The confirmation prospects of two of Donald Trump’s most controversial Cabinet picks were in jeopardy on Friday amid allegations of sexual misconduct in developments that reflect the president-elect’s own history of abuse toward women.

Uncertainty surrounded the nomination of Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick for defense secretary — whose path to confirmation in the Senate was already complicated due to concerns about his inexperience and extreme views — following revelations that police in California filed a sexual assault allegation in 2017 had investigated against him.

No charges had been filed. But the allegations were so serious that Trump’s newly appointed chief of staff, Susie Wiles, reportedly spoke to Hegseth after learning about them on Wednesday evening, the day after his appointment.

According to Vanity Fair, which initially reported the story, the new president’s lawyers also spoke with Hegseth, a 44-year-old Fox News host and Army veteran who railed against — among other things — women serving in military combat roles.

The revelation deepened controversy over Matt Gaetz, the far-right Florida representative who was nominated as attorney general despite facing a two-year Justice Department investigation over sex trafficking allegations. They included allegations that he had sex with a 17-year-old.

On Friday, the attorney for two women who were witnesses in the House Ethics Committee investigation into Gaetz said one of his clients told the panel she saw the representative having sex with a minor, according to reports.

Republican and Democratic senators on Friday pushed to see the committee report on Gaetz’s conduct, which was ordered despite the criminal investigation ending without charges.

Gaetz avoided the planned release of the report on Friday – which was widely expected to be damaging to him – by immediately resigning from the House of Representatives after Trump announced his nomination on Wednesday. House Speaker Mike Johnson has also said he would “strongly request” that the report not be published.

But the report’s existence could in fact still torpedo his nomination after senior senators — including Republican John Cornyn of Texas, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee — demanded it be preserved for use in confirmation hearings in the Senate.

The investigation was originally launched in 2021 to investigate whether the representative “may have engaged in sexual misconduct and/or illegal drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the floor of the House of Representatives, misused state identification information, used campaign funds converted to personal use, and/or or has accepted bribes, inappropriate tips or unacceptable gifts, in violation of house rules, laws or other standards of conduct.”

Trump is believed to have selected Gaetz as the ideal candidate to carry out a massive purge of the Justice Department, against which he harbors bitter grievances for initiating criminal investigations into his conduct during his first presidency.

Hegseth has also been selected with a view to purging the armed forces, which he says are being hampered by ‘woke leadership’.

His prospects for doing so appeared to be clouded by the disclosure of the 2017 investigation, which stemmed from an alleged incident at the Hyatt Regency hotel and spa in Monterey, California, where a Republican women’s conference was taking place.

The Monterey City Manager’s office confirmed the investigation in a brief statement, adding that the alleged incident occurred between midnight on October 7, 2017 and 7 a.m. the following morning.

Hegseth reportedly told Wiles and Trump’s legal team that it arose from a consensual meeting and described the allegation as “he said, she said,” Vanity Fair reported.

The magazine’s website also quoted a source as saying Hegseth had not been vetted. This was contradicted by a source in Trump’s transition team, who said: “Hegseth was vetted, but this alleged incident did not come up.”

The vetting dispute followed separate reports that standard FBI background checks on some of Trump’s most controversial nominees — designed to uncover past criminal activity and other potentially disqualifying liabilities — had been thrown aside.

The questions about his nominees’ sexual behavior reflect Trump’s own past. The president-elect was ordered last year to pay $83 million in damages to writer E. Jean Carroll after a New York jury in a civil trial found him liable for assault and defamation. Carroll claimed that Trump raped her in 1996, which Trump denied.

His candidacy for the 2016 presidential election was nearly derailed after the emergence of an Access Hollywood tape from more than a decade earlier in which he bragged about using his celebrity status to grab women’s genitals.

Allegations of sexual misconduct have also dogged Robert F Kennedy Jr, Trump’s nominee to be secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. A former babysitter for his children alleged that Kennedy groped her in his home in 1998. Kennedy responded to the accusation, again reported in Vanity Fair, by saying, “I’m not a church boy.”