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Post by Deleted on Jul 23, 2019 3:30:04 GMT
The New Yorker did this story on Al Franken and I thought it was worth sharing here.
I always felt the Democrats moved too fast in throwing Al Franken under the bus and not giving him his day in court by not letting their be an investigation by the Senate Ethics Committee. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a sad commentary on this country that it’s just been these last couple years that women feel they can come forward and tell their stories and be believed. Do I know if he is a sexual pervert or an old lecher or someone who just didn’t think? No I don’t but I think he should of had his day in court , so to speak, before being forced to resign.
“The Case of Al Franken”
“Last month, in Minneapolis, I climbed the stairs of a row house to find Al Franken, Minnesota’s disgraced former senator, wandering around in jeans and stocking feet. It was a sunny day, but the shades were mostly drawn. Takeout containers of hummus and carrot sticks were set out on the kitchen table. His wife, Franni Bryson, was stuck in their apartment in Washington, D.C., with a cold, and he had evidently done the best he could to be hospitable. But the place felt like the kind of man cave where someone hides out from the world, which is more or less what Franken has been doing since he resigned, in December, 2017, amid accusations of sexual impropriety.
There had been occasional sightings of him: in Washington, people mentioned having glimpsed him riding the Metro or browsing alone in a bookstore; there was gossip that he had fallen into a depression, and had been seen in a fetal position on a friend’s couch. But Franken had experienced one of the most abrupt downfalls in recent political memory. He had been perhaps the most recognizable figure in the Senate, in part because he’d entered it as a celebrity: a best-selling author and a former writer and performer on “Saturday Night Live.” Now Franken was just one more face in a gallery of previously powerful men who had been brought down by the #MeToo movement, and whom no one wanted to hear from again. America had ghosted him.
Only two years ago, Franken was being talked up as a possible challenger to President Donald Trump in 2020. In Senate hearings, Franken had proved himself to be one of the most effective critics of the Trump Administration. His tough questioning of Jeff Sessions, Trump’s nominee for Attorney General, had led Sessions to recuse himself from the investigation into Russian influence in the 2016 election, and prompted the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel.
As it turns out, Franken’s only role in the 2020 Presidential campaign has been as a figure of controversy. On June 4th, Pete Buttigieg was widely criticized on social media for saying that he would not have pressured Franken to resign—as had virtually all his Democratic rivals who were then in the Senate—without first learning more about the alleged incidents. At the same time, the Presidential candidacy of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has been plagued by questions about her role as the first of three dozen Democratic senators to demand Franken’s resignation. Gillibrand has cast herself as a feminist champion of “zero tolerance” toward sexual impropriety, but Democratic donors sympathetic to Franken have stunted her fund-raising and, Gillibrand says, tried to “intimidate” her “into silence.”
Franken’s fall was stunningly swift: he resigned only three weeks after Leeann Tweeden, a conservative talk-radio host, accused him of having forced an unwanted kiss on her during a 2006 U.S.O. tour. Seven more women followed with accusations against Franken; all of them centered on inappropriate touches or kisses. Half the accusers’ names have still not become public. Although both Franken and Tweeden called for an independent investigation into her charges, none took place. This reticence reflects the cultural moment: in an era when women’s accusations of sexual discrimination and harassment are finally being taken seriously, after years of belittlement and dismissal, some see it as offensive to subject accusers to scrutiny. “Believe Women” has become a credo of the #MeToo movement.
At his house, Franken said he understood that, in such an atmosphere, the public might not be eager to hear his grievances. Holding his head in his hands, he said, “I don’t think people who have been sexually assaulted, and those kinds of things, want to hear from people who have been #MeToo’d that they’re victims.” Yet, he added, being on the losing side of the #MeToo movement, which he fervently supports, has led him to spend time thinking about such matters as due process, proportionality of punishment, and the consequences of Internet-fuelled outrage. He told me that his therapist had likened his experience to “what happens when primates are shunned and humiliated by the rest of the other primates.” Their reaction, Franken said, with a mirthless laugh, “is ‘I’m going to die alone in the jungle.’ ”
Now sixty-eight, Franken is short and sturdily built, with bristly gray hair, tortoiseshell glasses, and a wide, froglike mouth from which he tends to talk out of one corner. Despite his current isolation, Franken is recognized nearly everywhere he goes, and he often gets stopped on the street. “I can’t go anywhere without people reminding me of this, usually with some version of ‘You shouldn’t have resigned,’ ” Franken said. He appreciates the support, but such comments torment him about his departure from the Senate. He tends to respond curtly, “Yup.”
When I asked him if he truly regretted his decision to resign, he said, “Oh, yeah. Absolutely.” He wishes that he had appeared before a Senate Ethics Committee hearing, as he had requested, allowing him to marshal facts that countered the narrative aired in the press. It is extremely rare for a senator to resign under pressure. No senator has been expelled since the Civil War, and in modern times only three have resigned under the threat of expulsion: Harrison Williams, in 1982, Bob Packwood, in 1995, and John Ensign, in 2011. Williams resigned after he was convicted of bribery and conspiracy; Packwood faced numerous sexual-assault accusations; Ensign was accused of making illegal payoffs to hide an affair.
A remarkable number of Franken’s Senate colleagues have regrets about their own roles in his fall. Seven current and former U.S. senators who demanded Franken’s resignation in 2017 told me that they’d been wrong to do so. Such admissions are unusual in an institution whose members rarely concede mistakes. Patrick Leahy, the veteran Democrat from Vermont, said that his decision to seek Franken’s resignation without first getting all the facts was “one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made” in forty-five years in the Senate. Heidi Heitkamp, the former senator from North Dakota, told me, “If there’s one decision I’ve made that I would take back, it’s the decision to call for his resignation. It was made in the heat of the moment, without concern for exactly what this was.” Tammy Duckworth, the junior Democratic senator from Illinois, told me that the Senate Ethics Committee “should have been allowed to move forward.” She said it was important to acknowledge the trauma that Franken’s accusers had gone through, but added, “We needed more facts. That due process didn’t happen is not good for our democracy.” Angus King, the Independent senator from Maine, said that he’d “regretted it ever since” he joined the call for Franken’s resignation. “There’s no excuse for sexual assault,” he said. “But Al deserved more of a process. I don’t denigrate the allegations, but this was the political equivalent of capital punishment.” Senator Jeff Merkley, of Oregon, told me, “This was a rush to judgment that didn’t allow any of us to fully explore what this was about. I took the judgment of my peers rather than independently examining the circumstances. In my heart, I’ve not felt right about it.” Bill Nelson, the former Florida senator, said, “I realized almost right away I’d made a mistake. I felt terrible. I should have stood up for due process to render what it’s supposed to—the truth.” Tom Udall, the senior Democratic senator from New Mexico, said, “I made a mistake. I started having second thoughts shortly after he stepped down. He had the right to be heard by an independent investigative body. I’ve heard from people around my state, and around the country, saying that they think he got railroaded. It doesn’t seem fair. I’m a lawyer. I really believe in due process.”
Former Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who watched the drama unfold from retirement, told me, “It’s terrible what happened to him. It was unfair. It took the legs out from under him. He was a very fine senator.” Many voters have also protested Franken’s decision. A Change.org petition urging Franken to retract his resignation received more than seventy-five thousand signatures. It declared, “There’s a difference between abuse and a mistake.”
In recent months, Franken has witnessed a prominent Democrat survive a similar political storm: this past spring, several women accused Joe Biden of unwanted kissing or touching at rallies and other political events. Biden apologized but never stopped campaigning for President. Unlike Biden, though, Franken was caught on camera. His undoing began with a photograph, which was released by a conservative talk-radio station on November 16, 2017. The image was taken in 2006, the year before Franken first ran for the Senate. At the time, he was on his seventh U.S.O. tour, entertaining American troops abroad as a comedian. The photograph captures him on a military plane, mugging for the camera as he performs a lecherous pantomime. He’s leering at the lens with his hands outstretched toward the breasts of his U.S.O. co-star, Tweeden, who is wearing a military helmet, fatigues, and a bulletproof vest. Franken’s hands appear to be practically touching her chest, and Tweeden looks to be asleep—and therefore not consenting to the joke.
Some people saw the photograph as a mere gag. Emily Yoffe, writing in The Atlantic, called the image “an inoffensive burlesque of a burlesque.” Yoffe, who has argued that men accused of sexual misdeeds deserve more due process, noted that Franken and Tweeden were “on a U.S.O. tour, which is a raunchy vaudeville throwback.” But the minute the photograph surfaced it went viral, and condemnation came from both conservatives and liberals. Breitbart, which loathed Franken’s politics, elicited gleeful comments from readers after it posted a piece from Slate, a liberal publication, headlined “Franken Should Resign Immediately.” The article argued that “there is no rational reason to doubt the truth of Tweeden’s accusations, no legitimate defense of Franken’s actions, and no ambiguity.” Sean Hannity, Fox News’ biggest star, also quoted the Slate piece, and on his show he interviewed Tweeden—a friend who had been a guest on his show dozens of times, often as a booster of the military. The media uproar was further heightened by an impassioned personal statement released by Tweeden’s Los Angeles radio station, KABC-AM, which provided her account of the story behind the photograph.
The damning image, Tweeden said, was the culmination of a campaign of sexual harassment that Franken had subjected her to after she had spurned his advances at the start of the U.S.O. tour, which lasted two weeks. It was Tweeden’s ninth U.S.O. gig, but her first with Franken. She alleged that he had written a skit with a kissing scene expressly for her, telling her, “When I found out you were coming on this tour, I wrote a little scene, if you will, with you in it.” She said that when she saw the script, which required them to kiss, “I suspected what he was after, but I figured I could turn my head at the last minute.”
Part 2 in next post
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Post by Deleted on Jul 23, 2019 3:37:27 GMT
Part 2 of the Al Franken story in the New Yorker...
”According to Tweeden’s statement, after they landed in Kuwait, the tour’s first stop, Franken told her, “We need to practice the kissing scene.” At first, she said, she “blew him off,” but “he persisted” so aggressively that it “reminded me of, like, the Harvey Weinstein tape”; Weinstein, she noted, had been taped “badgering” a resistant sexual victim. Just five weeks before Tweeden released her statement, the Times and this magazine had published allegations accusing Weinstein of serial sexual harassment, assault, and rape. The resulting outcry had emboldened women across the country to speak out about their own victimization; online, the hashtag #MeToo emerged. Tweeden cited these developments as having inspired her to come forward about Franken.
She wrote that, in 2006, she’d initially told Franken that it was unnecessary to rehearse, saying, “Al, this isn’t ‘S.N.L.’ ” She relented only so that he would “shut up.” The rehearsal occurred, she said, in a makeshift gym behind the stage. When they got to the kiss, Tweeden said, “he just put his hand on the back of my head, and he mashed his face against it.” She went on, “He stuck his tongue in my mouth so fast—and all that I could remember is that his lips were really wet, and it was slimy.” Privately, she began thinking of Franken as Fish Lips. She emphasized that she’d fought back: “I pushed him off with my hands, and I remember, I almost punched him.” Afterward, her hands instinctively clenched “into fists” whenever she saw him. She said that she had warned him that “if he ever did that to me again I wouldn’t be so nice about it the next time.” Tweeden said, “I was violated.”
Tweeden wrote that she “never had a voluntary conversation with Franken again.” When they performed the kiss onstage, she said, “trust me, he didn’t get close to my face.” She said that, because she had felt powerless, she hadn’t reported the assault to the military authorities. She claimed that she had “told a few others on the tour what Franken had done and how I felt,” but her prepared statement provided no names of corroborators. Franken, she said, “repaid me with petty insults” for having rejected him. He doodled “devil horns” on a head shot of hers. As a final act of reprisal, Franken demeaned her with the photograph of her sleeping. Tweeden remembered clearly that the photograph had been taken on the final day of the tour, Christmas Eve, as “we began the 36-hour trip home to L.A.” and “our C-17 cargo plane took off from Afghanistan.”
Tweeden concluded her statement by declaring, “Senator Franken, you wrote the script. But there’s nothing funny about sexual assault.” She continued, “You knew exactly what you were doing. You forcibly kissed me without my consent, grabbed my breasts while I was sleeping, and had someone take a photo of you doing it, knowing I would see it later, and be ashamed.”
She said that it wasn’t until she returned home and received a CD of images from the tour photographer that she saw the image of Franken pretending to grope her while she slept. “I felt violated all over again,” she said. At that moment, she had wanted to “shout my story to the world,” but hadn’t felt secure enough. Now, she said, she wanted “other victims of sexual assault to be able to speak out,” adding, “I want the days of silence to be over.”
Tweeden went public the Thursday before Thanksgiving, while Congress was wrapping up for the holiday break. At 9:54 a.m., Ed Shelleby, Franken’s deputy chief of staff, was at his desk in the Capitol when he noticed that a strange e-mail had arrived in an office account. The subject line was “Comment Requested,” and the sender was Nathan Baker, the news director at KABC-AM. The e-mail said that the station’s “morning drive anchor,” Leeann Tweeden, had written “a piece about experiences she had with Senator Franken while on a U.S.O. tour.” It noted, “If you have any reaction or comment from the Senator we would of course include it in our coverage.” There was a link to Tweeden’s statement and to the photograph, both of which had already been posted on the Internet. Shelleby called Franken’s chief of staff, Jeff Lomonaco. “We gotta get Al!” Shelleby said. “We’ve got this thing! ”
Franken was in a meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Lomonaco ran through a series of corridors and pulled him out.
What’s going on?” Franken said.
“It’s important,” Lomonaco said.
“But I want to vote,” Franken protested.
Lomonaco showed him the KABC-AM story and the photograph.
Oh, my God, my life! My life! was Franken’s first thought. He remembered the picture being taken, but he was stunned by Tweeden’s account. He had thought that they were on friendly terms. In 2009, she had attended a U.S.O. awards ceremony, in Washington, honoring him; photographs of the event capture them laughing together. He had no memory of her having balked at the kissing scene, and knew that he hadn’t written it for her. He had written it in 2003, and performed it on other U.S.O. tours before meeting her.
In Franken’s 2017 book, “Al Franken, Giant of the Senate,” which was published before Tweeden’s accusations, he writes of being preoccupied during the 2006 tour with deciding whether to run for public office. Others on the trip confirm this, recalling that he spent much of his downtime studying policy positions with an assistant, Andy Barr. Records show that Franken had already set up a political-action committee, and he announced his Senate bid soon after returning home.
Tweeden may well have felt harassed, and even violated, by Franken, but he insisted to me that her version of events is “just not true.” He confirmed that he had rehearsed the skit with her, noting, “You always rehearse.” The script, he recalled, called for a man to “surprise” a woman with a kiss, in a “sort of sudden” way, and though Tweeden had read the script, it’s possible that in the moment he startled her. Tweeden wasn’t an actress—before going into broadcasting, she had been a Frederick’s of Hollywood model—so she may have been unfamiliar with rehearsals. But Franken said, of Tweeden, “I don’t remember her being taken aback.” He adamantly denied having stuck his tongue in her mouth.
Franken’s longtime fund-raiser, A. J. Goodman, a former criminal-defense lawyer, told me that it was “easy to see how it could have grossed Tweeden out” to be kissed by Franken. At the time, Franken was fifty-five, and his clothes tended toward mom jeans and garish windbreakers. “He was like your uncle Morty,” Goodman recalled. “He wasn’t Cary Grant. But tongue down the throat? No. I’ve done hundreds of events with this guy. I’ve been on the road and on his book tours with him.” She said that Franken was “five hundred per cent devoted” to Bryson, his wife, whom he met during his freshman year at Harvard. “He can be a jerk, but he’s all about his family,” Goodman said. (Franken and Bryson have a daughter, a son, and four grandchildren.)
In Hollywood, Franken’s reputation had been far from wild. According to Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad’s book, “Saturday Night,” when Franken worked on “S.N.L.” he was seen as a stickler and a “self-appointed hallway monitor” figure. James Downey, who spent decades writing for the show, told me, of Franken, “He’s lots of things, some delightful, some annoying. He can be very aggressive interpersonally. He can say mean things, or use other people as props. He can seem more confident that the audience will find him adorable than he ought to. His estimate of his charm can be overconfident. But I’ve known him for forty-seven years and he’s the very last person who would be a sexual harasser.”
As Franken absorbed Tweeden’s statement and the photograph, he realized that, given the recent rise of the #MeToo movement, “anyone who wanted to read the photo as confirming what I was accused of could do that. I understood that right away. And boom—I was instantly in shock.”
Franken wasn’t the only one. Two actresses who had performed the same role as Tweeden on earlier U.S.O. tours with him, Karri Turner and Traylor Portman, immediately recognized that Tweeden was wrong to say that Franken had written the part in order to kiss her. Both women told me that they fully supported the #MeToo movement and could speak only to their own experiences. But Turner confirmed that she had acted in the same skit in 2003. Video footage of her performing it, which can be seen online, shows that the script was altered for Tweeden only by cutting references to “JAG,” a TV show in which Turner starred. In a statement, Turner said that “no woman should have to deal with any type of harassment, ever!” But on her two U.S.O. tours with Franken, she said, “there was nothing inappropriate toward me,” adding, “I only experienced a person that was eager to make soldiers laugh.”
Traylor Portman, who used her maiden name, Traylor Howard, while appearing on the TV show “Monk,” said that she also played the role in Franken’s skit, in 2005. “It’s not accurate for her to say it was written for her,” Portman told me. She had rehearsed the kissing scene with Franken, and hadn’t objected, because “you’re going to practice—that’s what professionals do.” She said that the scene involved “what looked like kissing but wasn’t,” adding, “It’s just for comic relief. I guess you could turn your head, but whatever—it’s nothing. I was in sitcoms. You just play it for laughs.”
Portman went on, “I get the whole #MeToo thing, and a whole lot of horrible stuff has happened, and it needed to change. But that’s not what was happening here.” She added, “Franken is a good man. I remember him talking so sweetly and lovingly about his wife.” Portman recalled, “There were Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders there, and he didn’t pay any special attention to them. He had a good rapport with everyone. He was hilarious. He was just trying to get them to laugh. It was about entertaining people who were risking their lives.” Asked about the allegation that Franken drew “devil horns” on Tweeden’s head shot, Portman said, “It doesn’t sound out of line for him—but please. To get offended by that sounds ridiculous, like fourth grade.”
Part 3 in the next post..
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Post by Deleted on Jul 23, 2019 3:45:52 GMT
Part 3...
”Franken’s claim that he wrote the skit years before Tweeden’s performance was also borne out by interviews that he did on NPR in 2004 and 2005. He described the skit as a throwback to the frankly lascivious U.S.O. sketches that Bob Hope used to perform with Raquel Welch. The conceit of Franken’s skit is that a nerdy male officer has written a part for a beautiful younger woman, and she has to audition for it. As she reads aloud from the script, she grows suspicious but keeps going, eventually reaching the line “Now kiss me!” To her disgust, the officer lustily does so. The stage directions in the 2006 version of the script say “Al grabs Leeann and plants a kiss on her. Leeann fights him off.” She then reproaches him, saying, “You just wrote this so that you could kiss me!”
Yeah,” Franken’s character admits. (In videos of the skit, the audience bursts out laughing.)
The young woman protests, “If I were going to kiss anybody here, it would be one of these brave men—or women.” Pointing to the audience, she calls a random soldier onstage, who begins reading from the script. When the soldier says, “Now kiss me!,” the stage directions call for “a long deep kiss” from Tweeden. In video footage, she seems to be gamely playing the part, setting off hoots and hollers from the crowd.
It was “surreal,” Franken told me, that Tweeden had publicly said of him, “I think he wrote that sketch just to kiss me”; her language was essentially borrowed from his skit. Moreover, her fighting him off and expressing anger had also been scripted by him. But it seemed impossible to relay such nuances to the press. Explaining that her accusations appropriated jokes from comic routines that they’d performed together would be as dizzying as describing an Escher drawing.
The U.S.O. skit didn’t end with the kissing scene. In a coda, Franken appears as a doctor who has just had “a cancellation” in his appointment schedule. Tweeden’s character is informed that “a woman your age should have a complete breast examination every year”; Franken then approaches her with his arms outstretched and his hands aimed at her chest. The script calls for Tweeden’s character to protest, “Al! At ease!” Franken, with a dirty-old-man nod to the audience, replies, “I’m afraid it’s a little too late for that.”
The joke was not memorable, yet when Shajn Cabrera saw the 2006 photograph of Franken on the plane, approaching Tweeden’s chest with his arms outstretched, he immediately recalled the “Dr. Franken” skit. Cabrera had been on the plane when the photograph was taken. At the time, he was a special assistant to the Sergeant Major of the Army, who hosts the U.S.O. tours. “I was the one who put the trip together,” Cabrera said. Looking at the photograph, he thought that “it was a hundred per cent in line with that skit when he does the breast exam.” The image, he said, “was not at all malicious.”
It’s understandable that Tweeden objected to Franken’s having reënacted the gag for a photograph while she was asleep. But when she wrote, “How dare anyone grab my breasts like this and think it’s funny?,” she omitted the fact that she had performed the “breast exam” bit multiple times. Metadata from the camera suggests that, contrary to Tweeden’s statement, the image was taken not on Christmas Eve, 2006, as a final taunt, but on December 21st. Photographs of a stage performance the previous day show Franken advancing toward Tweeden with splayed hands as she fends him off with a script, smiling in a winter coat and a Santa Claus hat.
Consenting to an act onstage is not the same as consenting to an act while sleeping. Rebecca Solnit, the writer known, among other things, for identifying the phenomenon of mansplaining, told me, “One of the key things about consent is it’s not blanket consent. The actor playing Romeo doesn’t get to kiss Juliet offstage because it’s in the script that they did onstage.”
Yet Bonnie Turner, a writer who worked with Franken on “S.N.L.,” said of Tweeden, “It showed bad faith, and was really wrongheaded of her, not to say that the skit was something they’d rehearsed and done over and over, night after night.” Cabrera told me that, when he saw the photograph, he felt sure that Franken had just been “goofing around” at the time.
Tweeden participated in other ribald U.S.O. skits. In one routine, she tells the audience that, as a morale booster, she has agreed to have sex with a soldier whose name Franken will pull from a box, explaining, “These are extraordinary circumstances.” The gag is that every name she picks is Franken’s, because he’s stuffed the raffle box. In a 2005 U.S.O. show with Robin Williams, Tweeden jumped into his arms, wrapped a leg around his waist, and spanked his bottom as he suggestively waved a plastic water bottle in front of his fly.
Given Tweeden’s repeated participation in such U.S.O. skits, Cabrera said that when he first heard about her allegations “it was shocking to me.” He noted that all the scripts had been approved by the Army, though he acknowledged that such humor might now be seen as inappropriate. He “never saw any animosity” between Franken and Tweeden, and noted, “No complaints were ever addressed to the Sergeant Major of the Army, and our job was to make sure everyone was happy.”
Though Tweeden has said that she felt too intimidated to complain to those in charge, she claims that she confided in several other people on the tour. But she declined to provide any names to me, or to be interviewed for this story. Two friends, who acted as intermediaries, said that she saw no gain in reopening the subject, which had exposed her to virulent online attacks.
I spoke with eight participants in the 2006 tour, including Julie Dintleman, the military escort who was assigned to Tweeden; none observed Tweeden being upset with Franken. “I don’t remember anything like that,” Dintleman said. Her assignment was to be almost continually at Tweeden’s side, except when the stars went to their quarters for “bed down.” Todd Tabb, a retired Air Force pilot who served as Franken’s military escort on an earlier U.S.O. tour, added that, ordinarily, “any incident would have been witnessed by a military officer with the ability to have someone arrested on the spot if there was an assault. Entertainers were treated carefully so that incidents did not occur. I was instructed to even go into the rest rooms, so I was never out of sight of the celebrity.” Though he wasn’t on the 2006 trip, he said, “I can’t imagine how someone wasn’t watching when they rehearsed.”
Jerry Amoury, who was then a trombone player in the Army band, was onstage during every show with Franken and Tweeden in 2006, and performed on two other U.S.O. tours with Franken. Amoury said, of Tweeden, “I’m not mitigating what she said, and if someone says something the ethical thing is to listen. But, based on my experience, it makes no sense.” As Amoury recalls it, Franken directed “no inappropriate energy” toward Tweeden, and he observed no tension between them. He said that Franken’s “humor could be blunt,” but, he added, “he was not a lecher, and didn’t have a wandering eye.” The photograph of Tweeden, he said, certainly “looked sexist out of context,” but “in context the whole thing was like being stuck on a smelly bus. Those planes are loud, there was a wrestler on board, and people were taking funny pictures. It was campy.”
In Tweeden’s telling, Franken “had someone take a photo” expressly to humiliate her. Doug McIntyre, a co-host and confidant of Tweeden’s at the radio station, who helped her prepare her public statement, told me, “She alleged that Franken got the Army photographer to take the picture, and put it on a disk, so her disk had this one extra picture. It was the caboose. She took it as the final ‘F.U.’ from Franken. The only person who got it was her.” He said that Tweeden had especially objected to this “bullying,” and that Franken’s pose in the photograph was no mere joke. “A comedian does jokes for an audience, but this was an audience of one,” he said.
This is incorrect. Many people on the trip also received CDs that included the photograph. Andy Barr, the Franken assistant, received the CD, which I have seen. He is a pack rat, and kept the original packaging. The mailer, postmarked January 9, 2007, is stamped “Official Business.” The return address is “Department of the Army, Office of the Chief of Public Affairs.” The disk’s label says “U.S.O.” and its plastic case includes a personal note from and contact information for Montigo White, an Army photographer on the trip, who wrote, “It was a pleasure to serve with you on the 2006 Tour.” White, now a command sergeant major in the Army’s Defense Information School, declined requests for comment. His wife, reached at their house, in Alexandria, Virginia, said, “I’m not confirming or denying that he took the picture.”
Franken recalls the incident that ended his career as lasting a split second. “I remember stepping on the plane, somebody saying, ‘Al, take a picture,’ and pointing to Leeann.” Pictures taken within a few minutes on the same camera roll show Franken doing other gags: in one, he’s delivering a mock speech; in another, he’s dancing with White, the Army photographer. It was near the end of what Franken called “a bawdy tour.” He said, “We were punchy. I was goofing around.” Even so, Franken admitted, the photograph of Tweeden could be seen as having crossed a line. “What’s wrong with the picture to me is that she’s asleep,” he said. “If you’re asleep, you’re not giving your consent.” When he saw the image that November morning, he said, “I genuinely, genuinely felt bad about that.”
Part 4 to follow...
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Post by Deleted on Jul 23, 2019 3:57:51 GMT
Part 4..
”Many people who worked in comedy with Franken defended his behavior more strongly than he did himself. Jane Curtin, who regards him as one of the few non-sexist men she worked with at “S.N.L.,” said, “They were doing a U.S.O. tour. They’re notoriously burlesque. The photo was funny because she’s wearing a flak jacket, and he’s looking straight at the camera and pretending he’s trying to fondle her breasts. But the humor is he can’t get to them—if a bullet can’t get them, Al can’t get them.” James Downey said, “Much of what Al does when goofing around involves adopting the persona of a douche bag. When I saw the photo, I knew exactly what he was doing. The joke was about him. He was doing ‘an asshole.’ ” Christine Zander, who wrote for “S.N.L.” between 1987 and 1993, said, “It was a mockery of someone acting in bad taste,” adding, “It’s so absurd she turned something that was written—these were trunk pieces, old sketches—into something improvised just for her.” Zander went on, “It’s tragic. All the women who know him from ‘S.N.L.’ and in New York and L.A.”—thirty-six in all—“signed a petition, but it wasn’t enough.” She added, “It makes you feel terrible and depressed, especially when there are people running the country who need to be charged.”
Franken’s friend Eli Attie, a former speechwriter for Al Gore who moved to Hollywood to write for “The West Wing” and other shows, told me, “Things he’s done as a comedian look very different through the prism of a senator.” He observed, “The comedy world is very different from politics. In writers’ rooms, they try to be loose. They say outrageous, unfiltered things. In politics, you try to censor yourself. You’re always fearful you’ll offend. You have to play error-free ball.”
A big part of Franken’s political problem was the way the story broke. KABC-AM released Tweeden’s material on its Web site, giving it the look of a proper news story. In reality, the station, which is owned by Cumulus Media, was a struggling conservative talk-radio station whose survival plan was to become the most pro-Trump station in Los Angeles. Three top staffers there had been meeting secretly for weeks, after hours, with Tweeden to prepare her statement, but it hadn’t been vetted with even the most cursory fact-checking. Nobody contacted Franken until after the story had been posted online. The station gave Franken less advance warning than it gave the Drudge Report, which it tipped off the previous day. After posting the story, Tweeden embarked on a media tour, starting with a live press conference and proceeding to interviews with CNN’s Jake Tapper (who had been alerted the previous day), Sean Hannity, and the cast of “The View.”
Lomonaco, Franken’s former chief of staff, said, “Typically, reporters will reach out to you for comment, so you have a heads-up, and some opportunity to put your best foot forward. But KABC posted it first and only then reached out to us. It was such an important framing moment. It had the veneer of a legitimate news story without having to abide by any of the conventions of journalism.”
McIntyre, Tweeden’s former co-host at the station, told me that he had “bluntly” lobbied to give Franken more time to respond but was overruled by Drew Hayes, the station’s operations director, and by Nathan Baker, the news director, both of whom feared that the story would leak. McIntyre and Baker confirmed to me that nobody fact-checked Tweeden’s account. They evidently didn’t ask for the names of the people on the U.S.O. tour whom Tweeden said she had confided in at the time; in fact, they made no effort to reach anyone who’d been on the trip. They didn’t check the date of the photograph, or look at online videos showing other actresses performing the same role on earlier tours. They didn’t realize that although Tweeden claimed she never let Franken get near her face after the first rehearsal, there were numerous images of her performing the kiss scene with Franken afterward. Nor did they review the script or the photographs showing Tweeden laughing onstage as Franken struck the same “breast exam” pose.
“The photograph speaks for itself,” McIntyre told me. “That carried the day.” He explained that, “as a local radio station, we didn’t have the investigative tools at hand” to vet her account. But he had worked closely with Tweeden for nine months, and had confidence in “the integrity of her character.” She was “a trusted employee who had a photograph,” he said, adding, “If we didn’t trust her, she couldn’t have been our news anchor.”
McIntyre, who describes himself as a Never Trump Republican, has since left the station, which, he said, has “taken a more pro-Trump position since I left, as a business decision.” Hayes, the operations director, declined to be interviewed. In 2011, under his management, Trump appeared on the air at least once; the station also provided an early platform to Steve Bannon. In 2016, according to a well-informed source, Hayes began chastising on-air talent if they criticized Trump. Hayes’s Twitter account shows that in 2016 the family Christmas tree was decorated with a crocheted Trump ornament, and that in 2018 his son had an internship with the Republican National Committee. Baker, who describes himself as politically independent, has since left KABC-AM to work as a senior strategist at Madison McQueen, a conservative media company; among other things, he has helped create ads for Senator Ted Cruz. While at KABC-AM, he was also a consulting producer with PJ Media, a hyper-partisan conservative-opinion platform. He told me that, as KABC-AM’s news director, he had felt obliged to contact Franken’s office; at the same time, he “didn’t want to step on Leeann telling a story that was very difficult for her.”
In interviews, Tweeden has described her decision to speak out as torturous. She has said that she “wanted to say something” earlier, but people she knew “said, ‘Oh, my God, you will get annihilated and never work in this town again,’ and I was afraid.” At the time of the 2006 U.S.O. tour, Tweeden was transitioning from modelling to broadcasting, and she was an on-air correspondent for Fox Sports’ “Best Damn Sports Show Period.” She went on to host a late-night poker show on NBC.
During those years, Tweeden shared the damning photograph of Franken with a few good friends, including Hannity. On Super Bowl Sunday in 2005, Hannity introduced her to his audience as a “right-winger” who was there to discuss the game. But he soon asked her how she, as a conservative, could pose “halfway naked on the covers” of magazines such as Playboy and FHM. “I do it with the troops in mind,” she said, and described how much she enjoyed signing such photographs for soldiers while doing U.S.O. tours. “I want to be this generation’s Raquel Welch,” she said. By the time of the 2006 U.S.O. trip, Tweeden had begun referring to Hannity as a friend.
According to McIntyre, Hannity wanted to use the photograph in 2007, when it would have derailed Franken’s first Senate bid. But he deferred to Tweeden, who feared that, because she had been a lingerie model, her credibility would be attacked. “To Sean Hannity’s credit, he never said a word about it,” McIntyre told me. (Hannity, through a spokesperson, praised Tweeden as “patriotic” and called Franken “literally insane.”) McIntyre emphasized that Tweeden and KABC-AM deliberately chose not to break the story with Hannity, or on Fox, because they didn’t want it to be tainted with charges of political bias.
There was a history of deep animosity between Fox News’ conservative hosts and Franken. Fox sued Franken over his 2003 best-seller, “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them,” which relentlessly disparages the network and its big star at the time, Bill O’Reilly. It includes a chapter mocking Hannity as, among other things, “an angry, Irish Ape-man.” Franken writes that, after having a greenroom shouting match with Hannity about Rush Limbaugh, in 1996, he “had never in my life hated a person more.” Fox dropped the suit, but O’Reilly reportedly threatened vengeance. When Andrea Mackris later sued O’Reilly for sexually harassing her while she was a producer at Fox News, she revealed that, in 2004, O’Reilly had told her, “If you cross Fox News Channel, it’s not just me, it’s Roger Ailes”—at the time the head of the network—“who will go after you. . . . Ailes operates behind the scenes, strategizes and makes things happen so that one day BAM! The person gets what’s coming to them but never sees it coming. Look at Al Franken, one day he’s going to get a knock on his door and life as he’s known it will change forever. That day will happen, trust me.” When Tweeden accused Franken, one of his wife’s first thoughts was of O’Reilly’s prediction.
Part 5 next..
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Deleted
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Oct 6, 2024 9:18:14 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Jul 23, 2019 4:05:44 GMT
Part 5... This is way longer than I thought. Here is the link for the entire story. Worth a read if you have the time. link |
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Post by nlwilkins on Jul 23, 2019 5:09:59 GMT
I read this earlier today and found it was not a simple case of sexual conduct. There were lies and more in the woman's tale. He really deserved better from his own party.
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cycworker
Pearl Clutcher
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Post by cycworker on Jul 23, 2019 5:23:50 GMT
He should never have resigned. And Gillibrand needs to drop out of the primary.
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Post by lucyg on Jul 23, 2019 6:28:26 GMT
I would much rather have Al Franken in the Senate or running for President than Kirstin Gillibrand.
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smginaz Suzy
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Je suis desole.
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Jun 26, 2014 17:27:30 GMT
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Post by smginaz Suzy on Jul 23, 2019 6:39:35 GMT
Yeah, I find it really frustrating with any allegation when an investigation is not done before moving to conclusions. But it is what I do for a living, so that is my bias. My team sees all the time how things that seem very clear cut can morph into something totally different once interviews are conducted and actual evidence is gathered. Sometimes the universe really wants to rush to judgment.
I understand that we need to believe victims, and I still think that can be balanced with gathering and evaluating facts and assessing credibility.
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Post by mollycoddle on Jul 23, 2019 8:59:24 GMT
An investigation should have been done. Period.
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Post by mollycoddle on Jul 23, 2019 9:16:59 GMT
This was in the WaPo comment section of an article by Molly Roberts-which completely mischaracterizes Mayer’s article. This comment is spot on:
“
Rob_
1 hour ago
The Alabama senatorial runoff election was coming up in just a few days. The Democrats had made a big deal about Roy Moore dating young women twenty or more years before. The Al Franken revelations threatened to undermine that attack on Moore. Franken would be replaced by another Democrat, whereas the Alabama senate race was an opportunity to pick up a seat. So bye-bye Al. He was sacrificed for the greater good of an additional senate seat. Politics ain't beanbag.”
And Schumer basically refused Franken an investigation. Shameful.
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Sarah*H
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Post by Sarah*H on Jul 23, 2019 12:12:48 GMT
Just when I thought I couldn't dislike Kirsten Gillibrand more, she used this article to whine about the double standards she faces because she's a woman, to reiterate that she doesn't regret a thing and to insist for the umpteenth time that she bears no responsibility for his resignation. I really, really, really hope I never have to vote for her because it would be the worst vote I have ever had to cast.
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Post by Merge on Jul 23, 2019 12:33:12 GMT
Yep, just another case of Democrats feeding their own to the wolves, while Republicans double down on their support of actual sexual predators in their ranks.
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ellen
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Post by ellen on Jul 23, 2019 12:40:58 GMT
Ugh, so frustrating. At the time it felt so rushed and unfair - and it was. I'm thankful that he was replaced by someone it is easy to support. She was easily elected in November. She has to run again in 2020 and she'll win. I wish he was still my Senator and I think most MN Democrats feel the same even though we are happy with Tina Smith.
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Post by mollycoddle on Jul 23, 2019 13:17:34 GMT
Maybe it’s just my twitter feed, but I am noticing the Franken’s harshest critics seem to be very young. Has anyone else noticed this?
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peppermintpatty
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Refupea #1345
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Post by peppermintpatty on Jul 23, 2019 13:35:01 GMT
Don't get me started on the whole MeToo movement! I have always stated that you have to hear BOTH sides of the story. How many times have we come to find out that the accuser is lying simply because they may have been rejected or something else? I'm not saying it isn't without merit but the simple fact that peoples LIVES are being ruined because everyone jumps to conclusions WITHOUT weighing the facts, is just wrong! His career is over (although I believe he could probably come back to politics) and some of those who jumped all over him are now saying "Whoops, sorry, I shouldn't have said or done that" is disgraceful.
I will admit I didn't read the entire thing but it just gets my blood boiling. I never thought he should have resigned. He left too quickly and it made him look completely guilty.
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lindas
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Post by lindas on Jul 23, 2019 13:50:34 GMT
I never liked Al Franken, wasn't a fan when he was o SNL but I think what his party did to him was disgusting. He was entitled to defend himself and he should have been given that chance. The court of public opinion should not be the determining factor in someone's guilt or innocence and that's what happened with Franken.
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Post by crazy4scraps on Jul 23, 2019 14:31:45 GMT
Ugh, so frustrating. At the time it felt so rushed and unfair - and it was. I'm thankful that he was replaced by someone it is easy to support. She was easily elected in November. She has to run again in 2020 and she'll win. I wish he was still my Senator and I think most MN Democrats feel the same even though we are happy with Tina Smith. This is how I feel too. He totally got railroaded. |
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Post by SockMonkey on Jul 23, 2019 14:35:31 GMT
So, I guess what's concerning to me is that there were lots of holes in the main accuser's story, but there were 7 other accusers. He resigned. I mean, ultimately he could've stood his ground, right? Man, sorry, but I don't want dudes like that in power. At all. Democrat or Republican. I'd like to offer a dissenting opinion to Jane Mayer's: www.vox.com/2019/7/22/20703617/al-franken-jane-mayer-resignationIf Franken would think about this clearly, he could be an important example both for men who have done some bad things in their life and for people interested in public service more broadly. Sexual harassment of women is a serious problem. It is serious enough that even “lesser” or “not so bad” versions of it are, in fact, bad.
In other contexts, this is not a matter of dispute. If you break someone’s leg for no reason, you don’t get to say, “Well, it’s not like I’m a serial killer,” and then go about your day, even though it is true that breaking legs is not as bad as murder. Establishing the precedent that you don’t need to be history’s greatest monster to still have done something wrong that requires atonement is important. |
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Post by PeachStatePea on Jul 23, 2019 14:38:34 GMT
Not a fan of Franken but I think what hurt him the most was that photo of him pretending to grab the breasts of that sleeping woman. It was just horrible. If that hadn't come out I think he could've weathered the storm and stayed in the Senate.
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Post by SockMonkey on Jul 23, 2019 14:44:16 GMT
Not a fan of Franken but I think what hurt him the most was that photo of him pretending to grab the breasts of that sleeping woman. It was just horrible. If that hadn't come out I think he could've weathered the storm and stayed in the Senate. And, he did that. Now Tina Smith is in the Senate, is perfectly capable and has not sexually harassed anyone. What have we lost here? What do we gain by rehashing this situation in which a man did something shitty? Is it that it wasn't quite shitty enough? What's enough? I don't know. This feels messy and gross. |
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Post by papercrafteradvocate on Jul 23, 2019 14:50:57 GMT
It appears that her statement of being “assaulted” was not accurate, from what I’m reading he didn’t lay hands on her, nor did the skit happen the way she described.
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Post by papercrafteradvocate on Jul 23, 2019 14:53:36 GMT
Not a fan of Franken but I think what hurt him the most was that photo of him pretending to grab the breasts of that sleeping woman. It was just horrible. If that hadn't come out I think he could've weathered the storm and stayed in the Senate. Goes to show that actions have consequences... for some that is. It’s a shame that all politicians/elected or appointed officials are not held to the same standards or consequences. |
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Post by SockMonkey on Jul 23, 2019 15:11:36 GMT
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Post by mollycoddle on Jul 23, 2019 15:17:22 GMT
So, I guess what's concerning to me is that there were lots of holes in the main accuser's story, but there were 7 other accusers. He resigned. I mean, ultimately he could've stood his ground, right? Man, sorry, but I don't want dudes like that in power. At all. Democrat or Republican. I'd like to offer a dissenting opinion to Jane Mayer's: www.vox.com/2019/7/22/20703617/al-franken-jane-mayer-resignationIf Franken would think about this clearly, he could be an important example both for men who have done some bad things in their life and for people interested in public service more broadly. Sexual harassment of women is a serious problem. It is serious enough that even “lesser” or “not so bad” versions of it are, in fact, bad.
In other contexts, this is not a matter of dispute. If you break someone’s leg for no reason, you don’t get to say, “Well, it’s not like I’m a serial killer,” and then go about your day, even though it is true that breaking legs is not as bad as murder. Establishing the precedent that you don’t need to be history’s greatest monster to still have done something wrong that requires atonement is important.I got into an argument on twitter about this. It was badly done, IMO. He was entitled to a hearing, and should not have been pressured to resign. No matter what the outcome, it should have been investigated. Schumer bears a lot of the blame for this. |
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Post by lucyg on Jul 23, 2019 15:28:47 GMT
I think there’s a crap ton of difference between rape, ongoing abuse, threatening women’s careers, chasing after underage girls, and many of the other big-name cases we’ve seen in the news or been subjected to ourselves ... and a professional entertainer doing some ass-grabbing in passing. Especially during an age when basically no one thought twice about it.
Conflating all sexual transgressions, major and minor, as if they are all equal does not help society in general take the cause more seriously.
Tina Smith is perfectly fine but she’s no Al Franken.
Al Franken got railroaded and Kirsten Gillibrand is still proud of the fact she was the ringleader of that particular circus.
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Post by SockMonkey on Jul 23, 2019 15:32:26 GMT
So, I guess what's concerning to me is that there were lots of holes in the main accuser's story, but there were 7 other accusers. He resigned. I mean, ultimately he could've stood his ground, right? Man, sorry, but I don't want dudes like that in power. At all. Democrat or Republican. I'd like to offer a dissenting opinion to Jane Mayer's: www.vox.com/2019/7/22/20703617/al-franken-jane-mayer-resignationIf Franken would think about this clearly, he could be an important example both for men who have done some bad things in their life and for people interested in public service more broadly. Sexual harassment of women is a serious problem. It is serious enough that even “lesser” or “not so bad” versions of it are, in fact, bad.
In other contexts, this is not a matter of dispute. If you break someone’s leg for no reason, you don’t get to say, “Well, it’s not like I’m a serial killer,” and then go about your day, even though it is true that breaking legs is not as bad as murder. Establishing the precedent that you don’t need to be history’s greatest monster to still have done something wrong that requires atonement is important.I got into an argument on twitter about this. It was badly done, IMO. He was entitled to a hearing, and should not have been pressured to resign. No matter what the outcome, it should have been investigated. Schumer bears a lot of the blame for this. But like, entitled to a hearing and needing a hearing to come to the conclusion that you did shitty things are two different things. This wealthy man landed on his feet, and these were the consequences of his actions. Do you think that a hearing would have been good for the state? Good for his family? Do you think he was innocent of all 8 complaints? Do you think that he knew he probably acted inappropriately and thus felt it would be better to just step down? Maybe an investigation was warranted, but ultimately Al Franken made the choice to step down. slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/07/al-franken-jane-mayer-new-yorker-leeann-tweeden.html |
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lizacreates
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Post by lizacreates on Jul 23, 2019 15:35:16 GMT
I disagree with most who’ve posted so far.
I’m surprised this piece was written by Mayer. She’s usually more objective than this. She seemed to have forgotten that Menz, Dupuy, Kemplin, a congressional aide and 2 (or 3?) others had revealed what happened to them, albeit some of them wanted to preserve their privacy by remaining anonymous. And in most of these, it’s been established by confidantes and family members that the claims were credible. Grabbing a woman’s butt during a photo op, forcibly kissing another, groping another’s breast (not just pretending, but actually groping) were just some of the allegations. The focus of the article was on one woman. There were eight accusers in total.
Franken was not the victim, and it’s my opinion that the Dems would not have had the moral authority they had during the Kavanaugh hearing had Franken stayed on. Try and imagine Franken questioning Kavanaugh on Ford’s allegation while he himself was being accused by eight women. If he, indeed, wanted a hearing by the ethics committee (which would have involved an investigation), he could very well have told Schumer to back off and wait for the outcome. He was not railroaded. He caved to pressure, and that was his decision, not the decision of anyone else around him.
I’m with Gillibrand on this specific issue and will even go as far as to say that if I was in her position, I would have done the same thing: "It's his decision and his alone whether to wait out his ethics committee hearing, whether to wait for his next election. The decision I made was whether or not to carry his water and stay silent. And given 8 allegations, two since he was Senator, and the eighth one being a congressional staffer, I couldn't stay silent." She may very well be held directly responsible for the ousting of a popular senator and it may even be a factor in her unpopularity as a candidate, but I stand firmly on her side on this.
Were the allegations against Franken as grave as those leveled against Trump or Kavanaugh? Probably not all of them, but sexual harassment in any form IS a problem regardless of how varied the forms are, and something that should no longer be tolerated and defended. I refuse to be someone who condemns Republicans for their misconduct against women and at the same time be an apologist for Democrats in theirs. This article, in my opinion, is one of those things that happen to women who do speak out: You’ll get a hit piece in one of the more respected publications. Then we wonder why more women do not speak out.
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Deleted
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Oct 6, 2024 9:18:14 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Jul 23, 2019 15:45:10 GMT
I think there’s a crap ton of difference between rape, ongoing abuse, threatening women’s careers, chasing after underage girls, and many of the other big-name cases we’ve seen in the news or been subjected to ourselves ... and a professional entertainer doing some ass-grabbing in passing. Especially during an age when basically no one thought twice about it. Conflating all sexual transgressions, major and minor, as if they are all equal does not help society in general take the cause more seriously. Tina Smith is perfectly fine but she’s no Al Franken. Al Franken got railroaded and Kirsten Gillibrand is still proud of the fact she was the ringleader of that particular circus.  I’m always happy when I see someone saying something so much better than I would. |
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Post by SockMonkey on Jul 23, 2019 16:26:34 GMT
I disagree with most who’ve posted so far. I’m surprised this piece was written by Mayer. She’s usually more objective than this. She seemed to have forgotten that Menz, Dupuy, Kemplin, a congressional aide and 2 (or 3?) others had revealed what happened to them, albeit some of them wanted to preserve their privacy by remaining anonymous. And in most of these, it’s been established by confidantes and family members that the claims were credible. Grabbing a woman’s butt during a photo op, forcibly kissing another, groping another’s breast (not just pretending, but actually groping) were just some of the allegations. The focus of the article was on one woman. There were eight accusers in total. Franken was not the victim, and it’s my opinion that the Dems would not have had the moral authority they had during the Kavanaugh hearing had Franken stayed on. Try and imagine Franken questioning Kavanaugh on Ford’s allegation while he himself was being accused by eight women. If he, indeed, wanted a hearing by the ethics committee (which would have involved an investigation), he could very well have told Schumer to back off and wait for the outcome. He was not railroaded. He caved to pressure, and that was his decision, not the decision of anyone else around him. I’m with Gillibrand on this specific issue and will even go as far as to say that if I was in her position, I would have done the same thing: "It's his decision and his alone whether to wait out his ethics committee hearing, whether to wait for his next election. The decision I made was whether or not to carry his water and stay silent. And given 8 allegations, two since he was Senator, and the eighth one being a congressional staffer, I couldn't stay silent." She may very well be held directly responsible for the ousting of a popular senator and it may even be a factor in her unpopularity as a candidate, but I stand firmly on her side on this. Were the allegations against Franken as grave as those leveled against Trump or Kavanaugh? Probably not all of them, but sexual harassment in any form IS a problem regardless of how varied the forms are, and something that should no longer be tolerated and defended. I refuse to be someone who condemns Republicans for their misconduct against women and at the same time be an apologist for Democrats in theirs. This article, in my opinion, is one of those things that happen to women who do speak out: You’ll get a hit piece in one of the more respected publications. Then we wonder why more women do not speak out. I agree with you. I also think it's gross that people are mad at Kirsten Gillibrand when 35 Senators did the same thing. She was just the bravest first. And, I agree that Mayer's article minimized the inappropriate actions of men. |
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