Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said on Friday that he and his husband had been separated from their 4-year-old twins after an anonymous report falsely accused Mr. Buttigieg of posing a threat to their children.
The separation lasted for 24 hours and required their children to sit for interviews with Children’s Protective Services, Mr. Buttigieg said.
The Michigan State Police and C.P.S. determined the report was false, a spokeswoman for the state police said in a statement, adding that “false reports are dangerous.”
“I’ve been through political attacks in office, death threats in public life, and rocket attacks in war,” Mr. Buttigieg, a military veteran, wrote in a Substack post titled “A Terrible Thing Happened to My Family.” “But this is the ugliest thing that has happened to me since my career in service began.”
Mr. Buttigieg noted that the incident occurred soon after the Buttigiegs shared images of their family for Father’s Day, and also during Pride Month.
Mr. Buttigieg, a Democrat, ran for president in 2020, was the first openly gay cabinet secretary and is widely seen as a 2028 presidential contender. He has long weathered attacks over his sexual orientation.
Incidents known as “swatting,” or false emergency calls intended to draw a heavy police response, have been on the rise as the political landscape has become increasingly volatile and polarized. While the attacks typically involve dispatching the police to private homes under false pretenses, the targeting of Mr. Buttigieg’s family with false claims related to child abuse appeared to introduce a new dimension to the harassment.
Mr. Buttigieg said he learned of the allegation this week, when a police officer and a Children’s Protective Services worker showed up to the family’s house in Michigan.
That night, the twins slept at their grandparents’ house. The authorities required them to sit alone for the interviews with the C.P.S. workers, as is common during such investigations.
Mr. Buttigieg said that the next day, when he spoke to a police officer at his house, he learned more about the complaint.
“An anonymous caller had contacted C.P.S.,” Mr. Buttigieg said. “The caller said that he had spoken to a woman who claimed to have met me at a conference several years ago in Alabama, where she said I told her that I had committed unspeakable violent crimes, and the caller believed my children were still at risk.”
Mr. Buttigieg said he told the officer that he had not been to the town where the woman had supposedly met him. The officer “made clear that he believed this was politically motivated, and said it would not be referred to a prosecutor,” Mr. Buttigieg said.
The Michigan State Police did not respond to inquiries seeking a report of the incident, audio recordings of the anonymous allegation, or more information about the status of any investigation into the caller.
The former transportation secretary vowed to try to press charges against the caller.
“I don’t know how much we can do about it, but so help me God, if there is any way to press civil or criminal charges over this, we will,” he wrote on Substack. “Not just for our own sakes but to draw a line that I thought everyone already recognized: do not mess with someone’s kids.”
