and psychological scars. “She was heavily denounced by him throughout their relationship,” one of the sources told me. “To everyone else, they were seen by many as an all-American power couple building big things for themselves.” (Schwarz declined to comment. Hegseth’s attorney, Timothy Parlatore, (I did not respond to a detailed list of questions for this story, but instead issued a statement that impugns my reputation as a reporter.)

When Schwarz filed for divorce, Hegseth was with her Samantha Deering, He met him while working in Washington, D.C., with Vets for Freedom, a group that worked to maintain the military’s “counterinsurgency” strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2010, Hegseth married Deering, with whom he has three children. In 2017, Deering filed for divorce after Hegseth fathered a child with his Fox News producer husband Jennifer Smokes. Hegseth and Rauchet married in 2019 at Trump’s golf course in Colts Neck, New Jersey.

Hegseth’s personal life may have remained a little-noticed case of a conservative media personality not practicing what he preaches. But as the Senate prepares for hearings to confirm the former Fox & friends The host’s appointment on the weekend as Donald TrumpAs US Secretary of Defense, his entire biography and beliefs are the subject of public debate. In that role, Hegseth would oversee a military with about 1.3 million active-duty troops and a budget of nearly $900 billion. In his 2020 book American Crusade, Hegseth suggests that the military should pursue a Christian mission. “Our current moment closely resembles the eleventh century,” he wrote, adding: “We do not want to fight, but we, like our fellow Christians a thousand years ago, must fight. We need an American crusade.”

On November 14, I reported that Trump transition officials were blindsided by an allegation of sexual misconduct by Hegseth against a woman at a Republican women’s conference in Monterey, California, in October 2017, when Hegseth was still married to Deering. Rauchet gave birth to his son.

According to an anonymous memo that I later reviewed, the woman said Hegseth’s alleged sexual assault occurred while her husband and two young children were asleep at the hotel. Parlatore, Hegseth’s attorney, told Breitbart News that the woman stalked Hegseth. Parlatore also noted that Monterey police investigated the case and declined to press charges, but Hegseth later paid the woman to keep the incident confidential. During a visit with senators on Capitol Hill last month, Hegseth declined to discuss the allegations in detail. “The matter was fully investigated and I have been fully exonerated. And I’ll leave it at that,” he told reporters.