Domestic abuse allegations that derailed Parnell's Senate race make him a perfect fit for a high-level Trump post.
Domestic abuse allegations that derailed Parnell's Senate race make him a perfect fit for a high-level Trump post. In this Sept. 22, 2020, photo, Sean Parnell walks through people gathered at a campaign rally for President Donald Trump at Pittsburgh International Airport in Moon Township, Pa.
There was a moment just over three years ago when it was clear not only that Sean Parnell — a highly decorated Army veteran and an acolyte ofin Butler, Pa., that Parnell had repeatedly abused her and their young children, both verbally and in occasional fits of violence. The decorated Afghanistan combat veteranat the 2021 hearing. “He was strangling me.” She told the court Parnell would stop their car on family trips to verbally abuse her, once forcing her out of the vehicle and telling her to “go get an abortion.” In another incident, she charged, the later-Trump-endorsed Senate candidate slapped one child hard enough to leave fingerprint-shaped welts through the back of the child’s T-shirt. In the 39 months since the seemingly disgraced Pittsburgh native ended his Senate bid, America has changed — a lot. In 2025, Parnell will be the public face of the world’s largest and most powerful militaryearlier this month, calling the 43-year-old veteran “A Great American Patriot” and “a fearless Combat Veteran, who led one of the most decorated units in the Afghanistan War.” But the presidential pronouncement wasn’t nearly as loud as the unspoken memo naming Parnell as the mouthpiece for Hegseth,That message to thousands of U.S. female soldiers or military spouses and partners who’ve suffered intimate partner violence is essentially a new form of psychological abuse. It’s that Hegseth’s Pentagon isn’t going to even pretend to care about assaults against women, in an America where 2017’s #MeToo moment has beenin a sexual abuse case , as well as several men, such as newly confirmed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whoOne could argue Parnell’s appointment is the latest example of a government shaped in the image of its strongman leader, who himself has been accused of sexual misconduct byI reached out this week to the Pentagon’s press office seeking either to interview Parnell, or at least get some answers to what his hiring says about how intimate partner violence and abuse will be handled under the Trump regime. I was referred toIf Parnell is apologetic for his past behavior, it doesn’t come across in his active feed on the Elon Musk-owned social media site X., from June, states: “On this Father’s Day, I wanted to share a significant personal update. After enduring two challenging years of navigating the hellscape that is our family court system I have been vindicated. Since November of last year, I have had a more favorable custody arrangement than ever before. All my rights have been fully restored.”, Parnell states that he’s also adopted the daughters of his current wife Melanie, and gives a full-throated endorsement of what might be called men’s rights, writing that the family court system “is a hell that I would not wish upon my worst enemy.”the ability of women to engage in combat roles. And he’ll be touting a remake of the U.S. military that hasaround gender at the U.S. Military Academy, and removed Michelle Obama’s portrait from a military schoolThe erasure of a half-century of steady progress in making the American military into a more diverse fighting force — with womenof those on active duty — is an insult not just to the thousands of women who served this country so well, but also to all of us. But what’s most disturbing is the message that the ascension of Hegseth and now Parnell sends specifically to those suffering domestic abuse, often in silence. The sad truth is that the Pentagon has already failed in tracking the extent of intimate partner violence in the military — accurate statistics are impossible to come by, althoughshows how in the Army alone, thousands of abuse cases have fallen through the cracks — while not doing nearly enough to curb the problem.that offered anonymity to tell the abuse stories of a dozen military wives who said their horror stories were frequently ignored or minimized when they sought help.“I never made peace with being let down by his command structure,” a then-49-year-old woman named Jennifer, who described her husband’s attempt to kill her with a knife shortly before he died by suicide,. “I was made to feel like this was my fault. My family didn’t believe me. The Navy didn’t believe me. I carry that with me.” How many Jennifers will suffer in silence or risk injury or death knowing it’s the testosterone-drenched military of Hegseth, Parnell, and Trump now? Indeed, there’s a broader climate of fear that the forces of misogyny are again ascendant in America, and there is nothing to be gained and much to be lost by even speaking out. In writing this column, I reached out to a leading advocacy group against domestic violence — which declined to comment about Parnell’s hiring. I’ll have to go with this comment: “I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego.”wrote to him in a 2018 email accusing the future Pentagon chief of a pattern of abusing women . But Penelope Hegseth’s words seem to encapsulate the bigger outrage here. Parnell and Hegseth have every right to continue to deny the individual charges against them, but their broader deny-everything-admit-nothing middle finger to the widespread problem of violence against women, both in the U.S. military and in American society writ large, is outrageous. It will cause immense pain as a once-great nation moves backward. These two men and their tortured history of alleged mistreatment of women are at the vanguard of an American Taliban desperate to pretend the last 60 or so years never happened — to spin a redemptiveIt’s bad enough that, in a moment of global uncertainty, the future of the U.S. military is likely one of less diversity, more fear, and lower morale. But the bigger picture from a defiantly misogynistic Pentagon is even more troubling. Every time Parnell or Hegseth appears on your TV screen, it is an act of political violence.
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