The leftist media are excited about a long-ago sexual assault claim an unnamed woman filed against Pete Hegseth. The police refused to press charges, but Hegseth, by then a well-known and wealthy TV personality, paid the woman some money. Hegseth contends that the sex was consensual, that the woman was the aggressor, and that he paid her to make her go away. I may be a lousy feminist here, but knowing how the world works, I think it’s just as likely that Hegseth’s version of events is true. That being the case, the entire thing should be disregarded moving forward.

I come into this with strong biases. First, although numerous academic articles discount it, “gray rape” exists.

Gray rape happens when young women have consensual sex with someone and then, filled with post-coital regret (and often bullied by feminist friends), claim they were raped. Indeed, some women make a lifestyle out of their alleged victimhood.

Reports of campus rapes have often followed this pattern. A classic example of this pattern is what happened to Ben Feibleman. Unsurprisingly, Columbia settled.

Image by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.

The reality is that women lie about rape. These are just some examples, some famous, some not.

• The Scottsboro Boys were imprisoned and had their lives otherwise destroyed based upon two women’s false rape allegations.
• 14-year-old Emmett Till was brutally lynched when a woman lied about him grabbing her in a sexual manner.
• The utterly vile Al Sharpton came to national prominence and unleashed racial violence when he latched onto Tawana Brawley’s false rape claims against four white men.
• Three members of the Duke Lacrosse team were tried on a false rape claim (with the woman who made the claim later going on to murder her boyfriend).
• Rolling Stone magazine, whether acting intentionally or foolishly, tarred a University of Virginia fraternity as rape central based upon an obviously false story by a disturbed young woman who wanted a boy’s attention.
• Actress Lena Dunham claimed to have been raped when her own version of the facts shows that she regretted having sex.
• In England, a woman got ten years in prison for repeatedly making false rape claims, one of which saw a man wrongly imprisoned.
• In Philadelphia, police charged a woman with lying about an attempted rape.
• In Ireland, a woman admitted that she lied to the police when she contended that consensual sex was, instead, a rape at knifepoint.
• Christine Blasey Ford’s contentions about Justice Brett Kavanaugh were repeatedly challenged by people with first-hand knowledge of the facts—as well as Kavanaugh’s own contemporaneous calendar.

I’m also dubious about rape claims when alcohol is involved in social settings. Think of Brock Turner. Turner got blind drunk at a frat party and got entangled with an older woman who crashed the party, also got blind drunk, and then passed out at some point. Significantly, it’s unknown whether she did so before or during intercourse because she blacked out. Maybe she agreed to sex; maybe she didn’t. However, she became Glamour’s Woman of the Year while Turner’s life was destroyed.

All these “gray rape” charges make a mockery of actual criminal rape, which is a violent and obviously non-consensual act. Women who have been raped know it.

I’m also cynical enough to know that wealthy, famous men are targets for rape accusations. They have high-profile careers to protect and the money to buy off accusers...so they do.

That gets us to the seven-year-old charges against Hegseth. Here are the publicly available facts.

In 2017, Hegseth, already a well-compensated Fox News host, spoke at an event at a hotel in California. He was foolish enough to get publicly drunk (something I hope he’s never done since then) and went up to his room with a woman. The woman claims that she was Hegseth’s minder at the event, and when she heard he was getting “pushy” at the bar, she went to talk to him and the two women.

At that point, the accuser remembers nothing until many hours later, when she was trying to find her own hotel room...where her worried husband was waiting for her. She says that’s when she thought maybe she was raped, had a panic attack, and went to an ER, which found semen in her. Hegseth’s version is that they had consensual sex, after which the woman planned to tell her husband she’d fallen asleep in another (presumably female) guest’s room.

Police allegedly have a video showing the woman and Hegseth walking arm-in-arm to his hotel room, so that’s one layer of violent coercion that didn’t exist. According to the police report, filed four days after the alleged assault, the woman had a bruise on her thigh. Police did not press charges, but the woman and her husband eventually started talking about the matter, leading Hegseth to feel he was being blackmailed ... so he paid.

On the known facts, it’s easy to believe that the woman, whether drunk or sober, forgot her vows when she had the chance to have sex with a handsome, famous guy, backpedaled like crazy when confronted with her husband, and then saw a chance for money.

It’s also possible that, in a Lena Dunham variation, the woman, having been foolish enough to enter a hotel room with a strange man who did the things men do when they want sex (kissing, stroking, etc.), physically complied and even participated, despite not really wanting to have sex. Her body language radiated consent, no matter what her internal thoughts were.

And yes, it’s possible that Hegseth somehow forced himself on the woman...although I find it strange that, while she claims to have had no memory of the encounter, she did not allege that he gave her a date rape drug.

I’ve told you my biases: I don’t believe all women, I believe too many women destroy rape’s real horrors by claiming victimhood to hide regret or push an agenda, and I think men, especially famous men, who get drunk in public are asking for trouble.

In the past, people pragmatically knew that men + women + alcohol often ended badly. They protected women with strict behavior rules that, as a byproduct, protected men. With those pragmatic rules gone, skittish senators could use this highly ambiguous scenario to vote against Hegseth. That would be a shame. Hegseth has the potential to be the best Secretary of Defense in modern history because he’s a soldier and bureaucratic outsider who will work to save the US military from climate, race, and sex-obsessed wokism.