Ann Coulter doesn’t think highly of Donald Trump’s controversial nominee to lead the Department of Defense — but it’s not because he’s been accused of rape.
The conservative commentator skewered Fox News host Pete Hegseth’s character during Monday’s episode of her podcast, “Unsafe with Ann Coulter,” but appeared to dismiss Hegseth’s rape accuser and instead took issue with his cheating, calling Trump’s Cabinet pick “sleazy” and a “serial adulterer.”
Hegseth was investigated for allegedly raping a woman after speaking at an event for Republican women in 2017. Prosecutors declined to press charges, citing a lack of “proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”
The news anchor, who has been married three times and was in the midst of his second divorce at the time of the alleged rape, has repeatedly claimed that the encounter was consensual.
Coulter appears to have accepted his explanation and suggested on Monday’s episode that it was possible Hegseth’s accuser had “cried rape.”
She did, however, take issue with his adultery.
“In all of this talk about about whether whether Pete Hegseth is an abuser of women, it just, no one even mentioned that he is a serial adulterer!” she told listeners. “Are we a society that doesn’t care about adultery anymore?”
Noting that not one but two of Hegseth’s divorces reportedly stemmed from infidelity, Coulter said, “The fact that it was three times, and this sleazy, and everyone at Fox News knew about it is one thing. But seriously … No one is even mentioning the adultery!”
Somehow, Coulter then found a way to blame Democrats for Hegseth’s moral failures.
“I’m sorry, this is liberals winning,” she told listeners. “This is liberals changing our culture in this subtle and insidious way where the only rules that matter are the feminist rules, not the rules that have protected women for millennia, like don’t cheat on your wife.”
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While Hegseth was not charged over the 2017 rape allegation, his own mother called him an “abuser of women” in 2018 email that recently came to light.
“You are an abuser of women — that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego,” she wrote to her son.
Trump’s willingness to overlook the controversy around Hegseth may have a lot to do with his own history. The president-elect has been accused of sexual abuse by dozens of women over his decades in the public eye.