GOP Senators Say Hegseth Hearings Will Be ‘Kavanaugh on Steroids’

In the new year, the Senate will vote on whether to confirm former Fox News host and alleged rapist Pete Hegseth as defense secretary in the second Trump administration. And, because the confirmation hearings will inevitably be contentious given the disturbing allegations against Hegseth, Senate Republicans are already self-victimizing—and they’re using especially gross terms to do so. Specifically, they’re comparing the upcoming Hegseth hearings to the 2018 confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was also accused of sexual assault. And they’re inexplicably portraying themselves as the real victims of the showdown that retraumatized sexual assault survivors across the country and even forced Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and her family to move houses amid threats and harassment.

“Everything is going to be elevated. I think it’s going to be Kavanaugh on steroids,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) told the Hill. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said he’s warned Hegseth that his hearings are “going to be a miserable experience, sort of like Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing.”

Over the weekend, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told NBC that Hegseth released the woman who accused him of rape in 2017 from a confidentiality agreement that was part of their settlement. Graham claimed that Hegseth is “being tried by anonymous sources,” and “if people have an allegation to make, come forward and make it like they did in Kavanaugh. We’ll decide whether or not it’s credible.” 

Graham, of course, is high on the list of men who should absolutely not be making determinations about whether women and victims are “credible” or not. Six years after the Kavanaugh hearings, still permanently seared into my brain is the image of Graham’s face contorted in white-hot rage while claiming Dr. Ford and the supposed feminist conspirators on the Senate Judiciary Committee were trying to “destroy” Kavanaugh’s life. (As for Kavanaugh’s “ruined” life, anonymous sources paid off about $200,000 in debt he owed around when he was nominated to the court; he's since ruined the lives of women and girls everywhere by overturning Roe v. Wade.)

That Graham would attack the woman accusing Hegseth of remaining anonymous and invoke the Kavanaugh hearings in the same breath is especially ironic: We all watched what the Senate did to Dr. Ford in 2018, and before that, to Anita Hill in 1992. The idea that victims must come forward to be credible, only to then be dragged and attacked into oblivion, is all about coercion and intimidation. 

Hegseth is accused of raping and potentially drugging a woman in his hotel room at a political convention in 2017. The woman alleged that he stole her phone and trapped her in his room when she tried to leave; the next day, she went to an emergency room to collect a rape kit, and a nurse reported the alleged rape to police. Hegseth conceded to police that the woman showed signs of “regret” when she left his room, but he didn’t elaborate. No charges were filed, and Hegseth and the woman privately settled. Last month, one GOP senator wrote off the graphic police report as "two people flirting with each other."

Hegseth has previously argued women shouldn’t be allowed in combat roles in the military and has been accused of fostering a sexist work environment and pursuing sexual relationships with female staffers at the veteran advocacy groups he led. His own mother once called him “an abuser of women” during his divorce from his second wife, which involved extensive allegations of infidelity and mistreatment. (She’s since desperately tried to take these words back on Fox News, but a man’s own mother calling him an “abuser” is a pretty hard thing to forget.) In college, as editor of a conservative campus publication, Hegseth published an op-ed arguing that raping an unconscious person isn’t really rape. Over the last month, a string of reports allege that Hegseth struggled with aggressive alcoholism for years, showing up drunk to work and varying work events at nearly all his previous places of employment; he even had to promise one GOP senator that he wouldn’t drink anymore—if confirmed.

That Trump had the nerve to nominate this man to run the world’s most powerful military is deranged enough on its own. That Republicans now see themselves as the victims, because Hegseth will inevitably face questions and possibly protesters, is entirely predictable. Trump, himself, is a legally recognized sexual abuser, and several men he nominated or appointed to top positions in his administration have similarly faced sexual assault allegations. Theirs is a political party of male entitlement to misogyny and violence against women.