Frat Bros Tapped for a President's Cabinet‽‽

The fear is real and justified for many women.

Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth, Robert Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump; Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu via Getty Images, Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images, Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images, Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

This piece features guest author Chloe Nazra Lee, MD, MPH, and overall badass woman.

I admire Dr. Lee's fierce advocacy and I respect her expertise and insights.

Dr. Lee and I connected over a piece I wrote for

The Big Picture

—How Men Like Donald Trump, Brett Kavanaugh And Brock Turner Are Made. Our experiences at Dartmouth College were disturbingly similar, despite our matriculations happening 23 years apart.

Dr. Lee graduated from Dartmouth College in 2014 with a Classics major and Neuroscience minor and received her Masters of Public Health in Molecular Epidemiology from Columbia University in 2018 and her doctorate of medicine in 2023 from the Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine.

She is now a resident physician in psychiatry at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York. Dr. Lee's writing has appeared in MedPage Today, Ms. Magazine, Women’s Media Center, and The Baltimore Sun. Her professional interests include narrative medicine, working with abuse victims, and trauma disorders.

She has been described as ‘boring, not outstanding, not physically desirable’ and ‘a misandrist’ by the men who dislike her work.

~ Auntie Mavis

💛🤍🖤❤️💛🤍🖤❤️💛🤍🖤❤️💛🤍🖤❤️💛🤍🖤❤️💛🤍🖤❤️

Dr. Chloe Nazra Lee

The raw emotion in Penelope Hegseth’s 2018 email to her son, admonishing his abuse of women, moved me to tears. It’s everything I wish someone would have said for me as I left a man like Pete Hegseth.

His mother Penelope wrote to her son Pete:

“You are an abuser of women—that is the ugly truth and 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 (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.”

Sadly, Penelope later retracted her impassioned defense of her former daughter-in-law Samantha (Deering) Hegseth—the mother of three of Hegseth’s seven children (4 biological, 3 stepchildren).

Pete Hegseth, the self-described Christian champion of family values—nominated by Donald Trump for Secretary of Defense and confirmed by the United States Senate 51-50 with JD Vance casting the tie breaking vote—shattered his first two marriages with a serial pattern of infidelity.

He also has allegations of both sexual assault and problematic alcohol use that colleagues at Fox News claim precluded his professional responsibilities.

By nominating Hegseth and others like him to political office, Trump—convicted for sexual abuse himself—rewards violence against women, forming a brotherhood predicated on misconduct within the executive branch of government.

What does alcohol-soaked sexual misconduct in a traditional boy’s club of misogynistic charmers—who flout the ethical and moral standards they demand for everyone else—protected by a larger institution remind you of?

It reminds me of a college fraternity and my near-decade at Dartmouth College as an undergraduate and medical student. Dartmouth’s fraternity antics, resulting in a student’s death by drowning, have made the news again.

But I’d like to spotlight that all too common feature of campus life that also stems from its alcohol-fueled recklessness towards human life: pervasive sexual misconduct.

I remember the chronic foreboding I felt on that campus back in my undergraduate days, as I fear for women nationwide as Trump—the ultimate entitled male—ascends to power.

Our History of Misogyny

The “Dartmouth X” is a special piece of college culture you’ll never see on the university’s website. It’s a measure of sexual desirability by gender. Picture yourself drawing a large X. From left to right, the upward sloping line represents men’s “hookup potential” as they pass from freshman to senior—it increases.

But the downward sloping line connotes women’s desirability over time—the naive 18-year-old women are considered to be at their sexual zenith, their value plummeting by their senior year.

This concept highlights the institution’s fundamental attitude towards women, based on regular revelations in the media of its complicity with the culture of abusing women that seemed so insidiously pervasive on campus.

I’m not saying anything that isn’t common knowledge or hasn't been covered extensively in the news. We have no shortage of well-documented scandals rooted in violence against women, often within the Greek system:

• 2012: In a controversial op-ed and subsequent interview with Rolling Stone Magazine, fellow student Andrew Lohse exposed hazing at the now-derecognized chapter of the fraternity, SAE.

Lohse's account, better suited to a Sadean novel than an elite university, detailed harrowing anecdotes about forced nudity, routine humiliation, immersion in an inflatable pool filled with urine, feces, and semen, and a culinary aberration called a “vomlet” that pledges were forced to eat.

Although his disclosure was fundamentally a hazing exposé, it helped spotlight campus sexual assault.

• 2013: Dartmouth underwent federal investigation for mishandling sexual misconduct reports.

• 2014: An anonymous post explicitly detailing the rape of a specific student was published on our Reddit-esque online forum, Bored@Baker. The targeted female student later reported that she had been raped in the exact scenario detailed in the infamous “rape guide.”

• 2014: Parker Gilbert, a former student athlete, was acquitted of raping a 19-year-old peer as she slept. The victim’s alcohol use and unlocked door were questioned, as though either constitutes a rape invitation.

The culture of misogyny extends beyond Dartmouth’s historically conservative Greek system, even permeating its “leftist” academia.

In 2019, Dartmouth settled a lawsuit for $14.4 million after 3 neuroscience professors, Bill Kelley, Todd Heatherton, and Paul Whalen, reportedly subjected female students to sexual harassment and rape, threatening their careers if they complained.

Even more devastating were the claims that Dartmouth did nothing for over 16 years.

The lawsuit alleged that Dartmouth actively silenced the 27 complainants and protected the perpetrators at the victims’ expense, with the chair of the Psychological and Brain Sciences Department reportedly calling a meeting to “browbeat the women who were planning to sue.”

I witnessed similarly vile attitudes towards women at Dartmouth’s left-leaning medical school. I recall hearing two male classmates privately deride another’s wife, a beautiful lady inside and out, but apparently “too fat” and “not attractive.”

I hated how they talked about “smashing” women. I hated how other men in the class boastfully compared “body counts.”

Liberal misogyny has its own pernicious flavor, hiding behind a pretext of progressivism. It invites you, tantalizingly, to trust it before breaking you.

These same men would publicly champion gender equality, medical ethics, and equity, but would treat women as disposable, rabidly consuming one after the next to satiate their selfish desires. They are doctors.

If I were a mother, I’d never entrust my daughters' medical care to them.

I cannot dismiss their words. Sexual violence arises from demeaning attitudes about women – where women are treated as conquests for the male ego, not valued for their humanity.

Men's Redemption Over Women's Pain

Of course, Hegseth was the picture of contrition after his verbal cruelty to his second wife Samantha was revealed in court documents.

He responded to being exposed with:

“I am committed to learning from my mistakes.”

Abuse is a choice, not a mistake. Abusive men commonly have these come-to-Jesus moments when their misdeeds are exposed.

I’ve seen Dartmouth men who have perpetuated the abusive culture show similarly performative penitence. After exposing campus hazing, Andrew Lohse earned the labels of “traitor” or “brave” depending on whom you asked.

The characterization of Lohse as a selfless reformer annoyed me. I found his narrative, portraying him as a helpless victim of Dartmouth frat culture, inauthentic and self-serving and hated that his redemption story was the central narrative, while women’s voices remained mostly unheard.

That 2012 Rolling Stone profile of Lohse enhanced his sympathetic Prodigal Son image, describing him as “highly self-aware” and “scarily accomplished,” even calling attention to his “handsomeness” to complete the angelic portrait.

He claimed he wasn’t a partier prior to Dartmouth, denouncing the culture of “pervasive hazing, substance abuse, and sexual assault.” But the Rolling Stone interview reported that he “chased and conquered numerous girls” through high school and “reached the pinnacle of adolescent cool by dating ‘this really hot, skanky cheerleader,’ as he himself puts it,” among his salient accomplishments.

Lohse’s “popularity with women” was cited as a factor prompting SAE to accept him: “A friend recalls walking into Lohse’s room one night to find a girl in his bed, alone, while Lohse was in bed with another girl down the hall.”

No one who genuinely respects women treats them the way Andrew Lohse has. That repentant sinner performance to salvage someone’s public image is a mere facade.

Bottom line: if you truly had “family values,” you wouldn’t have done any of it in the first place.

Entitled Boys Who Never Grew Up

Whether or not they want to admit it, Dartmouth has left a legacy of pain for so many women.

Wrote the author of the Dartmouth rape guide:

“I went out last week and was assaulted at the first and only house I went to. Then I got told it happens all the time. I hope that maybe someone reading this will do something, because I have no one to turn to.”

I know her hopelessness too well, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. I and many women from Dartmouth I know have a story about male aggression on campus—harassment, stalking, assault, rape—and once resigned ourselves to silence after feeling like we weren’t taken seriously.

I don’t want hollow statements about safety and inclusivity. I don’t even want an apology. I want real change and accountability.

I anticipate 2 responses from my alma mater: vilifying my character and denouncing my disloyalty.

It’s a tactic that Trump and his cronies have employed, a classic response pattern among men confronted with accountability for sexual misconduct.

Trump has proclaimed:

“It’s a scary time for young men in America…You could be someone that was perfect your entire life, and someone could accuse you of something.”

Far-right pastor Joel Webbon proposed ending the #MeToo movement by executing women who make false claims—ignoring that a tiny minority of rape claims are false, or that many sexual assault reports do not result in criminal charges, let alone convictions.

Their furor ignores that Trump and many men of “family values” on the right have led far from perfect lives and their absent outrage about the plethora of men who do abuse women screams misogynistic volumes.

There are too many women like me to ignore. Do they really think we’re all lying? Even if the truth of our words is glaringly obvious, they don’t want to hear it.

As Mike Huckabee stated in a Newsmax interview:

“I think there are two virtues: loyalty and confidentiality. Be loyal to the people who helped you and learn how to keep your mouth shut if you have information that could be hurtful to someone.”

The blame for negative perception after unsavory truths are reported, lies solely with perpetrators and institutions that protect them, not with the women who speak about the horrors we’ve endured.

If you don’t want bad press, don’t act unethically. Simple.

Loyalty is a wonderful quality.

But if you are loyal to an institution over your principles, then you have no principles at all.

And so, I will never be loyal to an institution over my ethics. I don’t owe anyone that, especially after the harm done to too many women.

Andrew Lohse faced backlash for “disloyalty” by talking about hazing at Dartmouth. The female victims of Dartmouth’s neuroscience department allegedly faced professional repercussions for reporting sexual harassment.

And many women fear the same spiteful retaliation from our wealthy institution. I fully understand how terrifying it is to speak up in a system that seems hell-bent on concealing misconduct, preserving optics over substance.

I understand why women nationwide might be terrified.

The system seems stacked against us, with restrictions on reproductive care, calls to repeal the 19th Amendment, proliferation of online misogyny and harassment on Elon Musk’s X, and attacks on women’s choices by opposing contraception access and no-fault divorce, thinly cloaked under “traditional values.”

Meanwhile, men’s violations of their own principles remain unchecked and tolerated.

The troubling nominations of men with unclear qualifications for political office—beyond appearing on Fox News, blind loyalty to Trump, or allegations of sexual violence—are a hallmark of the second Trump administration.

Trump’s regular rants against diversity initiatives and claims that “the highest level of genius” is required for certain jobs have not stopped him from nominating RFK Jr. to lead Health and Human Services. Kennedy has demonstrated overt incompetence in matters of public health and also faces allegations of sexual misconduct.

Matt Gaetz—originally tapped for Attorney General before public outcry caused him to withdraw—is another such example.

Against accusations of sexual misconduct, substantiated by a House report on Gaetz’s alleged activities—including paying thousands for sex and drugs and a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old—the self-described Baptist, vehemently defended himself:

“It’s embarrassing, though not criminal, that I probably partied, womanized, drank, and smoked more than I should have earlier in life. I live a different life now.”

Not very Christian of him.

Gaetz also claimed to be the victim of extortion and obstructed the investigation, as stated in the report:

“Representative Gaetz continuously sought to deflect, deter, or mislead the Committee in order to prevent his actions from being exposed.”

I distinctly remember “not bearing false witness” being a core precept when I taught Sunday School.

Possibly the most troubling piece of the Gaetz saga involves the “Christian” men who shielded Gaetz and attempted to suppress the House’s investigative report. House Republicans frustrated a Democrat-led effort to release the report publicly in December 2024.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson requested that the Ethics Committee not release their findings, offering no other reason than:

“That is not the way we do things in the House.”

Vice President-elect J.D. Vance even lobbied for Senate support for Gaetz as Attorney General. Let that sink in: the Christian “law and order” politician actively pushed to place a man who had a sexual relationship with a minor and paid women for sex in a position of high authority.

It feels like they won.

The violent men won.

Writing Our Voices Back

Is it surprising at all that a convicted sexual abuser is protecting other alleged sexual abusers?

What hope do women like me have when the violent men in our lives receive this national welcome?

But there is a certain freedom when unethical people in power take everything from you because they leave you with nothing to lose.

So speak up, my sisters.

The poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s cry for resistance in his poem Speak never felt so timely:

Speak, for your two lips are free.

Speak, for your tongue is still your own.

This straight body still is yours,

Speak, your life is still your own.

See how in the blacksmith’s forge

Flames leap high and steel glows red.

Padlocks opening wide their jaws,

Every chain’s embrace outspread.

Time enough is this brief hour

Until body and tongue lie dead.

Speak, for truth is living yet.

Speak, whatever must be said.

~ Dr. Chloe Lee

💛🤍🖤❤️💛🤍🖤❤️💛🤍🖤❤️💛🤍🖤❤️💛🤍🖤❤️💛🤍🖤❤️

Thank you to Dr. Lee for sharing her wisdom and insights.

Two things I hear very often when I publish a piece is “I never knew that was happening” and “I thought I was the only one this happened to.”

The first speaks to educating the masses about things happening in the world that they've never been exposed to. The second speaks to forming networks of support and our interconnectedness as people.

For all those opposed to the emerging misogynist, Christian nationalist “new normal”—please speak out!

Whether it’s one on one with friends and relatives, in person forums or demonstrations, or online, all of us can do something. Say or write your experiences, what you think, and how you feel.

Make your voice heard!

For those in the United States, learn how to contact your Congress members in the House of Representatives and Senate. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Consider running for office, from the local school board to the national level.

Consider joining grassroots, national, and international organizations that fight for the basic human rights for all women and girls.

Here are a few respected organizations—please feel free to add more in the comments:

National Organization of Women (NOW)

United Nations Women

Association for Women’s Rights in Development

Womankind Worldwide

Center for Reproductive Rights

Plan International

Equality Now

Men Engage Alliance

Global Fund for Women

Rise Up

PROMUNDO for men and boys

Girls Incorporated

Women Impacting Public Policy (WIPP)

Things may seem bleak right now, but we're in this together. Let's remember to look out for each other.

Philámayaye, Niawen'kó:wa, Thank you,

~ Šung'mánitu Ápé, Nikakwaho'tá':'ah Wá’tsik, Auntie Mavis