June 27, 2026:

Published
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Updated
Pete Buttigieg spent the night away from his kids after he says someone called Child Protective Services on him … in what was ultimately deemed a bogus tip.
The former transportation secretary said in a Substack post Friday that a police officer and a CPS worker unexpectedly showed up at his door a few days ago — saying there’d been an allegation made against him regarding his 4-year-old twins.
Michigan State Police confirmed in a statement that the allegation against Buttigieg was bogus and “determined the report was false,” per NBC News.
Pete says he was told they were going to interview the kids the next day, and he wasn’t allowed to be alone with them until then. They ended up spending the night at their grandparents’ place.
Buttigieg wrote that those were “among the darkest hours of my life,” saying … “I tried to get my head around the idea that I had been accused of something so serious that I couldn’t be alone around my own children, and had consented to have them interviewed by strangers, without my knowing where the accusation had come from or even what it contained.”
CPS wouldn’t tell Buttigieg what the allegation was until it was his turn to be interviewed. In his post, he said the allegation supposedly came from someone who “had spoken to a woman” who claimed she met the politician at a conference in Alabama years back.
The caller allegedly told CPS that the woman had said Buttigieg confessed to “unspeakable violent crimes” and believed his kids were at risk. But he told the officer he’d never even been to that town in Alabama.
According to Buttigieg, neither the police nor the CPS worker found anything to back up the allegation.
Buttigieg called the ordeal “the ugliest thing that has happened to me since my career in service began.”
And MSP said in their statement that false claims like this are “dangerous” and “divert law enforcement officers and Child Protective Services workers from responding to legitimate emergencies and protecting vulnerable children and families.”