A former soldier, he was criticized for mismanagement of funds from two veterans’ associations he presided over, as well as for his behavior (sexist and alcohol-fueled). He was a Fox News presenter when he was invited by Trump and it soon became news that he reached an out-of-court settlement with a woman who accused him of rape in 2017.
Hegseth turned to lawyer Timothy Parlatore, who had become famous for successfully defending a soldier accused of several crimes. The soldier in question, Edward Gallagher, was part of the Navy’s SEAL special operations unit and was eventually acquitted of most of the charges, having been convicted of posing next to a corpse. The person who campaigned on TV for his acquittal and for the intervention of Donald Trump, then in his first term, was Hegseth as a commentator on Fox News.
In the case of the alleged rape that occurred in 2017, Parlatore wrote a statement in which he blamed the woman. “Witnesses testified that Mr. Hegseth was visibly intoxicated, but the complainant was not, as she led him by the arm to his hotel room.” Once in the hotel room where Hegseth was staying, the woman did not come out and was “the aggressor when initiating sexual activity.”
According to the PostParlatore is also the author of the 21-page document that restricts journalistic activity at the Pentagon. In March, Signalgate broke out, the scandal in which the magazine’s director inadvertently The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg was added to a group on the messaging app Signal and in which details of the military operation in Yemen were discussed. It was also in that month that Parlatore returned to the Navy, this time to join the ranks of the lawyers and soon afterwards became Hegseth’s advisor, making up for the dismissal of three others, in April, when his possible dismissal was being discussed.