Almost NOTHING His Main Accuser Said checks out: the Case of Al Franken

[Jason]

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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.”

 

[Jason]

lol, her accusation about "he scripted the skit for me" is verbatim from the skit and it was verifiably written before she did the USO tour

 

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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.”

 

 

[Jason]

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Tweeden had also taken some controversial political stands. In 2011, in an appearance on “Hannity,” she sided with “birthers,” calling on President Barack Obama to produce a birth certificate to prove his citizenship, and praised Trump, who had been stoking racist suspicions about Obama’s identity. “I think Donald Trump is brilliant,” she added. “Who knows how far he could go?”

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Tweeden began working through every detail with McIntyre and Baker, and, later, with Hayes. McIntyre also suggested that Tweeden talk to her friend Lauren Sivan, a former anchor for the station, who was one of the witnesses against Weinstein. Sivan had risked her reputation to speak out about Weinstein’s having masturbated in front of her. When Tweeden told her about Franken, Sivan said to me, “the story, it was strange—because they were doing it as a skit.” She sympathized with Tweeden, whom she described as having felt “mocked and humiliated” by Franken. But she wasn’t sure how a public accusation would be received. She suggested that Tweeden take the story to a mainstream outlet, and even gave her the name of a reputable reporter. Instead, Sivan told me, Hayes controlled the process, which she considered a “mistake,” because “it’s a right-wing conservative radio station” and “it seemed like they just wanted to milk the story.” Nevertheless, Sivan said, of Tweeden, “it was absolutely something she wanted to do—I think she hated Franken.”

 

[MarSolo]

I’m so glad we held a Senator to a higher standard than the President which almost 30 accusations of sexual assault and possible underage rape case.

[b_m_b_m_b_m]

Quite the hill to die on

[Joe]

You got to respect Gillibrand for not backing down even a little from what she did.

[Jason]

4 minutes ago, Jose said:

You got to respect Gillibrand for not backing down even a little from what she did.

 

Her savvy political instincts are clearly paying dividends for her. 

[Joe]

16 minutes ago, Jason said:

 

Her savvy political instincts are clearly paying dividends for her. 

 

That's kind of my point. She is getting destroyed and has not changed her tune a bit.

[Chris-]

I realize stories like this are nightmare fuel for your on-going 'but what if I'm falsely accused of sexual assault' paranoia, but c'mon.

[RedSoxFan9]

 

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

His political friends and allies in the party turned on him and called for him to resign, but he wasn’t forced out? Ok. 

[Joe]

12 minutes ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

His political friends and allies in the party turned on him and called for him to resign, but he wasn’t forced out? Ok. 

 

You can just ignore those people ala Northam.

[Jason]

2 hours ago, MarSolo said:

I’m so glad we held a Senator to a higher standard than the President which almost 30 accusations of sexual assault and possible underage rape case.

 

You'd think Franken was accused of throwing binders at his staff or something abusive like that.