A Mother's Rebuke is not a Public Concern

Yesterday’s New York Times offers a story: Pete Hegseth’s Mother Accused Her Son of Mistreating Women for Years. The sub-headline reads: “Penelope Hegseth made the accusation in an email to her son in 2018, amid his contentious divorce. She said on Friday that she regretted the email and had apologized to him.”

Pete Hegseth is President Trump’s nominee to be our next Secretary of Defense. His nomination is already controversial, not least because of a 2017 rape accusation. Hegseth has been married three times, and as the Times reported, his second divorce was acrimonious. He has had children with each of these wives.

I don’t know whether Hegseth is qualified to be Secretary of Defense. For the sake of argument, let’s say he’s not. Let’s stipulate for the moment that he’s a reckless, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing cad who lacks experience, ability, and ethics. Even if all that is true, in the matter of this Times story, Pete Hegseth is more sinned against than sinning. A mother’s rebuke, composed in frustration and pain, is by any moral definition the sort of document to which the public is not entitled.

The Times does not share how it acquired the email. We know that Hegseth’s mama copied her soon-to-be-former daughter-in-law. Perhaps someone in that camp leaked the email to the press. In any event, Penelope Hegseth no longer stands by the words she wrote to her son.

Her change of heart is hardly evidence of anything nefarious. Perhaps you, my reader, are a member of a family. Perhaps you have had very bitter arguments with a parent, a child, or a sibling? Perhaps in those arguments, you have said something you very much meant at the time but which you later come to regret? Perhaps – just perhaps – anger and pain and grief cause us to speak and write words that capture the intensity of a transitory feeling but do not, in fact, convey an absolute truth?

My dear mother has had seven daughters-in-law. I have five former wives; my brother has one ex-wife and is very happily wed to the mother of his children. Mama loved all of my former wives, though she was fonder of some than others. When these marriages ended, she was sometimes very sad. She did not write me an angry email, but other members of my family did, especially after the public disgrace that accompanied my fourth divorce in 2013. Mama grieved and worried, but other relatives were appalled (not wrongly) by my behavior. They let me have it in very strongly worded messages, several of which were cc-ed to other members of the clan. It goes without saying that those emails were not intended for the public. If someone were to leak those to the press, the entire family would be furious.

There is no moral distinction between the Times using Penelope Hegseth’s private email to damage the nomination of her son and an aggrieved ex posting a former lover’s nude photos to the Internet. The intent is the same: to humiliate, to discredit, and to shame. This is not a trivial issue. If you are willing to do this to win a nomination battle, you have already lost the war.

I posted a link to the Times story on my Facebook last night. Two friends of mine commented that the paper was right to publish the emails. Their argument is a familiar one in this anxious and angry age: the existential threat of Pete Hegseth in particular (and Trump 2.0 in general) is too great to insist on silly things like a right to privacy. Muster the metaphors and convene the clichés: In a fight to preserve democracy, we must take off the proverbial gloves. We must fire with fire. When they go low, we go lower and take ‘em out at their knees. My friends worry that this insistence on respect for other people’s private lives is a reckless indulgence, a rearranging of the Titanic’s deckchairs. They throw out the most formidable accusation that the contemporary left has, a charge designed to shut down all discussion: mine is a position rooted in white privilege. (I’ve heard that charge thrown around too often and too lightly. That dog won’t hunt no more.)

It is not, in fact, a refusal to reckon with reality that leads me to insist that how we fight is every bit as important as what we fight for. Morality is at least as much about process as it is about outcome. We cannot control ends, but we can control means, and the means we use go a long way to determining the justice of our cause. A reverence for the distinction between a public and a private life is not a luxury to be thrown aside in a crisis. It is a principle on which to double down, because it is a foundational principle for civilization itself.

Criminal charges should be investigated as part of a background check. When one’s private conduct has somehow led to a complaint to the police, that is a public matter, because the law and the courts are public entities. A blistering, anguished, and private reproach from a parent is in a very different category. It is our fear and our rage that has blinded us to a distinction that we once grasped intuitively.

It is our challenge to remember that the world we build is determined by the tools we use. There is no threat so great that we can forget our decency, and our civility. There is no danger so imminent that we can afford to forget the difference between what is in the public interest and what should stay a private matter.

The New York Times owes Penelope Hegseth an apology. They won’t give it, but they owe it. And it is to our shame that in our eagerness to derail the career of a man we despise, we allow ourselves to believe otherwise.