Pa.’s Sean Parnell as the face of Trump’s Pentagon is another assault on women

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 of Donald Trump — would have to end his 2022 Pennsylvania U.S. Senate campaign, but that any future in politics looked extremely unlikely.

In November 2021, Parnell’s then-estranged wife, Laurie Snell, testified at an open family court hearing in Butler, Pa., that Parnell had repeatedly abused her and their young children, both verbally and in occasional fits of violence. The decorated Afghanistan combat veteran denied the allegations, but the judge hearing that case awarded Snell full custody and found she was “the more credible witness.”

“He tried to choke me out on a couch and I literally had to bite him” to get free, Snell had testified at 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 military as chief spokesperson for the Pentagon and assistant to new Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for public affairs.

Trump personally announced Parnell’s resurrection on his Truth Social feed earlier 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, who was barely confirmed in a 51-50 (with Vice President JD Vance the tiebreaker) vote after his own flurry of allegations around both abusive treatment of women and a sexual assault settlement.

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 been thrown down a memory hole.

Indeed, what passes for equity in the Trump 47 regime is that his rogues’ gallery of cabinet appointees includes a woman accused in a sexual abuse case (secretary of education nominee Linda McMahon, accused in a lawsuit of fostering abuse in her family’s pro-wrestling empire), as well as several men, such as newly confirmed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who reportedly apologized to a babysitter who accused him of a sexual assault.

One 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 by more than two dozen women, including E. Jean Carroll, whose charges led a jury to find Trump liable for sexual abuse in a department store dressing room.

I 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 to Trump’s post on Truth Social, which, of course, did not address those issues.

If 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. Parnell’s pinned tweet, 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.”

In the lengthy post, 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.”

Now, as the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson, Parnell will be called upon to defend a boss, in Hegseth, who has also questioned the ability of women to engage in combat roles. And he’ll be touting a remake of the U.S. military that has deleted web pages highlighting women’s achievements, canceled clubs around gender (as well as race and ethnicity) at the U.S. Military Academy, and removed Michelle Obama’s portrait from a military school as well as library books — such as a biography of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — which it calls “radical indoctrination.”

The erasure of a half-century of steady progress in making the American military into a more diverse fighting force — with women currently more than 17% of 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, although a 2024 investigation shows how in the Army alone, thousands of abuse cases have fallen through the cracks — while not doing nearly enough to curb the problem.

Instead, the best journalism about the extent of domestic violence in the armed services is mostly anecdotal, such as a 2019 HuffPost investigation 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.

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“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, told the site. “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.” That’s what Hegseth’s own mother wrote to him in a 2018 email accusing the future Pentagon chief of a pattern of abusing women (before disavowing it, as one does in the Trump era).

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 redemptive Handmaid’s Tale of unquestioned male supremacy.

It’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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