Pete Buttigieg Vows To Pursue Charges After A False Report Separated Him From His Twins
Pete Buttigieg says he will pursue charges if the law allows it, after a false report to Child Protective Services brought police to his home and kept him and his husband from their four-year-old twins for a full day.
The former United States Transportation Secretary wrote about it on his Substack and called the whole thing “a cruel, politically motivated hoax.”
What the report actually claimed
A police officer and a Child Protective Services worker turned up at his Traverse City, Michigan home a few days before he wrote about it. They told him someone had reported that his children were at risk.
Then came the substance of it. According to Buttigieg, an anonymous caller said he had spoken to a woman who claimed she met Buttigieg at a conference in Alabama years earlier, where he supposedly confessed to “unspeakable violent crimes.” Buttigieg shares the twins with his husband, Chasten.
A night he calls one of the darkest of his life
The claim was nonsense. The consequences were not. His twins were taken through separate forensic interviews the next morning, with no parent in the room, and stayed with their grandparents until it was done. “The 24 hours until they returned are among the darkest hours of my life,” Buttigieg wrote. Michigan State Police and Child Protective Services investigated and found the report was false.
So who gets held responsible?
Here’s where it gets thorny. The officer told Buttigieg the case looked politically motivated and would not be referred to a prosecutor. Buttigieg is not letting it sit there. “I don’t know how much we can do about it,” he wrote, “but so help me God, if there is any way to press civil or criminal charges over this, we will.”
Filing a false report is a crime under Michigan law, so the door is not completely shut.
The attack fits a pattern. Swatting, where someone makes a fake emergency call to send a heavy police response to a target’s address, has hit politicians and public figures repeatedly, and Buttigieg’s family has been targeted before.
How many of these does it take before the law treats it as the serious crime it is? For now, Buttigieg has a promise on the record, and an open question about whether anyone answers for it.
