A year and a half after stepping down from the Senate amid allegations of sexual harassment, Al Franken is in the news once again, this time thanks to writer Jane Mayer, who did what no one else has: actually investigated the claims against him.
Until now, many of us thought we knew what happened. But Mayer’s piece, published in the New Yorker, is a revealing inspection of how Franken was treated by the public, the press, and his colleagues and opponents in Congress. The conclusion Mayer comes to is that the most damning claims against Franken do not hold up under scrutiny. The initial claims, which were made a conservative radio personality named Leeann Tweeden, weren’t just factually inaccurate; they were, according to Mayer’s careful reporting, pushed by pro-Trump operatives like Sean Hannity and Roger Stone to take Al Franken down. And, of course, it worked.
Tweeden’s accusations against Franken were made in November 2017, shortly after the #MeToo movement began taking down powerful men accused of sexual abuse, harassment, or other misconduct. According to her account—which was first published online by Tweeden’s own employer, 790 KABC, a conservative, Trump-supporting radio outlet—Franken engaged in a targeted sexual harassment campaign against her on a 2006 USO tour of the Middle East. She alleged that Franken wrote a skit in which his character kissed Tweeden, and that he did it purely in an effort to force her to kiss him. This, according to Mayer’s reporting, was bullshit. The skit had been written three years earlier, and Franken, who was a comic and not a senator back then, had performed it, without incident, with other women.
Even more damning to Tweeden’s claims is that fact that her claims seemed culled from that very script Franken wrote. As Mayer explains:
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 [during the uproar over the accusations] 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.
After the claims were made public, Franken immediately apologized, apparently expecting that a full hearing would soon put the story into context. Instead, the apology was taken as an admission of guilt, and the full investigation never happened.
No one bothered to fact-check Tweeden’s claims—neither KABC nor the various media outlets that subsequently reported on the accusation—even though Tweeden had pushed outright lies before, including the lie that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. This lack of due diligence comes, I suspect, because the default position in the #MeToo era, at least in the media and on the left, is to believe claims of sexual abuse without question. And why not? The history of the species is replete with men in power abusing women.
At the moment Tweeden’s story dropped, the pressure to denounce, swiftly and without mercy, was high. Everyone wants to be on the Right Side of History, and as the Washington Post’s Wesley Lowry pointed out in a now-deleted tweet, the 24-hour news cycle is hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with the nuance, the gray areas, of human behavior.
Besides, Tweeden had photographic evidence: The now-infamous snapshot shows Franken, looking for all the world like a creep and leech, pretending to touch Tweeden’s breasts through a flak jacket while she slept. The photo lent her story credibility she may not otherwise have had, even though, as Mayer documents, she’s been busted lying before in public (by, of all people, Howard Stern, about, of all things, getting into Harvard). Politically, she’s about as far from a Franken supporter as you can get. But in that moment, anyone who questioned her motivations would have been accused of blaming the victim.
Besides, the photo looked bad. Making the photo all the more worse, Tweeden claimed that Franken had it sent to her after the USO tour with the express purpose of taunting her.
Except that was also bullshit. Mayer found that Tweeden’s claims about how she got the photo weren’t true, and there was little evidence to support her allegations that Franken had gone out of his way to torment her. As we should know by now, photos do not tell the entire story, and when Mayer contextualises this incident—which, again, took place while Franken was a comic hired to make soldiers laugh, not a sitting United States senator—Tweeden’s allegations fall apart. (Don’t take my word for it. Read her entire piece.)
Of course, seven other women also came forward to accuse Franken of misconduct after Tweeden’s story became national news. One woman, who declined to speak to Mayer, says that Franken grabbed her butt during a photo op at the 2010 Minnesota State Fair. Another woman, a journalist, said he touched her waist in a way that made her uncomfortable when they were posing for a photo at a 2009 party for Obama’s inauguration. Where she can, Mayer investigates those claims (a few of the allegations were anonymous), and what emerges is not the story of a serial predator but of a sometimes bumbling idiot, a man unaware of his physical presence in the world. He chewed with his mouth open. He kissed people on the lips. It may be weird but, according to Mayer, it was not assault or harassment, and dozens of women who’ve worked with Franken throughout his career strenuously insist he is not a sexual predator.
The fever to disavow Franken seems to have broken, but in the moment it was not hard to see why Democrats in Congress wanted him out. The allegations against him emerged while Alabama Senator Roy Moore—who had been credibly accused of sexual misconduct with minors—was running for office, so anything other than full condemnation of Franken from his colleagues in the Senate would have seemed like the height of hypocrisy. Plus, many in the media were demanding Franken’s resignation too.
However, regret over how Franken’s case was handled now seems to be growing. Senators including Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, Bill Nelson of Florida, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, and four others told Mayer they now regret calling for him to step down. Patrick Leahy of Vermont said it was “one of the biggest mistakes” he’s made in the Senate. Angus King of Maine said it was “the political equivalent of capital punishment.”
But not everyone in the Senate thinks Franken got screwed. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who is currently running for President and who spearheaded calls for Franken’s resignation (and then, according to Mayer, took credit for anti-sexual harassment legislation that Franken had originated), told Mayer that while she knows that the allegations against Franken are hardly the same level of evil as those against, say, Harvey Weinstein, “the women who came forward felt it was sexual harassment. So it was.”
This idea—if you feel like something is sexual harassment, it is—is the inevitable result of what Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff call the “impact-versus-intent paradigm,” which started in activist communities and then spread outward. In their 2018 book, The Coddling of the American Mind, they explain, “If a member of an identity group feels offended or oppressed by the action of another person, according to the impact-verus-intent paradigm, that person is guilty of an act of bigotry.” In this case, it’s not bigotry Franken is allegedly guilty of, it’s sexual misconduct, but the result is the same: Franken was viewed as guilty as soon as the allegations were levelled. If those women felt harassed, then it happened.
This logic, thankfully, only applies to the court of public opinion, and not criminal courts, which do take intent into consideration. There’s a reason manslaughter isn’t punished the same as murder, but in the case of Franken, any distinction was rendered irrelevant then moment the accusations became public. Intent is less important than impact. Reality is less important than how we interpret it. If she says she felt harassed—even if she’s a birther, even if she’s friends with Sean Hannity, even if she’s pushed conspiracy theories about Democrats in the past—then he unequivocally did it.
Of course, there’s a long history of women’s claims of abuse and sexual harassment not being taken seriously. Challenging that was the entire point of #MeToo, and it’s a positive shift in society that women are finally being listened to and taken seriously. But Mayer’s reporting shows, once again, that just as we shouldn’t dismiss an alleged victim’s claims out of hand, we also shouldn’t blindly believe women no matter what. Instead, what we should do is what Franken himself called for at the outset of this drama: demand there be an investigation. Demand a full airing of the facts. Franken never got that.
I don’t think the fall of Franken is a national tragedy, but I do think it’s a shame. Franken wasn’t just a good legislator, he could well have been a very strong candidate against Donald Trump because he possesses a quality that might be key to winning against him: He’s entertaining. It would have been the quintessential American mashup, so symbolic of our culture of celebrity worship that is seems almost poetic: two entertainers, both born in New York. One is a liberal, Jewish SNL Democrat. The other is a racist, whitebread reality TV show Republican. It’s perfect.
But a bigger loss than a hypothetical run against Donald Trump is that Franken was an effective lawmaker. Watch him question Betsy Devos or Jeff Sessions. As Mayer wrote, “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.” Franken got shit done, but now he’s gone, back in Minnesota licking his wounds and hosting a podcast instead of interrogating Trump officials in the Senate.
Ultimately, Franken’s decision to resign was his alone, although it’s a bit like choosing to jump when the building behind you is burning. As Mayer’s reporting makes clear, there was not really another option. According to Franken, after Senator Gillibrand and others took to Twitter to demand his resign, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told him that if he didn’t resign by 5 p.m. on December 7, just three weeks after Tweeden’s employer first made her un-fact-checked allegations public, Schumer would instruct the Democratic caucus to demand he resign and strip him of committee assignments. That’s when Franken realized he had to step down.
Maybe Franken’s resignation was necessary for the health of the party, maybe not. But even if Mayer’s reporting redeems his reputation among some (but certainly not all) of America, for Franken’s career in the Senate, the truth comes too little, too late.
