Pete Hegseth's Relationship Timelines With His Exes Screams Cheater

Pete Hegseth credits his wife, Jennifer Rauchet, with getting him on the straight and narrow, but talk about the third time being the charm! In addition to the Secretary of Defense War being on missus number three, Hegseth has quite the tainted track record in the love department — and yes, that includes some very interesting overlaps. First, the Trump staffer married Meredith Schwarz, his high school sweetheart. As reported by Vanity Fair, Hegseth and Schwarz were so smitten their classmates deemed them: "Most likely to marry." Five years later, they did just that. However, let's just say the term "Happily ever after" didn't exactly apply here. 

Friends of the former couple claimed Schwarz "was gaslighted by [Hegseth] heavily throughout their relationship." The former Fox News host was also unfaithful, and as seen in excerpts from their divorce papers, cited by APM Reports, that was why they ultimately split. According to the Daily Beast, Hegseth told Schwarz about five affairs, among them Samantha Deering, the woman who became his second wife. In fact, it was after he admitted to the infidelity that the future government employee used Schwarz's credit card to book a hotel room for them.

Hegseth's marriage to Deering didn't fare much better. Despite claiming in an essay for Center of the American Experiment that he married her because he'd been raised to respect "fidelity," the TV personality cheated again, this time with Rauchet. In fact, they welcomed a child together in 2017, before he was even divorced from his second wife. As for Rauchet, those familiar with the messy rumors surrounding Hegseth will remember that it was during her pregnancy that he was accused of sexual assault by another woman. Nevertheless, the happy couple wed in 2019. 

Pete Hegseth's relationship history is pretty amusing considering he was once a vocal critic of divorce. However, it turns out there's a simple workaround for hypocrisy: Just re-write history. That's what the Trump staffer has tried to do, anyway. Hegseth's first not-so-subtle attempt at justifying his behavior came in his 2016 book "In the Arena." Hegseth declared that U.S. family policy should focus on "strengthening families and creating good citizens by preventing divorce of parents with kids," which was a nice little caveat, considering his initial divorce was from a woman with whom he had no children. Of course, when the author and second wife Samantha Deering split in 2017, that no longer applied, as they shared three kids. Enter, the revised version of "In the Arena," which featured a rather convenient edit. This time, Hegseth wrote that families could be strengthened "by preventing wanton divorce." Wanton, indeed.

While some may be inclined to give the government official the benefit of the doubt for these embarrassing, and utterly transparent, attempts at justifying his divorce-causing affairs — after all, as Hegseth bragged in an interview with Birmingham Christian Family, his and Jennifer Rauchet's marriage had sired a massive blended family, and, "There are no 'steps' or 'halves' in the Hegseth clan" — his mom didn't. In 2024, the New York Times published an email Penelope Hegseth had sent him in 2018, which read in part, "I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man." She later retracted her words, but to paraphrase an iconic Real Housewife, she said what she said.