As the confirmation hearing for Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth gets underway on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, veteran servicewomen like Paula Coughlin will be watching closely.
Ms. Coughlin, who narrowly escaped rape during the now-infamous Tailhook scandal of 1991, was a pioneering whistleblower in the movement to change Pentagon thinking and policies that long tolerated inaction and retribution against service women like her.
She was one of dozens of sailors who reported being sexually assaulted in a Las Vegas hotel hall by some 300 naval aviators attending a conference and flying high after the release of “Top Gun” and a Gulf War victory.
Why We Wrote This
As Senate confirmation hearings begin for Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth, leaders of the longtime fight against sexual assault in the armed services are raising alarm over his position toward women in the military.
Trained as an anti-submarine warfare helicopter pilot, Ms. Coughlin resigned from the Navy after speaking up. Asked whether she’d recommend the service she once loved, for years her answer was “absolutely not.”
Then came widely hailed bipartisan legislation and President Joe Biden’s 2023 executive order that took the decision about prosecuting sexual assault away from commanders who might be, and often were, tempted to protect male friends and their unit’s reputation.
It was a step supporters had long argued would deter the crime – and dovetails with a recent drop in military sexual assaults reported by the Pentagon. After increasing during the first Trump administration, there were some 8,500 reports of military sexual assaults in the most recent fiscal year, which includes the months just before Mr. Biden’s executive order went into effect. This marked a nearly 5% decline from the previous year and a drop for the first time in nearly a decade, according to the Pentagon’s annual report on sexual assault. The latest report also points to a 20% drop in “unwanted sexual contact” of any sort.
“I was actually going to change my answer” on the recommending service question, Ms. Coughlin says. “But not anymore.”
Today, decades of work to have the crime taken seriously by the U.S. military – and for women to be taken seriously as full members of America’s warrior ranks – are in jeopardy, she and others argue, with President-elect Donald Trump’s choice of Mr. Hegseth. He’s an Afghanistan and Iraq war veteran who has said “straight up … we should not have women in combat roles,” as he put it in a November podcast episode.
Such beliefs about the worth of their service are seen by many women as a barometer for how they would likely be treated in a military run by Mr. Hegseth. Rather than driven by desire or drunkenness, sexual assault is now often understood to be a crime of deep disrespect apt to flourish in places where men don’t think others belong. If Mr. Hegseth allows this disregard to take root, advocates like Ms. Coughlin worry it could supplant their decades-long efforts to bring about change.
Outside of his military record, a 2017 sexual assault allegation, as well as reports of heavy drinking, harassment, and financial mismanagement dogged the early days of Mr. Hegseth’s nomination. The assault accusation did not result in an arrest; it was investigated after a hospital nurse reported to police, per local legal requirements, that a patient had requested a rape exam.
Mr. Hegseth denies any crime, saying the encounter was consensual. In 2020 he agreed to pay an undisclosed sum, his lawyer said, to head off what he described as a spurious civil lawsuit. He has pledged to give up alcohol if he gets to lead the Pentagon.
Remarks Mr. Hegseth makes about women’s proper roles in a book published in June, “The War on Warriors,” have also stirred up controversy.
“We need moms, but not in the military,” writes Mr. Hegseth, who served as a major in the Army National Guard. Killing runs counter to female instincts, he argues, and seeing women wage war messes with men’s heads.
“Women in combat forces men to ignore those civilized instincts. If you train a group of men to treat women equally on the battlefield then you will be hard pressed to ask them to treat women differently at home,” he warns.
Despite the controversy, in the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s Senate hearing a number of Republican Senators have voiced support for him. As part of his Capitol Hill charm offensive, Mr. Hegseth appears to have dialed down his remarks about women in the ranks.
He stopped by his former employer, Fox News, to say on a recent broadcast that female troops are “some of our greatest warriors.”
Yet there are potential policy moves that Mr. Hegseth could make should he become defense secretary. The Defense Department dropped its ban on women in combat in 2013. Mr. Hegseth could potentially reinstate it. Currently, out of the roughly 2 million service members in the U.S. military, about 19% are women. Since it was opened to women a decade ago, more than 140 women have graduated from the U.S. Army’s elite Ranger School
Having to contemplate these scenarios and others harks back to “an implied vulnerability, an implied second-class citizenship for every military woman,” says Ms. Coughlin. “It’s just what we’ve been working against all these years.”
This is a story about that work.
“Bone-crushing” culture
The U.S. military ultimately referred 140, or less than half, of the alleged Tailhook perpetrators for disciplinary action, but filed no sexual assault charges.
In the hours after it happened, Ms. Coughlin recalls thinking that the offenders were “absolutely outliers” – that this was not a systemic problem. Her dad was a naval aviator, and she’d grown up close to his Navy friends and their families.
Ms. Coughlin, an admiral’s aide, told her boss, Rear Adm. Jack Snyder, the story the next morning. She was sure he’d want to know about criminal behavior. “Instead, he said, ‘Well, that’s what you get when you walk down a hallway of drunk aviators.’ ”
The commandant of the Marine Corps later told Ms. Coughlin that he’d met with an alleged perpetrator and his minister. “He said, ‘He’s a good Christian.’ And that I got the wrong guy,” she recalls.
Instead of introspection, or even action, Ms. Coughlin ran headlong into resentment. “It was, ‘Why are there women in the military, anyway? Who opened that Pandora’s box?”
When Rear Adm. Snyder failed to move her complaint up the chain of command, Ms. Coughlin went public and found herself on the receiving end of a culture bent on “totally destroying victims,” she says. Her security clearance was revoked and the vile vitriol – to which her parents were also subjected – felt never-ending. “It was bone-crushing. I changed my name and hid for a long time.”
A decade later – after she got married and raised a family – Ms. Coughlin reemerged into the world of advocacy.
Nancy Parrish, a Democratic strategist and activist, had watched Ms. Coughlin’s interviews on national television years earlier and was struck by her bravery. Like Ms. Coughlin, Ms. Parrish also thought that the Pentagon would fix the problem once it was on their radar.
That didn’t happen, and in 2012 Ms. Parrish invited Ms. Coughlin to take part in the rollout of the documentary “Invisible War,” about military sexual assault.
Ms. Coughlin agreed. As she did some preparation after long avoiding the topic, she said she was gutted to see that military assault rates remained high and unaddressed.
“One of the best steps towards healing is to take steps to keep it from happening to somebody else,” she says. “And so I threw myself back into it.”
“A form of torture”
It was in the year of the Tailhook scandal that retired Col. Don Christensen, former Chief Prosecutor of the Air Force, began his career as a judge advocate general, or JAG lawyer.
He was good at his job and gradually gained a reputation as a go-to defender for military men accused of sexual assault – not one he wanted. He saw the effect that the cases were having on women, and that there were too many men “well above the law.”
He switched sides and proceeded to prosecute dozens of sexual assault cases – more than any other JAG lawyer at the time.
In 2012, he won a conviction against a popular lieutenant colonel and fighter jet pilot, James Wilkerson, for assaulting a guest at his house party. The guest was Kim Hanks, a physician assistant at the U.S. base in Aviano, Italy.
Mr. Wilkerson was sentenced to a year in jail and kicked out of the Air Force, but months later his commander overturned the conviction and ordered him reinstated at full rank. The general’s reasoning boiled down to “he was a good family man and had a lot of love for the Air Force,” Mr. Christensen says.
Mr. Wilkerson was later demoted and removed from the military once again when it was discovered that he had fathered a child with a woman outside his marriage, a violation of military codes, including conduct unbecoming an officer.
The general’s decision to overturn the verdict of a military jury “was the last straw,” Mr. Christensen says. “I was like, ‘This is never going to change from the inside.’ And so I left to advocate for reform.”
Around the same time, Ms. Parrish, who had chaired the congressional campaign of Rep. Jackie Speier, was quietly bringing Ms. Hanks and other victims around Capitol Hill to share their stories with lawmakers.
“These were incredible people who just wanted to serve, who I saw as a tremendous loss to our country,” once they left the military, says Ms. Parrish, who fled an attempted date rape as a young woman.
“I could get away. I could never see this person again. But to have to work with your perpetrator everyday – it’s a form of torture.”
Ms. Parrish decided to start an organization, Protect Our Defenders, to bring together a pro-bono network of attorneys to represent victims and make law from the lessons they were learning about how to fix a broken military justice system.
As with gay rights, which expanded in the wake of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” era, the hope, Ms. Parrish says, is that the military might serve as a cultural beacon for American society when it comes to addressing sexual assault, too.
Finding the “good guys”
Ms. Parrish became skilled at scoping out military conferences, finding the “good guys” and seeking their guidance. “I’d have conversations with some of them standing at the back of the room who supported our work but who could never say so publicly.”
When Ms. Parrish first began chatting with Colonel Christensen, “Obviously, we had a real meeting of the minds.” She arranged for him to meet with then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel about his experience in the Wilkerson case. She would later hire Mr. Christensen to be president of Protect Our Defenders.
Secretary Hagel urged Congress to strip the ability to overturn military verdicts from commanders and, championed by lawmakers like Representative Spier and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, the measure was signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2013.
Other policy reforms followed, including giving sexual assault victims their own lawyers, known as special victims counsels and, in 2015, preventing use of the “good soldier defense” – the Wilkerson case was a textbook example – as a previously legitimate legal avenue for arguing innocence.
The 2023 measure taking the decision about prosecuting sexual assault out of the hands of commanders who’d lobbied to keep that power was a move that many service members hailed as the most significant transformation of the military justice system in decades.
Darchelle Mitchell, a Navy service member who came forward with allegations of being raped by a military coworker while her two little boys were in the house, was elated.
It is “a crack, finally, in that good old boy system,” she says. Military leaders “are having to change their mentality because the law is not just their law anymore.”
Years earlier, when her perpetrator was found not guilty by a military jury that included some of his sailor buddies, Ms. Mitchell’s father was beside her as her knees buckled.
A proud Army veteran in whose footsteps she’d wanted to follow, “He grabbed my elbow to lift me back up. And he says, ‘Never let them see that they broke you. You stand strong.’ And somehow, I pulled it together.”
She connected with Protect Our Defenders, the attorney network, “and all these people rallied around me. And when they rally, they rally,” she says. “They picked up the torch, and they fought for me. And that was one of the most beautiful things.”
Amid fears that Mr. Hegseth’s nomination could usher back in the old status quo, those who battled to break it down are ready, they say, to persist.
“You have to keep pressing, because if not, those who oppose reform will begin to reverse what you’ve done,” Ms. Parrish says. “That’s why the fight is never over.”
For Ms. Coughlin, this grueling work has given her a new perspective on her own experience – and the role she’s played bringing about change.
“I thought for many years that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she says. “It took a lot of mental fortitude to realize I was probably in the right place at the right time.”
