Shocked, I Tell You, Shocked. When is Truth a Requirement?
OK, I’m breaking the silence on this one. I believe the behavior of many men, including Roy Moore, Donald Trump, Kevin Spacey, Bill Clinton, Harvey Weinstein, and thousands more to be appalling. To expose this behavior is necessary to cure this ill in our society. #metoo is a strong message to all Americans, especially men and the boys that come behind them. However, a social contract comes with that solemn responsibility. Women who accuse men of harassment and abuse MUST be truthful. We must believe what women say is their experience. The other side of that contract is that if a women accuses a man of such abhorrent behavior, it must be the true.
Which brings us to Leeann Tweeden, who, this week in an emotional nationally televised statement and followup interviews accused Senator Al Franken of sexual harassment by forcing himself upon her and kissing her. A photo was then released of Franken supposedly groping her. Then the truth came out:
https://youtu.be/rJidGI-NMd0
Tweeden is well known for horsing around with men, sexual innuendo, and semi-nude modeling as well as appearing in a number of sexually charged scenes with men. She’s played grab ass with men on and off stage, and rubbed all over them. Her shock at being kissed by Al Franken in a skit rehearsal where they were rehearsing…wait for it…a kiss, rings pretty hollow.
She regularly appears on right wing media, and Roger Stone, one of Trump’s henchmen and all around dirtbag, spoke of the attack against Franken hours before it became public. Ray Charles, were he alive, could see the coordinated attack on Franken to damage a Democrat and distract from the actual predators, Roy Moore, Donald Trump and others now being revealed.
These issues are serious; deadly serious. Since the beginning of time men have abused and forced themselves on women. They’ve been disrespectful and even criminal. To expel this behavior from our society, we must believe women and teach young men to respect them. The requirement of this, though, is that the accusations against men must be true. If they’re not true, like Tweeden’s fabricated attack against Franken, cheapens and politicizes a critical issue. When this happens, everyone, men and women, must call this out for what it is. Otherwise, we make no progress. We cure no ill.
Just one more instance of traitor trump’s sleazy sycophants smearing an innocent man to deflect away from him and Moore’s behavior. That Sen Franken said if his behavior was inappropriate he apologized. The key word is “if”. It looks as if the accusation is not justified.
1The false allegation will make it harder for women who have been abused to be believed. I sure hope Roger Stone made it worth her while to betray abused women.
2This is just sad. Truly, and I’ve loved Al and have for a long time.
But this…
The only truth that came out is that The Boss is in deep denial and frankly, a hypocrite.
3Al Franken has, thus far, one “accuser” and he has stated he recalls the incident differently than Tweeden recalls it. The picture is unpleasant and is not defensible.
He has apologized and Tweeden has accepted the apology. While the Senate will likely do an ethics investigation, no criminal charges seem imminent.
Tweeden’s sexual conduct with others is not germane to this incident, unless slut-shaming is the purpose.
By comparison Roy Moore has nine accusers who tell remarkably similar tales of his activities and his verbal statements of his sense of entitlement and immunity.
The demonic entity known as Donald Drumpf made an extemporaneous statement on video in 2005 confessing to multiple sexual assaults against victims unknown and threatening sexual assault on actress Arianne Zucker.
IMHO Franken’s charge is not comparable to Drumpf’s or Moore’s almost frequent flyer abuser status.
4Addendum
The image to which I referred above is the one in which Tweeden is asleep on a military aircraft and Franken is lurking above her and is aiming his hands as if to grab her boobs. The facial expression is that of a pervert. The entirety of the image is unpleasant.
5Thank you! Thank you for speaking TRUTH!
The WHOLE picture; context, context, context — its critical.
Franken has the high ground in this, imho…head and shoulders higher. beth
6Unfortunately, Franken still acted in a way that, verifiably, puts him in the position of groper/aggressor. The gray shade may be more BS colored, but he still did this to himself…
7I love my Senator Al, as do most Minnesotans. His approval rating is 58%. Ms. Tweeden accepted his apology for the incident in the photograph and Al was right to apologize. He stated tonight that he will not resign and I’m glad. He’s a very good and ethical senator who did a very stupid thing and reacted like an adult when called on it.
As for Ms. Tweeden, as Micr said, what she’s done before or after the incident in the photo is irrelevant. What a woman is wearing or doing at the time is also irrelevant. No means No. Period.
8My first reaction when I read/saw this was to put it on my Facebook page. After reading some of the above comments, I thought about it some more and decided to remove it. Hard to know where this will go, but I don’t need to add to it. I too like Al Franken, but he behaved stupidly and knows it. That’s as far as I care to go right now.
9Micr and Old Fart–
Yes, I agree that what Franken did was stoopid, but he’s not the first twentysomething or thirtysomething I’ve ever heard of who did something stupid. Would you like to be punished, severely and retroactively, for stuff you “got away with” when you were young?
Yes, Franken did what he did much more publicly than you did, but as I’ve said here before, he was a practicing comedian at the time, doing stupid stuff because a lot of people were paying him to do stuff that, at the time, was considered pretty normal fare for comedians. Doesn’t make it right, does make it different from, say, Moore, who was supposed to be a practicing judge–not at all the same.
A sort of analogy that comes to my mind is the commercials I used to see for Girls Gone Wild, which annoyed me because someone was paying girls to do things that are considered “indecent exposure” on this side of the pond. Yeah, I’ve heard that that guy has been stopped, but he’s not the one who was exposing himself. (Well, I suspect he was doing some of that, too, but that’s not the issue here.) If he’s in the pen for paying for the girls’ bad behavior, do the rest of us belong there for paying for the insensitive behavior of comedians?
(Yes, I sort of put Louis CK in that same basket–not that what he was doing was more or less okay because he was a comedian but that he was young and stoopid and has apparently grown up some since then.)
I don’t hate George Washington or Thomas Jefferson for owning slaves. (Yeah, Jefferson shouldn’t have been sleeping with Sally, but that’s a different problem.) They were doing what was [mostly] considered socially acceptable at the time, and we can’t punish them retroactively.
Yes, the women have to be truthful, but the rest of us have to own some of the responsibility, too. And we all have to grow up and learn how to stop ourselves before we do the stupid thing, whether it’s the way we treat the opposite sex or a different sexual identity or another “race” (if you accept that concept) or another religion or economic status or whatever.
I’m an old bird, and that’s not always easy–but I’m working on it. And I’m trying to temper anger with forgiveness, and I think a lot of us need to work on that, too.
10@djw
I am neither a sitting Senator, a Senator wannabe, nor a sitting President.
Take a look at Vosburg v. Putney. This case set the standard for strict liability: You are responsible for the things you do. For some of those things “I’m sorry” isn’t sufficient to make the victim whole. Any attorney will lecture at length about this case. If you want a heartfelt, deep in the gut analysis, ask an anesthesiologist. No one I have ever met understand Vosberg v. Putney, you are responsible for the things you do, the way anesthesiologists as a group do.
11Slut-shaming is shameful.
12Where Franken is concerned but not Moore or Trump, let him who is without sin cast the first stone. Times have changed and our understanding of decent conduct has changed, and almost everyone did something then he regrets now.
Franken is apologetic. Moore and Trump are not. That’s the real difference.
13I don’t think it is slut shaming to say that the scenes of Tweeden being sexually playful with men on-stage during the USO trip puts a different perspective on the photo of Franken mugging for the photographer while she was asleep. Franken’s actions were tasteless, but it was all done in public as performance (in one case for an audience and the other for the tour photographer). Her on-stage behavior does not justify assault, but the photograph of Franken does not show assault, it’s a performance and he did not touch her.
14As Tate says, “apologetic”. Ditto for Louis CK who did an all fall out public confession and beat up on himself. What gags me so much about Moore and Trump are the ages of the victims. Remember, there is a woman who tried to bring her rape accusation against Trump when she was 13 to light after many years only be scared off during the campaign. And then there are all the other women he confessed to abusing in that damn conversation with Billy Bush who was either to stupid or scared to stop him. Plus Trump’s own admission of barging into the dressing rooms inhabited by mostly naked teen age girls. And Moore? How stupid can you get! It was that “mother’s permission” that sealed his fate forever with me! It was the cherry on top of the ice cream sundae provided by his accusers.
15Franken has turned out to be one of the smartest, and certainly most focused, Senators we have. His immediate call for a Senate Ethics Committee hearing on this allegation told me that he knows there will be nothing else alleged against him. It also makes me think that he will present his participation in the USO tours (he did many of them over several years) as a continuation of what Bob Hope did for decades. And, all of us know what those were like.
NBC combined several of the shows and put on a special every year that most people watched. They were chock-full of sleazy double-entendres and lots of pretty girls skimpily dressed. They were aimed at young men, who made up the vast majority of the audiences, who apparently appreciated that kind of stuff.
This was the template that Franken followed and I hope this will be examined in the hearing. It isn’t out of line to think that the culture we live with contributes to the idea that men can treat women this way and it’s all OK.
What gives me hope is that, unlike a lot of other men who have now been exposed for this kind of misbehavior, there have been NO OTHER WOMEN coming forth about Franken.
16I think “slut shaming” is too broad a definition.
You could call this woman a “slut” for the way she behaves — modeling half-clothed, twerking on-stage, etc, and that would be slut-shaming.
But she’s also then alleging that a rehearsal kiss for a skit with Al Franken made her feel disgusting and that a picture of him pretending to twerk her boobs inches away from her flak jacket was disgusting — that’s just ridiculous. Because she wasn’t 14 years old and she was a fully sexually active and demonstrative adult woman. So, it isn’t “shaming” her to say that she was fully participating in public sex scenes and loving them. In retrospect, she saw a way to attack Franken — that’s the shameful part.
17Sorry all but HER history is important. Look at any trial using competent lawyers and one of the 1st things they do is try to make the witness into a sleaze-Ball liar or at the least a not so good person, to doubt their truthiness.
18So we have a not so great photo which MIGHT show something beyond a silly joke, and a sexy rep that also points to not so true accusation! There were others in the area of the photo…what do they say? If she was actually asleep, and he actually did grope her then the whole thing changes. But he says/she says & he apologized for any mistakes made!
And you all (& I too agree) are blaming others based on their other behaviors when you say they are guilty because they are sleazy people!
Long game: If Al Franken runs again, Tweeden is his opponent’s ad campaign. Any way you look at this, Franken is damaged goods; right or wrong.
19When the photo was released, I wrote to several friends suggesting that, to my eye, it looks photoshopped. The shadows are all wrong — as is the perspective. At least so it seems to me.
I also said, in those emails, that all we need – – – ALL we need – – – is for one woman to step forward – and lie – for this watershed moment to fly right past us and the possibility of redress for the wrongs that have gone on for centuries to begin, at long last.
One lie gives the ammunition to all the people who, for years, have been saying, “Oh you know women. They’re so emotional. They just make stuff up.”
And here we are.
Did she lie? I don’t know. Is she a Trump supporter [which I have read on several forums]? I don’t know. If she is, indeed, a supporter of Trump — that would certainly give her a motive to lie about a liberal Democrat — and this moment gives her the means.
I’m torn in so many directions at once I don’t know which way to turn. If she’s telling the truth, my estimation of Al Franken just dropped through the floor. If she is lying, she has just done a world of damage to women and, in fact, to justice in this country — perhaps the world.
20Exactly, two crows. A woman who lies like Tweeden is doing does all of us damage. This is not slut shaming in the slightest. This is pushing raging truth to the front. This was a political hit job, nothing more, nothing less. Oh, and by the by, here’s little innocent Leeann holding her own with Howard Stern on national radio. Some of the talk will singe your speakers. https://youtu.be/T1ogwuJ2fAo
21The photo appears pretty damning and I expect we’re going to see it every time Franken’s name is mentioned, until the end of time. It depicted assault of a woman in a vulnerable position, no excuses..period. Was he trying to make an incredibly stupid joke photo or attempting to cop a feel through a flak jacket? (seriously?) Since they seem to have different memories of the “kiss rehearsal” incident, I’m going to let the Ethics Committee sort it out. What makes me most skeptical is Stone’s insertion into the ordeal.
The Franken and Moore accusations have politicized the #metoo movement. My gravest concern is that some public accusations will turn out not to be so truthful and honest women will lose credibility, as a result. Some social commentators may promote a dialog that “boys will be boys” and shouldn’t be expected to be “politically correct”. And any progress made over the past few weeks, will be lost.
22OK–there is a woman this morning who says that, during a photo op at the Minnesota State Fair in 2010,Senator Franken grabbed her backside. This is another one of those “maybe it was deliberate, maybe it wasn’t” things. She says he pulled her close to him for the photo, grabbing her rear end in the process. He says that he has done hundreds of such photos and doesn’t remember this one,but apologized for making her feel uncomfortable. It seems to me that it’s entirely possible that he held her a bit lower than he intended. It was all over the minute the photographer took the picture; she didn’t complain to him, although she did to her family.
Minnesota law, according to the article I read, doesn’t consider touching someone’s buttocks through their clothing to be sexual harassment. As for Senator Franken, I’m not inclined to find him guilty of anything but stupidity in the first instance and carelessness in the second. Two possible, somewhat dubious, incidents in fourteen years doesn’t seem to me reason to demand that he resign from the Senate for harassing women.
23Let’s not get ahead of our skis, folks. I imagine that if Senator Franken could make one request of us, it would be: “please don’t help.” He has made a thorough apology. His apology was accepted and characterized as sincere by Ms. Tweeden. In the interest of transparency he has requested an ethics investigation. Be patient, please. Allow Al and his lawyer to sort this out.
Defending him isn’t productive. Attacking the aggrieved is never a good strategy. Making comparisons to other dissimilar situations is dangerous in that some of their slime often unintentionally becomes cross contaminated in that effort. Let’s not let the snacilbupeR false equivalency crowd trap us in their game(s.)
When hit by smear tactics from the right, be patient and smile politely. There’s plenty of time for them to volunteer for their own ethics hearings, if they possess the moral fortitude.
24Perspective: easy to lose esp in emotional moments. Who hasn’t done things thruout their lives that they are ashamed of in retrospect? Isn’t this one of the points of life is to exercise free will; ie, to make mistakes so that we can learn before check out time? If so, then there is a track record of what is learned; ie, good vs bad, etc.
25Then the specious argument “Both sides do it.” is promoted as being EQUALLY egregious which is seldom, if ever, the case.
Isn’t that what is being done with Franken by the right?
Look behind the curtain, Alice.
Unfortunately the ones that need to look won’t until they personally pay a painful price; ie, a death, health/financial disaster that they can attribute to their bad decision making. Bigly hurdle tho.
I’m with PKM on this one.
26No, El Jefe. If she walked down the street stark naked yelling, “hey boys, come take a look at this!” all she would be “asking for” is gawking. Not gropes, not grabs, not assault.
Yeah, she’s a right-wing tool, but a right-wing tool who did nothing to deserve being humiliated by a photo of Franken grabbing her well-covered breasts.
27And what exactly IS “slut-shaming”?
28Is being a slut now respectable?
Google is no help.
@Yellow Dog – So to be clear. Women can play grab ass, rub and grind all over men, kiss any man they want, and sexually clown around, and THEN can suddenly reverse and be shocked when those men treat her in kind? That’s nothing but entrapment. Context MATTERS, and truth matters.
29El Jefe, please do yourself a favor and take a clue from Al. Resist the urge to ‘mansplain. Try understanding Ms. Tweeden’s perspective. She may not have been happy with the script nor what was asked of her in the name of making a living and rightfully so. Al stepped on a proverbial landmine. We have no clue what she endured during her career or on that particular USO tour. Al has the sense to be embarrassed by his actions. He probably even understands why she declared that enough was enough that day.
We men are not being asked to dance two choruses backward in Ginger Rogers’ shoes. All that is being asked of us is to accept that no means no. To evolve would be to recognize unacceptable behavior and not require prompting by a no.
Getting it means working with the women on the economic issues that have made them vulnerable to the indignities and worse brought on by simply trying to make a living.
30I don’t condone slut-shaming. In fact, I abhor it. But this is a bit different circumstance. All of these people were performers, on a tour to entertain presumably randy young men. These clips help to establish what the atmosphere was like
Ms. Tweeden’s bump-and-grind, and her lip lock on that hapless soldier? A performance.
Likewise, Al Franken’s pose of a grope, in front of a photographer? ALSO a performance. It was in terrible taste; a caricature of a Dirty Old Man with his prey. But not a violation. In fact, when the story came out, Tweeden’s claim that she was groped, and didn’t wake up, sounded weird to me. Al may or may not have actually touched her flak jacket;hard to tell.
The kiss rehearsal; it sounds gross. But again, a performance.
CONTEXT matters, people!
31El Jefe, that’s Not what Yellow Dog said. Reread the comment. Yellow Dog is right. You grossly exaggerated the comment.
32