Someone Called CPS on Pete Buttigieg – They Took Away His Kids for 24 Hours

As Pride Month draws to a close, one of the ugliest stories of the season broke Friday. 

Someone decided to call Child Protective Services on Pete Buttigieg. They said he had confessed to violent crimes against his children. It was a lie. It worked anyway.

A Michigan State Police officer and a CPS worker showed up at the Traverse City home Buttigieg shares with his husband, Chasten, and their 4-year-old twins, Penelope and Gus. There had been an allegation. Their kids would need to be interviewed and Pete could not be present and he couldn’t be alone with them until it was done.

“The twenty-four hours until they returned are among the darkest hours of my life,” Buttigieg wrote Friday in a Substack post titled “A Terrible Thing Happened to My Family.” “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.”

Penelope and Gus spent the night at their grandparents’ house.

The next day, investigators told Buttigieg what the anonymous caller had actually said. The caller claimed to have spoken with a woman who said she had met Buttigieg at a conference in Alabama years ago. At that conference, she claimed, Buttigieg told her he had committed unspeakable violent crimes. The caller believed the children were still at risk.

Buttigieg said he had never been to the town where the alleged conference took place.

The forensic interviews of the children found nothing. Michigan State Police said in a statement that authorities “responded and determined the report was false.” The officer told Buttigieg the case would not be referred to a prosecutor. The officer also told him he believed it was politically motivated.

“Many times over the years, I have been denounced, yelled at, protested, threatened, and heckled,” Buttigieg wrote. “I’ve been through political attacks in office, death threats in public life, and rocket attacks in war. But this is the ugliest thing that has happened to me since my career in service began.”

Buttigieg described the incident as a form of swatting — the practice of filing false emergency reports to send law enforcement to a target’s home. This version used Child Protective Services instead of a SWAT team.

He noted the timing. It happened during Pride Month, shortly after he posted a Father’s Day photo of his family on Instagram. Buttigieg and Chasten are among the most visible same-sex parents in American public life. He said the incident may have been rooted in homophobia, though he did not say so definitively.

“I cannot describe the mix of rage and sadness that I feel at the idea that someone brought our children into this,” he wrote. “They are four years old. Four. They do not know or care what a Democrat or a Republican is.”

Under Michigan law, making a false report of felony child abuse is a crime punishable by up to four years in prison, a fine of up to $2,000, or both.

Buttigieg said he intends to pursue charges if possible. “Not just for our own sakes but to draw a line that I thought everyone already recognized: do not mess with someone’s kids.”

He ended the post with this: “We cannot let American politics keep going in this direction. And we must not all go on as if it’s acceptable for this kind of thing to be part of the cost of entering public service.”