During the height of the #MeToo movement in 2017, a woman named Leeann Tweeden accused Al Franken of sexually harassing her during his comedic days and snapped a photo of him pretending to grope her breasts. I called on Franken to resign from the Senate not because I thought his alleged actions were irreparable, but because I felt the Democrats should free themselves from the burden of defending him.
My first instinct, I wrote at the time, “is to say that Franken deserves a chance to go through an ethical investigation but remain in the Senate, where he must redouble his efforts on behalf of victims of abuse and harassment.” But if that happened, I feared Republicans could use Franken’s photo to deviate from the more serious charges against Donald Trump and Roy Moore, only to run for the Senate in Alabama as they were dogged by allegations of sexual assault. abuse of teens. “It’s not worth it,” I wrote at the time. “The question is not about what is fair to Franken, but what is fair to the rest of us.”
In the years since, I have discussed with many people who believe that Franken was the victim of serious injustice. Often they pointed to Jane Mayer’s New Yorker who exposed inconsistencies in Tweeden’s story and described Franken’s regret and devastation. I feel terrible for Franken, and I’m not sure he deserved to lose his job, but I don’t think he was innocent either. Before the Tweeden photo popped up, I’d heard secondhand about Franken grabbing a woman’s ass at a political event. At the time, I didn’t know what to think, but when Tweeden came forward, I braced myself for others to follow, and they did.
By the time Franken resigned, eight women had accused him of groping or forcibly kissing them. Even if you dismiss Tweeden’s account, it seems overwhelmingly likely to me that he acted in a way that left women who admired him confused and humiliated.
Nevertheless, I regret calling Franken to resign without a Senate investigation. (I later wrote a piece about my ambivalence about Franken, but never took back the call to quit.)
A fair trial is important whether someone has done what he or she is accused of, and the absence of it has left lasting wounds in this case. Carried away by the furious momentum of #MeToo, I let myself forget that transparent, dispassionate systems for hearing conflicting claims are not a barrier to justice, but a prerequisite for it.
This, of course, is not unique to the Franken affair. During #MeToo, many feminists tried to find a way to get past the reflexive doubt that all too often greets people who speak out about sexual misconduct. But a reflexive assumption of guilt is not a decent substitute. In private we are free to come to our own conclusions. In public life, however, we must strive to have several, sometimes contradictory ideas in mind at once – that accusers have little reason to lie and deserve a presumption of good faith, that a false accusation can be crushing, and that in some cases both sides think they are telling the truth.
Some feminists argue that the concept of “fair trial” doesn’t really apply outside the legal system; I may have said something similar myself. “Losing your job for sexual harassment is not a violation of due process,” said a 2018 headline from Rewire News Group. Due process, wrote Caroline Reilly, “is violated when the government deprives a right.”
Technically this is true, but in everyday speech, a fair trial usually means hearing people and treating them according to clear and neutral rules. Particularly in the case of Franken, I was wrong in thinking that it was possible to distinguish between what was fair to him and what was fair to everyone else.
This was true in both a practical and moral sense. During the uproar in Franken, Democratic female senators were constantly harassed about why they didn’t demand that he step aside. I thought it was wrong at the time that they should pay a political price for his obvious rudeness. If anyone had to take a hit, I remember thinking, it should be him, not her.
But in the end, the lack of an investigation hurt them too. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s 2020 presidential campaign was derailed in part by bitterness over the role she played in ousting Franks. It’s a sick irony that the fallout from #MeToo ended up hurting Gillibrand, one of the Senate’s most staunch feminists, more than Donald Trump, but such is the country we live in, and short-circuiting the investigative process didn’t help. the reform it.
If there had been a Senate inquiry into Franken’s behavior, it probably would have been an ordeal for Democrats and slowed the momentum of #MeToo. But a more careful, deliberate move wouldn’t have been such a bad thing. Franken might have had to step down after all, but it didn’t seem like he’d been put on track. Due process may not be helpful, but there is no legitimate way to get around it.
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