A new era in American politics: When sexual misconduct allegations are overlooked
(This story has been updated to reflect that former Florida congressman Matt Gaetz withdrew his bid for attorney general.)
WASHINGTON ? There was a time in American politics when allegations of sexual misconduct would end a political career.
But accusations of sexual misdeeds are not a roadblock to landing a high-powered job in Donald Trump's new administration.
A woman who worked as a live-in nanny for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, has accused him of groping her when she was 23. Kennedy, a member of one of America’s most storied political dynasties, said he had no memory of the alleged assault but apologized to the woman “for anything I ever did that made you feel uncomfortable.”
Kennedy’s accuser, Eliza Cooney, said his apology wasn’t really an apology at all. “I don’t know if it’s an apology if you say, ‘I don’t remember,’” she said in an interview with USA TODAY.
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Three other men who Trump has nominated for prominent positions in his incoming administration also have faced sexual misconduct accusations, raising questions about their past and complicating their pathway to government service.
Pete Hegseth, Trump’s choice for defense secretary, paid a financial settlement to a woman who had accused him of sexual assault, his attorney acknowledged this week. Hegseth denied the allegation and was never charged. His attorney said the Army National Guard veteran paid the woman because he feared losing his job as a commentator on Fox News.
Matt Gaetz, a former Florida congressman who Trump has tapped as attorney general, has been under investigation for three years by the House Ethics Committee for allegations of sexual misconduct and illicit drug use. Gaetz, who denies the allegations, resigned from his House seat shortly after Trump nominated him to become the nation’s top law-enforcement officer – just days before the Ethics Committee was to release its investigative report. On Thursday, he withdrew his nomination, saying it had become a distraction for Trump's transition team.
Elon Musk, the world's richest man who Trump has asked to help spearhead a new initiative on government efficiency, was sued in June by eight former employees of his aerospace company, SpaceX, a major federal contractor. The suit alleges that Musk and his company treated women “as sexual objects to be evaluated on their bra size” and described an “Animal House” workplace environment in which lewd sexual banter was common and those who complained were told to look for a job elsewhere.
By giving jobs in his incoming administration to other men accused of sexual misconduct, Trump is “kind of putting up his middle finger to everyone who has talked about his own behavior with women,” said Julian Zelizer, a history professor at Princeton University and author of the book, "The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment."
Trump's transition team did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump himself is no stranger to allegations of sexual impropriety. Nineteen women have accused him of sexual misconduct going back as far as the 1970s. Last year, a federal jury found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation of author E. Jean Carroll, who said Trump sexually assaulted her in a New York department store nearly three decades ago. Trump denied the allegations, but the jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million in damages. He has appealed the award.
The verdict was a rare rebuke of Trump, who has managed to confound his accusers at almost every turn. Trump's appeals against the Carroll verdicts are ongoing and it's unclear if and how his presidential election might affect them.
In 2016, Trump successfully used his career as a New York businessman and reality TV star as a springboard to the presidency, even with the sexual misconduct allegations hanging over him. Just weeks before the election, an Access Hollywood videotape surfaced in which he made of boast about grabbing women by their genitals. He won anyway, defeating the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, in a stunning upset.
Trump’s decision to put four men accused of sexual misconduct in prominent government positions is "just the president-elect saying one more time he will do what he wants to do,” Zelizer said. “He doesn’t care about convention. He doesn’t care about perceptions and norms. This is him asserting himself, as he does all the time.”
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A national conversation about sexual harassment and abuse
Trump is not the first public figure to face public accusations of sexual misconduct and survive. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas won Senate confirmation in 1991 despite allegations by one of his advisers, attorney Anita Hill, that he had sexually harassed her. Thomas’ confirmation hearing triggered a national conversation about harassment of women in the workplace and served as a precursor to the “#MeToo” movement that would focus even more attention on the issue.
Twenty-seven years after Thomas’ hearing mesmerized the nation, one of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, Brett Kavanaugh, would be confronted during his confirmation hearing with allegations that he had sexually assaulted a woman in the early 1980s. Like Thomas, Kavanaugh denied the allegations and won Senate confirmation.
Other prominent figures in entertainment and politics have lost their jobs or were forced to resign amid allegations of sexual misconduct. The fallen include governors (New York’s Eliot Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo and New Jersey’s Jim McGreevey), senators (Bob Packwood of Oregon, Larry Craig of Idaho and Al Franken of Minnesota) and congressmen (Anthony Weiner of New York, Mark Foley of Florida and Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina).
Even the mere suggestion of sexual mischief was once enough to subject a politician to public ridicule. Devout Christian Jimmy Carter confessed to Playboy magazine during his 1976 presidential campaign that he had lusted in his heart after women who were not his wife. A political cartoonist responded with a drawing showing Carter lasciviously leering at the Statue of Liberty. Carter said the fallout nearly cost him the election.
The allegations against Trump’s four nominees are far more serious than unrequited lust.
Ever since Trump announced that he had picked Gaetz to serve as his attorney general, new details have emerged daily about allegations of sexual misconduct and illicit drug use against the former congressman.
Florida Attorney Joel Leppard told ABC News he represents two women who testified to the House Ethics Committee that Gaetz paid them for sex through Venmo. One witness said she saw Gaetz having sex with her then 17-year-old friend at an Orlando house party in July 2017.
Court documents in a spin-off defamation lawsuit reference sealed testimony that refers to Gaetz at the same party where there was “alcohol, cocaine, ecstasy, also known as molly, and marijuana.” Those documents could also become public after they were reportedly snatched by a hacker.
The Justice Department investigated the allegations against Gaetz but declined to bring any charges against him, which Gaetz says shows they are false. But the Ethics Committee report or damaging witness testimony that could be leaked had the potential to derail Gaetz’s nomination.
“Paying for sex is concerning, providing drugs to a minor is problematic and having sex with a minor is disqualifying for a potential attorney general of the United States,” a source close to the House Ethics and a separate Department of Justice investigation said. “We don’t think of our attorney general as participating in those kinds of activities.”
In the case of the allegations against Hegseth, city officials in Monterey, California, confirmed last week that Trump’s nominee to lead the nation’s fighting forces was involved in an investigation into an alleged sexual assault in 2017.
A woman who claims she was sexually assaulted by Hegseth told police she remembered him preventing her from leaving a room at the Hyatt Hotel and that he was on top of her, according to newly released documents obtained late Wednesday by USA TODAY.
The woman recounted her hazy memories of the encounter but told police she said “no” a lot and that Hegseth swiped away her phone and blocked the door with his body, according to the documents from the Monterey Police Department. The 30-year-old woman, identified only as Jane Doe, told police she had been drinking Champagne and believed someone may have slipped something into her drink.
No charges were filed against Hegseth. His attorney, Timothy Parlatore, said the police investigation showed that Hegseth’s accuser was the aggressor but that he paid her an undisclosed sum as part of a settlement agreement after she threatened litigation in 2020.
As for Musk, the lawsuit filed by the former SpaceX employees carried a 31-page attachment that included dozens of pages of the billionaire businessman’s posts on the social media platform X, which he also owns. The lawsuit, a copy of which was reviewed by USA TODAY, said the posts inappropriately targeted groups of people and individuals.
In one post, for example, Musk announced his idea to create a Texas university similar to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) but noted his institution would be called “TITS” and that “Ds (women’s bra size) would get degrees,” the lawsuit said. Another post was accompanied by an altered photo rendering a rocket to appear to be a giant penis. Other posts included sexual innuendo, references to male genitals and comments about transgender people’s use of pronouns.
At least four other private lawsuits have been brought against SpaceX in California alleging sexual harassment or discrimination. In one case, filed in March, a woman alleged that her supervisor (not Musk) began a forced sexual relationship with her in 2019 that resulted in a child. The suit said SpaceX attempted to help the former supervisor avoid paying child support even after leaving the company in 2022.
The news website Business Insider reported that same year that it had documents relating to accusations that Musk propositioned a massage therapist for sex and exposed himself to her. Musk denied the allegations, telling the publication, “If I were inclined to engage in sexual harassment, this is unlikely to be the first time in my entire 30-year career that it comes to light.”
SpaceX did not respond to a USA TODAY request for comment.
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'An inflection point'
Cooney, the former babysitter who said Kennedy groped her, said she feels a sense of responsibility to share her story so people can make whatever decision they want to make about the nominee. She's not trying to derail his nomination, she said. She just wants to give women courage to share their own experiences with other men.
“I know that there are hardworking people who don’t have skeletons in their closet,” she said. “And I wish we were electing people with fewer skeletons in their closet.”
Juliet Williams, professor of gender studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the allegations against the four accused nominees should disqualify them from serving in Trump’s administration.
“This tells us that a prime target in the Trump culture war is going to be people who stand up against sexual abuse and sexual violence,” she said. “And, to me, that is disgraceful that any major political party, let alone the president of the United States, would make that the centerpiece of his agenda.”
Williams and Lorraine Bayard de Volo, a professor of women and gender studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, see Trump’s willingness to nominate men accused of sexual misconduct as part of a larger backlash against the “#MeToo” movement. "#MeToo" gained widespread attention in 2017 and caused many powerful men to lose their jobs and, in some cases, go to jail. Critics argue the movement went too far and sullied the reputations of men for sexual overtures that don’t amount to assault.
Bayard de Volo said she fears Trump’s nominations could discourage women from reporting sexual harassment or abuse. Already, most women who face sexual harassment or assault don’t report the abuse, she said, because they don’t trust the justice system to punish their assailants. With Trump’s nominees, “the message trickled down will be one that kind of confirms those fears,” she said.
Williams said she has been struck by how many of her students – young women in their late teens and early 20s – are shocked that a majority of Americans would elect a president with Trump’s record of sexual misconduct accusations. To them, she said, it was “like a gut punch” to realize how far away they remain from a world where women have a right to dignity, respect and safety.
For this generation of young women, “this will be, for their entire lives, an inflection point,” Williams said. “I just hope it’s not one that is deflating. I hope it’s one that’s clarifying.”
Contributing: Nick Penzenstadler of USA TODAY and Jim Little, Pensacola News Journal
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Some Trump cabinet picks show we're in a new era of American politics
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