"I will not be silenced": Inside the scandal rocking SEAL Team Four
An exclusive look at internal Navy documents reveals how leadership ignored allegations of racism until SecDef Pete Hegseth's lawyer got involved.
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A previously unreported trove of internal Navy documents reviewed by The After-Action Report details allegations from an enlisted sailor who says he was subjected to racial harassment over three years and stripped of his SEAL Trident in what he describes as a campaign of retaliation.
The 124-page file includes claims that safety violations were selectively enforced against him, disciplinary records were destroyed, and a discrimination complaint detailing the alleged harassment was swiftly dismissed by the commanding officer of SEAL Team Four in Little Creek, Virginia. The sailor’s complaint received renewed attention only after he retained Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s personal attorney.
“This has all been a calculated effort to sabotage my career, my professional standing, and my ability to continue serving in the capacity I earned,” the sailor wrote in a complaint submitted in March to senior leadership. “I will not be silenced. I will not be ignored. I will not allow this blatant misconduct to define my career.”
Capt. Jodie Cornell, a spokeswoman for Naval Special Warfare Command, declined to respond to a detailed list of claims made in the complaint. When the matter first surfaced last week, Cornell said the command investigated “serious allegations of unprofessional conduct” and that accountability measures are ongoing.
SEAL commanders have moved swiftly to address the allegations of racial misconduct, which have spawned multiple investigations into the culture at Team Four. Members of the Team are facing non-judicial punishments and administrative reviews that could jeopardize their future as special operators. Senior commanders have also taken steps to reinstate the Trident of the operator who filed the complaint.
A “Hard R”
The operator claims that from 2021 through 2024, he was repeatedly targeted with racist memes, slurs, including the N-word, and hazing rooted in both his Black and Asian heritage.
The After-Action Report doesn’t name the sailor who filed the complaint because he is an alleged target of racial discrimination, and it is this site’s policy not to name such individuals without their consent. Likewise, this report withholds the names of active-duty SEALs and personnel involved in the case, even when those names appear in public records.
The complaint points to other troubling incidents that suggest racism was not isolated to a single platoon or command. In a previously unreported June 2024 message posted in the Delta Platoon group chat, an instructor at Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) training in Coronado, California, wrote, “I dropped a hard R in front of a Black student 3 weeks ago.” (A “hard R” is a euphemism for the N-word.)
“Seeing this in group chat was not only shocking but should be deeply alarming for the SEAL community and dishonors the SEAL legacy,” the operator wrote in his complaint.
Commanders at BUD/S had already taken action before the complaint drew attention to the text in March. The instructor was formally counseled for two incidents involving the use of the N-word with students in training. In both cases, the instructor acknowledged lapses in judgment and recognized that such language was unacceptable. The instructor has since been removed from teaching duties and is awaiting a decision on whether he will face further punishment.
Memes, Slurs, and Silence
In another instance—first reported by The After-Action Report—a photo taken without the sailor’s knowledge during a deployment in October 2022 was digitally altered to depict him as a monkey and circulated in the platoon-wide Signal group chat. According to the complaint, platoon leaders saw the image and responded with laughing emojis; one member called the likeness “uncanny.”
As a “new guy,” the operator said he chose not to escalate the monkey meme that targeted him and instead quietly confronted the teammate who had posted it. It had been created by another junior team member assigned to generate humorous content for the platoon—a quirk of SEAL Team culture that seems to be asking for trouble. The petty officer apologized, but two months later, he circulated additional memes portraying his teammate as a slave. Platoon leadership once again said nothing.
In a community where team identity is everything, the sailor’s name was scratched off Delta Platoon plaques displayed in the unit’s common area—an act he described as a “deliberate act of exclusion and humiliation.” According to the complaint, leaders across SEAL Team Four were aware of the incident but took no action.
"They do not treat minorities equally at this command, nor do they implement justice equally,” an Asian administrative staff member formerly at Team Four wrote in a signed statement included in the file.
According to the Asian staff member’s statement, members of Team Four openly referred to her as the “Dragon Lady.” She added, “The name wasn’t enough—members of Team Four would make fun of my accent and constantly questioned my acuity and ability to do my job solely based on my appearance.” The staff member, a first-class petty officer, said she was glad when she was transferred to another command.
A Trident Taken
The sailor at the center of the racist meme case alleges that he was written up for safety violations that he contends were retaliatory. Multiple safety infractions and performance chits culminated in June 2024 in the loss of his Trident — the gold pin awarded to those who complete the grueling training and earn their place in the elite SEAL community.
A Performance Review Board—a key step in assessing an operator’s continued qualification—was a “setup from the start,” the operator wrote in his complaint. When he requested his Performance Review Board paperwork, Team Four’s senior enlisted leader told him that the records had been "shredded." The same leader, a command master chief, in a separate meeting, allegedly said: "This meeting will be whatever the fuck I want it to be," before revoking his special operator classification, effectively ending the sailor’s SEAL career.
The sailor said he was never informed of his rights during the Performance Review Board or Trident Review Board proceedings.
According to the complaint, the commanding officer of Team Four told the sailor in August 2024 that his problems in the unit boiled down to a “fitment issue”—an inability to fit in—which the operator interpreted as meaning he was “not being white.”
“I have done nothing—NOTHING—to warrant the adverse actions taken against me,” the sailor wrote in his complaint. “I am unsure if ‘fitting in’ means I should have spent more time out drinking with my platoon, or taking steroids or other illegal drugs. I don’t know if it means I’m expected to laugh at the racist comments and memes.”
Complaint Dismissed—Until Legal Help Arrived
The operator began to challenge what he saw as a hostile environment in October 2024, when he filed a formal complaint under the Navy’s Command Managed Equal Opportunity program against the command master chief. Five days later, the commander of SEAL Team Four dismissed the complaint.
The swift dismissal underscored the uneven way the Navy SEALs handle racism. At BUD/S in Coronado, the use of the N-word had been promptly reported up the chain of command and addressed. But at Team Four in Virginia, the sailor wrote in his complaint, the dismissal sent a different message: racial harassment would be tolerated.
Things changed quickly, however, when he retained a lawyer—and not just any lawyer, but Tim Parlatore, who also serves as an attorney and adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. William Brown, a former SEAL turned lawyer who works for Parlatore, took the case pro bono, refusing to accept a fee for what he saw as outrageous racist conduct.
Days after the sailor resubmitted his discrimination complaint in March and cc’d Parlatore and Brown, commanders at Naval Special Warfare Group Two, which oversees Team Four, launched an investigation.
The Associated Press reported that investigators have substantiated about half of the dozen specific allegations about racist behavior listed in the complaint and found that Team Four leaders did not adequately address the racism in the platoon.
A Divided Community
As the complaint moved up the chain of command, a different narrative began circulating within the SEAL community—one that portrayed the sailor as a poor performer with a personal agenda.
Jake Zweig, a Black former SEAL officer, podcaster, and leadership coach who has spoken about the racism he faced in the Teams in the 1990s, dismissed the operator as a “turd”—a serious insult in the Teams for someone seen as weak, unreliable, or unfit.
Rear Adm. Jamie Sands, the head of Naval Special Warfare Command, has sought to dispel that perception. In recent weeks, he told SEAL audiences on both coasts that the “poor performer” rumor wasn’t true.
The operator graduated from BUD/S, where roughly three-quarters of candidates fail, and completed the 26-week SEAL Qualification Training (SQT) course. He holds numerous qualifications, including as a SEAL sniper and a joint terminal attack controller—advanced designations that require additional instruction and testing.
The complaint alleges that the sailor was singled out for infractions that were overlooked or tolerated when committed by others. He was cited for safety violations, including one incident in which he was accused of “cooking a grenade”—allowing the fuse to burn briefly before throwing it. The operator disputed the charge, calling it a judgment call made to protect teammates in a confined hallway. He was cited again the following day for actions he said were consistent with standard procedures. He also failed a fitness test in 2024 that he characterized as a “punitive, retaliatory stunt.”
“Leadership has made it clear that their priority is not enforcing standards fairly but rather targeting me while shielding others from accountability,” the operator wrote in his complaint. “If my leadership cannot be trusted to uphold good order and discipline in the face of blatant racism, their authority to issue safety violations in good faith must also be called into question.”
Parlatore, the operator's attorney, told me last week that the people accusing his client of safety violations were the same ones sending and commenting on the racist memes.
Meanwhile, the case has sparked a quiet reckoning inside Naval Special Warfare. Questions of who truly belongs in one of the military’s least diverse units remain as urgent as ever.