Did Al Franken get railroaded? Jane Mayer's article in the New Yorker tells the story of a poor senator that fell victim to the system of the #MeToo movement. He didn't have the political chops of Joe Bidden to laugh it off, or the political charm of Bill Clinton and Donald Trump to come out of the accusations with his political life unharmed.
There is the public Mr. Franken and the private Mr. Franken. Ms. Mayer's article paints a portrait of a man railroaded by the political system. Due process is mentioned in the article, and he wasn't given a fair chance to defend himself against all the accusations that kept being leveled against him. Eight women came forward with stories of their uncomfortable moments with Mr. Franken.
His political colleagues hit the panic button and called for Senator Franken to resign. But why did they do this? Because they are politicians. They only care about their own jobs. They have no moral or ethical backbone, or they wouldn' have sought to see if these accusations were true. The career politicians raised the white flag and tried to wash their hands of the whole thing.
Senator Gillibrand is quoted in the article saying, "We had eight credible allegations, and they had been corroborated, in real-time, by the press corps." This quote alone is scary because she didn't even bother to do her own research and went off of what the press did. Senator Gillibrand seems to put her faith in the wrong institutions.
Al Franken may have been joking around when he posed for the picture. Yes, he wasn't touching Ms. Tweeden, but the photograph appears to make light of a situation. An old man creeping on a young woman and all this taking place while she is sleeping.
Ms. Mayer does her best to discredit Tweeden and offers a nice story about how Tweeden was going to go to Harvard but pursued modeling instead. The great investigative journalist Howard Stern is the one that broke that story and was the only man to publicly attack the claim. He even went so far as to mock Tweeden for making such a claim. The fact Tweeden was on the show seems a slight attack on Tweeden's character too.
Tweeden was a model that posed for men's magazines. This fact claw at the integrity of Ms. Tweeden. If she will take her top off for the camera, well, what else will she do? She does this with quotes from people that defended Al Franken. There are lines about it being a USO show, it is a burlesque show, and there was no way he was touching her through that flak jacket. The truth is that the picture is taken out of context and shows a moment of poor judgment and not an act of a male predator.
Ms. Tweeden is a Republican, and this is mentioned over and over again in the article. She accepted the apology from Senator Franken and didn't want him to resign. Ms. Tweeden even wanted an investigation.
The article does make clear that Senator Franken wasn't given a chance to prove his innocence. He did what he thought was right and resigned. But he did it because he didn't have an ally in the senate to support him. His fellow senators jumped ship while trying to burn him at the stake. It is one of the sadder moments in recent political history.
It is ironic that the comedian's story has a twinge of Shakespearean tragedy to it. He called it quits when he should have stood his ground and fought harder. He is the one that called it quits. He could have fought the accusations. He had that option. He didn't fight and now he is sad, but maybe that is the problem with being an outsider and not a career politician. He truly viewed these career politicians as his friends and equals and thus the Shakespeare knife is stuck further in the former senator's back.
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