Pete Hegseth will launch sexual assault accuser from NDA, Lindsey Graham says | EUROtoday

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Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s embattled nominee to steer the Department of Defense, will launch a lady from a non-disclosure settlement that adopted a 2017 sexual assault allegation towards the previous Fox News anchor, based on Senator Lindsey Graham.

“He told me he would release her from that agreement,” the South Carolina Republican informed NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday. “Just think about what we’re talking about. I’d want to know if anybody nominated for a high-level job in Washington legitimately assaulted somebody.”

Graham in contrast Hegseth’s nomination to the 2018 affirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was publicly accused of sexually assaulting former classmate Christine Blasey Ford.

“If people have any allegation to make, come forward and make it,” Graham stated. “Like they did in Kavanaugh, we’ll decline whether or not it’s credible. Right now he’s being tried by anonymous sources, that will not stand.”

The Independent has requested remark from Hegseth’s legal professional.

In 2017, police in Monterey, California, investigated an allegation that an intoxicated Hegseth sexually assaulted a lady in a lodge room after a Republican girls’s convention, at one level bodily blocking a door and stopping her from leaving, based on a police report seen by The Independent.

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Hegseth informed police and has subsequently maintained the encounter was consensual.

No costs have been filed.

After the accuser threatened to sue Hegseth in 2020, they entered a non-disclosure settlement and Hegseth paid the person.

“Hegseth strongly felt that he was the victim of blackmail and innocent collateral damage in a lie that the Complainant was holding onto to keep her marriage intact,” his lawyer informedThe Washington Post of the settlement.

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Hegseth’s legal professional claimed earlier this month the NDA was higher described as a confidential settement settlement and that the accuser has already voided it. He has threatened to file an extortion declare towards the girl if the previous Fox anchor isn’t confirmed.

“There is no NDA to release her from,” Tim Parlatore informed CNN. “If she wants to go in and talk about it, she can do it. I mean certainly she would do it at her own peril of a further defamation lawsuit.”

Hegseth has confronted a quite a few accusations regarding his allegedly troubling personal habits since Trump tapped him for protection secretary, together with alcohol abuse, financially mismanaging veterans teams, and chanting “kill all Muslims” in a bar.

His mom accused him in an e mail later made public of being an “abuser of women,” although she’s since disavowed the message and defended her son’s nomination.

The allegations don’t seem to have broken Hegseth’s standing with Trump, who hosted Hegseth as a visitor throughout Saturday’s Army-Navy soccer recreation in Maryland.