He’ll likely say this was all a joke. Not funny. Is his the next head to roll?
http://www.kabc.com/2017/11/16/leeann-tweeden-on-senator-al-franken/
This one has a photograph as evidence. She was groped.
I saw the photo. It’s shocking. I’m very disappointed with Sen. Franken (and I vote for Dems).
Oh, my gosh, that photo!! I hope his head rolls.
Wow!
Gross. Where is my big rolling pin?! Is this part of the $15M we the taxpayers paid?!
Yikes, that is terrible and disappointing. I just ordered his book as a gift for my son – looks like it will be returned.
Ugh.
This happened before he was a senator. (And not to split hairs, but I think that $15 million was paid for House member accusations, not Senate. Of course, that doesn’t mean there haven’t been any Senate payouts.)
Oh nooooooo.
It appears to me that the photo is of her asleep and him pretending to grope her while not actually touching her, har har. Not funny. I doubt that he is actually touching her in the photo because there is a photographer there taking the unfunny photo.
The kissing claim sounds plausible to me. I’ve watched improv comedians like Whose Line. A recurring unfunny “joke” is male comedians calling up young female audience members to participate in a sketch, and then lying on top of them, handling them and groping them as part of the “comedy,” all the while mugging to the rest of the audience. I believe male comedians have a culture, I hope disappearing, of taking advantage of women who are participating in their acts.
I’m having flashbacks to all the times, when I was a restaurant server, where I was expected to be able to “take a joke”, a sexual joke of course, from men, directed at me, or women in general.
It’s extra hard for women in certain environments where it can get very raunchy. Very play ball or go home.
Disgusting.
I don’t understand why some people (too many to list, celebrities, private individuals) think it’s okay to touch other people without permission. Do they know it’s not okay but do it anyway, to exert power?
I’ll ditto CF on the photo bit. It’s still unacceptable behavior, no ifs, ands or buts.
Extremely disappointed in Al who I think is a great Senator.
@rosered55 Socialization? M v F
He has apologized, unequivocally. I think most men are pigs, but some are more piggy than others. I think he’s less piggy than most.
It’s not just the photo. He wrote a ‘kiss’ into a skit. Then he badgered her into ‘rehearsing’ a kiss and put his tongue down her throat.
Then when she refused to do it again in the performance and turned her head away, he retaliated with petty iinsults for the rest of the tour including drawing devil horns on her on one of the pictures.
HIs ‘apology’ was weak with an “I don’t remember”.
It will be interesting to see what else this brings out of the bushes. This looks like many of the recent cases in which the perpetrator had a pretty well-developed methodology for instigating this abuse. It does not sound to me like his insistence on backstage rehearsal was a spur of the moment thing. Rather, it sounds like he was confident it would work, which likely means he had done it before. However, as much as I despise Sen Franken, I will extend him the same right that everyone deserves. He is definitely guilty in this instance, but I won’t condemn him for being a serial abuser until and if others come forward.
I always had a lot of male friends in high school and in college and none of them were piggy. I did have a few boyfriends that turned out to be arses (but normsl arses not horrid cretins like these men.)
I’ve always been curious about stage and screen kisses. It looks like a ripe area for abuse if one person wants to do as little as possible and the other doesn’t. If you’re up on stage in front of hundreds of people and supposed to be exchanging a passionate kiss, you can’t exactly haul off and slug the other person. What kind of understanding is there?