When Our Allies Are Accused of Harassment
Then I saw the news that a woman named Lindsay Menz accused Franken of grabbing her butt while they posed for a photo at the Minnesota State Fair in 2010, when he was a senator, and I read Franken’s lame non-denial: “I feel badly
that Ms. Menz came away from our interaction feeling disrespected.”
Yet I am still not sure I made the right call.
It’s easy to condemn morally worthless men like Trump; it’s much harder to figure out what should happen to men who make valuable political
and cultural contributions, and whose alleged misdeeds fall far short of criminal.
That photo — the unconscious woman, the leering grin — is a weight Democrats shouldn’t have to carry, given
that they’ve lately been insisting that it’s disqualifying for a candidate to grab a woman sexually against her will.
It seemed cruel to expect Democratic women to make Jesuitical arguments
that the shadows under Franken’s hands meant he wasn’t really touching Tweeden’s chest.
It’s not a coincidence that the post-Harvey Weinstein purge of sexual harassers has been largely
confined to liberal-leaning fields like Hollywood, media and the Democratic Party.
Last Thursday, after a photograph emerged of Senator Al Franken either groping or pretending
to grope a sleeping woman, Leeann Tweeden, with whom he’d been traveling on a 2006 U. S.O.