By Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali
PRINCETON, New Jersey (Reuters) – Laura Petrillo still remembers a 2002 day on the Princeton campus when she got into a heated argument with Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Pentagon.
She was putting up posters by Princeton’s Organization of Women Leaders, a feminist group known better by its acronym OWL. Hegseth and his friends from the campus’ conservative paper, The Princeton Tory, were tearing her posters down and putting up their own, leading to a verbal altercation, she says.
Such clashes between idealistic college students aren’t unusual.
But for Hegseth, the publisher of The Tory and the school’s best-known conservative at the time, the episode was one of several examples examined by Reuters of his confrontation with modern feminism on campus, decades before he would argue against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in the U.S. military. Reuters spoke to more than a dozen former students, faculty and staff at the university to build a picture of his time at Princeton from 1999 to 2003.
Hegseth’s spokesperson did not respond to questions about this incident and others described in this story. Asked about Hegseth’s time at Princeton, a university spokesperson said they had no comment.
Hegseth’s views toward diversity in the U.S. military, including the role of women, are likely to be a focus of his confirmation hearing on Tuesday before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee.
While his recent past has been scrutinized in the media, his college years have received less attention.
Under Hegseth’s watch, The Tory published a cover story in 2002 that put a cartoon owl in a gunsight — and then on page three, appeared to show the same owl with three bullet-holes in its head, drops of blood spilling to the ground.
“That felt threatening,” said Petrillo, OWL’s publicity chair at the time.
The Tory article’s headline was: “Killing Feminism: OWL sabotages the women’s movement.”
As publisher, Hegseth ran other articles that called homosexuality “abnormal and immoral” and argued that sexual intercourse with an unconscious woman would not be “a clear case of rape” because there would be no duress. He wrote a piece that attacked what he saw as Princeton’s “gratuitous glorification of diversity.”
Brittany Hume Charm recalled an event where she said OWL tried and failed to bury the hatchet with Hegseth, who showed up in his Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) uniform and appeared dismissive of OWL’s concerns. She recalled that his unusual decision to appear in uniform seemed meant to intimidate.
Reuters spoke to two former classmates who described Hegseth as friendly and as someone willing to poke fun at himself. They pointed to a paintball duel held on campus between Hegseth and the head of the college Democrats as an example of how he didn’t take himself too seriously.
Judson Wallace, a friend who was on the Princeton basketball team with him, said Hegseth was hardworking, caring and “the best player that never played,” since he was not a starter on the team.
Tessa Muir, a former Army captain, who served under Hegseth in the ROTC program, had a positive view of Hegseth during his time at Princeton, calling him “kind.” But she said she has also been alarmed by his recent comments opposing women in combat, a position he has softened as he courts Senate votes for confirmation.
“I felt so duped that he was put in charge of co-ed cadets,” Muir recalled thinking when she learned about Hegseth’s views.
Muir became an attorney in the Army and served in posts including South Korea.
RAPE SCENARIO
In an interview with Reuters, Thema Bryant, who led the Princeton office that seeks to combat and respond to sexual assault from 2001 to 2004, took issue with a 2002 edition of Hegseth’s Tory that criticized a freshman orientation course about sexual assault.
The course included a scenario about a student who drank herself unconscious and then was raped. A Tory article said that did not constitute a clear case of rape because she did not suffer duress since she was unconscious.
While she doesn’t recall seeing the article at the time, Bryant said Hegseth should apologize for its insensitivity towards survivors.
“And if you’re talking about (the department of) defense, we would have to wonder who are you going to defend? Who are you going to protect? And can you be trusted to do that?” she asked.
Sexual assault is a persistent problem in the military.
Asked about sexual assault on campus during Hegseth’s time at Princeton, a university spokesperson referred Reuters to Department of Education data that showed 28 forced sex offenses on Princeton’s campus between 2001 and 2003.
Hegseth arrived at Princeton already with affection for the military and with conservative leaning views and values, his father, Brian Hegseth, told Reuters.
“Instead of just going along with the tide, he thought it through and believed that what he had already was worth preserving,” he said.
His role as a conservative leader on campus sometimes made him the butt of jokes.
An old joke about Hegseth started circulating again among Princeton alumni after Trump nominated him to lead the Pentagon in November. Appearing in a campus humor magazine when he was a senior, it quoted one “Indian girl” overheard talking to another about how Hegseth seemed like a nice guy.
“Yeah, but you know he really wants to send you and your family back to India, right?” the second student responded in the Nassau Weekly magazine’s Dec. 2002 edition.
After graduating from Princeton in 2003, Hegseth served in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He has two Bronze Stars. He received a Master’s from Harvard University in 2013.
But Hegseth has faced what he says is a smear campaign by the media as reports surface about his past, including a 2021 incident first reported by Reuters where he was branded an “insider threat” by a fellow member of the Army National Guard over his tattoos. Hegseth has said the incident led him to be pulled from Guard duty in Washington during President Joe Biden’s inauguration.
He has denied any wrongdoing over a 2017 sexual assault allegation which did not result in charges, as well as accusations against him of excessive drinking and financial mismanagement at veterans’ organizations. Hegseth’s mother has aided his defense, retracting an email that surfaced of her criticizing his treatment of women during one of his two divorces.
Much like in his Princeton days, Hegseth sees himself as the underdog, this time in his effort to become defense secretary. He compared it to his time on the Princeton basketball team, where he was often benched and “told I wasn’t good enough to play.”
“I’m used to people coming at me,” he told Sirius XM radio.
(Reporting by Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali; Editing by Don Durfee and Claudia Parsons)
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