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Six weeks ago,<\/span> Jack Posobiec asked me to comment on whether I have a \u201ccreepy\u00a0fetish for Asian women.\u201d<\/p>\n That was one of several false and wildly personal allegations that the far-right pundit and newly minted member of the Pentagon press corps said that he planned to include in \u201ca story that I\u2019m writing about you.\u201d<\/p>\n I immediately understood his October 28 email to be a threat, though it was not made explicit. The day before, I had sent the Pentagon press office a series of questions concerning Eric Geressy, a senior Pentagon adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Geressy, who served with Hegseth during a tour in Iraq in the mid-2000s, is part of the Pentagon effort to instill a \u201cwarrior ethos\u201d within the US military. He now leads a team reviewing the role of women<\/a> in the armed forces.<\/p>\n Calling Geressy \u201cmy toughest critic and my best mentor,\u201d Hegseth in March presented<\/a> him with the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army\u2019s second-highest award for valor, for Geressy\u2019s conduct following an ambush in Baghdad in 2007.\u00a0<\/p>\n Posobiec\u2019s email arrived the day after my inquiries\u2026This was either an incredible coincidence or a deliberate message: Publish your article and get smeared.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n I had discovered that Geressy\u2019s email address was linked to a public Goodreads page with a \u201ccurrently reading\u201d list that included various books featuring stories about \u201cAsian wife sharing.\u201d These pornographic works, with titles such as \u201cAsian Wife Went With Her Dad\u2019s Friend: A Cuckold Story,\u201d appeared on the list alongside two books by Hegseth and a handful of military histories. They contain detailed descriptions of cuckolding, group sex, and scenes involving \u201cladyboys\u201d\u2014a term used to refer to Thai transgender women. The page, active since 2021, was taken down the day after I contacted the Pentagon and Geressy about it.<\/p>\n I also asked about a 1997 domestic violence allegation against Geressy, about his dating habits, and past relationships with foreign women. I inquired if the Pentagon had assessed those relationships as part of Geressy\u2019s security clearance process, and, more broadly, if his personal life might create concerns about his susceptibility to foreign influence operations.<\/p>\n The Pentagon repeatedly asked for more time to address those questions. Eventually chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell responded, in part: \u201cGeressy has served for 38 years in the government, has been vetted numerous times by the relevant agencies, and has never posed a security risk or engaged in improper behavior as this piece tries to suggest. Mother Jones<\/em> has stooped to a new low with this shoddy hit piece and should be ashamed of itself.\u201d<\/p>\n Posobiec\u2019s email arrived the day after my initial inquiries. The false claims he asked about, particularly the Asian fetish thing, seemed to mirror my questions. Posobiec, who in 2016 promoted the bogus Pizzagate conspiracy theory, gave me a deadline, 5 p.m. on October 29, that was the same as the one I had given the Pentagon press office. A Pentagon spokesperson and Posobiec both denied coordination. Geressy declined to comment. But considering the questions, timing, and Posobiec\u2019s links<\/a> to Defense Department officials, the situation seemed clear. This was either an incredible coincidence or a deliberate message: Publish your article and get smeared.<\/p>\n Posobiec\u2019s email claimed I have \u201ca history of objectifying women,\u201d and that I had engaged in some kind of misconduct. The email also included questions about my marriage.<\/p>\n Posobiec\u2019s questions suggested one of his \u201ctwo sources\u201d may have been a real woman with whom I did have a brief relationship nearly a decade ago. Contrary to the email\u2019s depiction, that relationship was perfectly amicable at the time. But it was part of some personal messiness, especially around the end of my first marriage, that is embarrassing.\u00a0<\/p>\n My first instinct was to laugh this off. Who cares what the Pizzagate guy writes? But getting lied about by someone with 3 million X followers is not that funny. Comet Ping Pong never housed a Democratic pedophilia ring in its basement. But that didn\u2019t make it less dangerous when the restaurant was targeted by QAnon crazies, including a guy who fired<\/a> an AR-15 into a room that had just been full of kids.\u00a0<\/p>\n I have done reporting that angered other well-known figures on the right\u2014Roger Stone<\/a>, Miles Guo<\/a>, Steve Bannon<\/a>\u2014and that drew some doxxing and half-assed personal attacks<\/a> from their allies. But I am not famous. Who cares about me?<\/p>\n The threatened audience for the smear, clearly, was my peers\u2014and my wife. It seemed meant to scare me into spiking my own story. That is not journalism, but an attack on journalism.<\/p>\n This apparent threat became more explicit as the possible publication date we had given the Pentagon approached. In tweets, Posobiec asked his followers if he should publish a story about mistreatment of women by a \u201cDC-area liberal reporter.\u201d After our possible publication date passed, though, he went quiet.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n That left my editors and me with a problem. Here was what we believed to be an attempt to strong-arm Mother Jones<\/em>, and perhaps an expansion of the administration\u2019s war on the press. This was news. But the development also complicated an already tricky story. And if we delayed publication, or decided the story was not important enough to run, we risked leaving the impression that we, and I, had been intimidated into silence.\u00a0<\/p>\n We knew that we would not drop the article because of Posobiec\u2019s ploy, nor rush into running it before we were ready. Instead, we did what reporters are supposed to do when confronted with a journalism dilemma: more journalism.\u00a0<\/p>\n My emails to the Pentagon<\/span> and Geressy were part of an effort to check the information we had gathered. We wanted their side of the story. My questions went largely unanswered, but I kept asking. I talked to more people. And I worked to verify the information we had.<\/p>\n We had linked the Goodreads account to Geressy based on various pieces of identifying information, including an email address he had used. The account was listed under the username Eric J\u2014Geressy\u2019s middle name is Joseph. At one point, the page noted that Eric J lived in a specific Florida town, which matched Geressy\u2019s known residence. Also, some of the non-erotic books displayed on the account were seemingly of interest to him; they included books, like Hegseth\u2019s The War on Warriors<\/em>, that mention Geressy\u2019s military service. These titles appeared on the page between 2021 and July of this year.<\/p>\n The same email address was also linked to other apps, including Yelp and MyFitnessPal, that appeared to be Geressy\u2019s, along with a MySpace page<\/a> that includes what looks like a photograph of him.<\/p>\n Geressy declined to comment, and did not confirm he had a Goodreads account. In theory that made it possible, if highly unlikely, that someone could have used his email account, obtained through a hack or other means, to set up the Goodreads account. So we tried to rule out that possibility.<\/p>\n I spoke to Nathaniel Fried, the CEO of OSINT Industries. That\u2019s a British organization whose platform matches<\/a> personal information such as emails and phone numbers to online accounts; we had relied on this platform to connect Geressy\u2019s email address to the Goodreads account. Fried said that while OSINT can\u2019t tell you for sure who signed up, \u201cit\u2019s 100 percent that that email has an account.\u201d In other words, either Geressy or someone using his email and personal information created the account.<\/p>\n I also asked Amazon, which owns Goodreads, about the account. After much back and forth, the company said it did not currently have a record of an account linked to Geressy, or the email address he appears to have used. But they also said that they do not retain identifying information for deleted Goodreads accounts. Since the account linked to Geressy had been deleted weeks before, right after I reached out to the Pentagon and Geressy for comment, this statement gave us little new information. Overall, Amazon\u2019s carefully parsed response did nothing to refute the connection.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s all about whether you are susceptible to a foreign service getting any leverage against you. It may not be disqualifying, but it should be looked at.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Still, none of that fully bore on the main consideration. That is, whether personal reading tastes, past relationships, or apparent dating habits are worth reporting on. After extensive discussion, we decided that in this case, they are.<\/p>\n For one thing, former national security officials told us that for Pentagon personnel in particular, relationships with foreign partners are a major concern.\u00a0<\/p>\n Geressy lived in 2016 with a woman who evidence suggests may be a Chinese national. That woman started a limited liability company during that time with a name that references Chinese investment. It was registered at Geressy\u2019s home address, then dissolved a few months later. (I am omitting some specifics to avoid including identifying information.) The Pentagon said that Geressy has never been deemed a security risk. But it did not provide verifiable answers to questions about whether that relationship and company were examined as part of Geressy\u2019s security clearance review. Neither did Geressy.<\/p>\n Geressy has had what appears to be a stormy personal life that has included three marriages. In 1997, a jury acquitted him of a domestic violence charge after an accusation by his then-wife, according to court records.<\/p>\n Email addresses Geressy used, and other identifying information, including his first name and biographical information, also appeared in three data breaches, between 2011 and 2016, of adult websites geared toward finding sexual partners, according to databases that include the hacked data. Those sites are Fling, AdultFriendFinder, which then called itself \u201cthe World\u2019s Largest Sex & Swinger Community,\u201d and Ashley Madison, which billed itself as \u201cthe most famous name in infidelity.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The presence of Geressy\u2019s email and other information in these data breaches does not confirm he used these sites, according to cyber researchers.<\/p>\n But as John Sipher, a former senior CIA officer, told Mother Jone<\/em>s, in normal circumstances, a government official who might be involved with such websites and who had romantic relationships with foreigners would draw scrutiny. \u201cIt\u2019s all about whether you are susceptible to a foreign service getting any leverage against you,\u201d Sipher said. \u201cIt may not be disqualifying, but it should be looked at.\u201d<\/p>\n And there is a second point. Geressy is a top official in a Defense Department that has booted trans people from the military based on President Trump\u2019s executive order<\/a> that argues that \u201cadoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual\u2019s sex conflicts with a soldier\u2019s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one\u2019s personal life.\u201d Geressy is not responsible for trans policy, but he is part of a Pentagon leadership that is concerns itself with subordinates\u2019 private lives.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s Pentagon wants reporters to be not just docile recipients of the administration\u2019s preferred narratives but active propagandists. That is a direct attack on the free press. It is also an insidious danger.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n In The War on Warriors<\/em>, one of the books on the Goodreads page linked to Geressy, Hegesth cited his mentor to support the position that women should not serve in combat roles. \u201cFrom my perspective,\u201d Hegseth quoted Geressy as saying, circa 2007, \u201coverwhelmingly most females want nothing to do with combat arms.\u201d According to Hegseth, Geressy had argued that the Army had unfairly awarded medals to some women who had served in combat. \u201cIf SGM Geressy was a transvestite\u2014or gay, or black, or a woman,\u201d Hegseth wrote, \u201che would have three Distinguished Service Crosses and be on the front of a Wheaties box.\u201d<\/p>\n The Pentagon is already beset<\/a> by scandals<\/a> in which top<\/a> officials<\/a>, most notably Hegseth himself, have been accused<\/a> of conduct that falls short of the standards it demands of other Defense Department officials and service members. Critics have<\/a> argued<\/a> that for lower-ranking personnel, actions like Hegseth sharing<\/a> military plans outside of approved channels, or the adultery<\/a> he acknowledged<\/a> during confirmation hearings, would result in firing. The racy selections on the Goodreads account linked to Geressy\u2019s email may be comparatively minor. But that a public page listing such titles existed until we flagged it adds to the impression that the department\u2019s leadership is not only hypocritical, but inept<\/a>.<\/p>\n Hegseth has reacted<\/a> furiously to reporting<\/a> on some of his missteps. He has raged<\/a> over coverage of his sharing<\/a> of plans for bombing targets in Yemen with a Signal group that included the editor of the Atlantic<\/em>. (The department\u2019s inspector general reported<\/a> that Hegseth\u2019s actions could have put US troops at risk.) He fired<\/a> aides accused of leaking news of a plan to give Elon Musk a top-secret briefing on US war plans versus China. Posobiec\u2019s email came as the Pentagon took an increasingly hostile stance toward the media.<\/p>\n Kingsley Wilson, a former conservative influencer who is the department\u2019s press secretary, told me that she did not speak to Posobiec about my story and did not believe Parnell did either. Posobiec also denied coordinating with the Pentagon. Geressy did not respond to a question about it.<\/p>\n But it came amid broader pushback to our reporting. \u201cThis is a garbage story made up of false allegations, decades-old claims that proved untrue, and disgusting innuendo aimed at smearing a man who was awarded the Army\u2019s second-highest military honor for extraordinary heroism in combat,\u201d Parnell said.<\/p>\n That response is consistent with the combative press relations posture of the second Trump administration. Shortly before, when a reporter asked the White House press secretary to identify who had suggested Trump meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Budapest, she responded<\/a>: \u201cYour mom did.\u201d<\/p>\n Similar truculence drives the Defense Department\u2019s recent decision to force outlets that assign reporters to the Pentagon to agree to a policy<\/a> that bars<\/a> reporters from revealing news the department does not authorize. Most news organizations refused<\/a>. (The New York Times<\/em> recently sued<\/a> the Pentagon, arguing that the policy violates the First Amendment.) Posobiec is among a group<\/a> of pro-Trump influencers who accepted<\/a> the restrictive terms. The result is that the new press corps the Pentagon grants<\/a> access to is largely composed<\/a> of far-right activists.<\/p>\n The Pentagon press shop maintains close ties to its newly constituted press corps. Wilson, the department\u2019s press secretary, occasionally appears<\/a> on a program Posobiec hosts. In an October episode, she thanked<\/a> him for agreeing to the department\u2019s restrictions. \u201cNow we get to have incredible journalists like yourself who are going to be here in the Pentagon reporting on what the Department of War is doing every single day,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n On Wednesday night, after weeks of silence, I heard from Posobiec again. He said he was \u201cfinalizing my story,\u201d and wanted to know if me, my wife, \u201cor your in-laws\u201d wished to comment. His message arrived an hour and forty minutes after I wrote to Geressy, posing some last questions and telling him I was \u201cfinalizing this story.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s Pentagon wants reporters to be not just docile recipients of the administration\u2019s preferred<\/a> narratives<\/a> but active propagandists<\/a>. That is a direct attack on the free press. It is also an insidious danger. It threatens to make us bad at our jobs. It can be harder work to treat people whom we cover critically like complete human beings, people who deserve empathy and a real chance to explain themselves. If the department yanks credentials for tough reporting, if a press secretary just attacks a story without engaging with questions, and if inquiries draw personal attacks, why give spokespeople, or the officials they work for, any opportunity to respond at all?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The answer, I think, is that in journalism, like everywhere else, we should treat people the way we want to be treated. This story, with its weird personal twist, drove home that necessity. By proposing to smear me, Posobiec inadvertently provided a reminder of how responsible reporters ought to act.<\/p>\n I have worked to be fair\u2014and honest. This attempt won\u2019t appease the Pentagon or the people who threatened me. And the choice here, between appearing to be coerced into silence or maybe getting slandered, lacks an option that doesn\u2019t feel shitty.\u00a0<\/p>\n But what I can control are the standards I aim for. Those are ultimately up to me. But they reflect the values of Mother Jones<\/em>, and the influence of other journalists, one of whom is my wife. She makes the judgment I\u2019ll live with.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n
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