Thanks @Urbanacus and @anon27007144. I knew there would be a response. I forgot about both of those instances. However, neither of them even went to trial. The Rolling Stone affair never got close to a courtroom and a grand jury refused to indict in the Brawley matter.
The first that came to mind for me was Emmett Till.
There were a lot of false rape claims associated with our sordid racial history. Scottsboro Boys too.
That one cuts both ways:
Ok, so I am on board with all the Franken allegations so far.
But… Unnamed source where the victim and photographer both either refuse to comment or say that the events didn’t happen?
We should believe women. This is not even un-believable. But the accuser here is neither victim nor photographer, nor do they have an identity. This isn’t “Believing Women”, this is about the same as an egg icon on twitter. near as I can tell.
I will happily eat my words if more details come out. And it’s worth mentioning, my interest is not in defending Franken (who cares, fuck that guy). But in just keeping this whole public political dragging process honest. Lord knows the right wing is filled to the fucking brim with opportunists.
Yeah, this isn’t an accusation. I don’t think title even indicates that.
I think it does show that he has some really loose boundaries around touching women in general. He and Arianna are friends. She might have been okay with this or likes him enough to let it slide since the stakes are high right now. But we can believe Arianna and still believe Leann, because they two different women with their own right to feel however they feel about what happened.
So it’s not a big leap to imagine him having done everything as it’s been described by his accuser.
Absolutely.
The title… Hard to say. In the context of this thread, it certainly sounds like an accusation. It didn’t come off as a suggestion of loose boundaries, but I get totally what you’re getting at: “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire”.
That’s fair.
I remember that article! It was for New York Magazine. The “shocking” “exclusive” photos are completely of a piece with the photos that were actually run.
Really nothing to see here, folks…
Yeah, Page Six is the gossip wing of the NYPost i.e. Murdock and Co.
I actually thought the whole article was aimed less at Franken and more at getting Hugfington dirty by association. It starts out calling her a so called feminist and then there are insinuations she’s covering up for Franken later in the article.
Edited: phone changed ‘gossip wing’ to ‘gossip song.’ I kind of like the mistake, but I fixed it.
It takes all types. I don’t know anyone with such a public facing career, but I do know women who have male friendships where this would be no big deal. (Not with me.) i think closer to your 20’s it’d be no big deal, but something else in your 30’s or 40’s. Pop culture rumors have it that this is also no big deal in LA regardless??
Anyways. Same issue, contingent on the relationship between Arianna and his wife. We don’t know, and the source is anonymous, and nobody else is talking. It sure looks weird, though.
That’s the whole point though, isn’t it? It doesn’t matter what people are rumored to be doing in LA or how old you are, or what your or my friend would find ok. What matters is that the touching is wanted and agreed to by any person being touched.
There isn’t anything wrong with the photoshoot since Arianna said so. Otoh, think some women and men would have a problem with being touched like that by people they aren’t sleeping with. The photos add to what we know about Al Franken, he is obviously a grabby guy.
If it was a frame from a fiction movie or an SNL skit would you be thinking it weird? This was NOT a senator and a respected Journalist/Publisher caught by a paparazzi. This was a professional comedian and an aspiring public figure hamming it up in front of a professional photographer IN A BED, ON A SET!!! Often acting involves takes going too far in front of the camera and then finding the right tone in post production.
I’ll let you two duke it out. I’ll just say, when me and mine were drunk and stupid twenty somethings, we had plenty of photos like this. There certainly was plenty of times where gals requested some photo op like this (and tbh I found it weird every time). Anyways, I can see there being a spectrum of boundaries that consenting adults are able to navigate.
I’ve maintained this position the whole time.
Sexual assault and harassment are the words we use to describe failures of those navigations, either intentional or unintentional.
That’s what we’re talking about here, a person who pushes boundaries more than most is much more likely to have ignored or crossed other people’s boundaries.
I might be misunderstanding what you’re getting at when you say, “grabby”. It doesn’t sound like there’s any boundary-respecting intent behind that term. Can one be “grabby” in a completely consensual and healthy way?
Duke Lacrosse case? There were certainly indictments/grand-jury-proceedings for that, though charges were dropped before trial.
I don’t have a clear notion what the rate of false reports of sexual harassment is. For rape & sexual assault Wikipedia says it’s hard to nail down definitions, but somewhere in the range of 2-10% is the consensus. IMO it’s probably on the low end of that; I can believe 2-4%, I have hard time believing 10%. At any rate, moderately rare, but it does happen.
Thing is, it’s hard to say how that would map to public accusations of harassment. I mean, now it can be newsworthy, even politically radioactive, if a random private citizen says “this politician – who was a stranger to me – grabbed my butt at a photo op 7 years ago.” It’s just kind of uncharted territory; we don’t yet have any real notion what the rate of false reports for such things might be, in the context of the larger political economy. I’d imagine still on the low end, but maybe more in the 10-15% range. And that’s a wild guess!
Certainly I know a friend of mine in college was threatened with being tarred with a false label of “harasser”. (It wasn’t even sexual harassment; the malefactors were just going to use the word “harassment” and let bystanders jump to a conclusion about the form of harassment it was.) Another student who was a senior and was also working as a local stringer for the Associated Press was also involved in the threat. Extremely unpleasant stuff. Bit of a tangent, but false accusations of sexual harassment – or threats thereof – empirically do exist.
All that said, yes, the bias for cases in this domain should be “believe the women”. No quarrel. Repeating what I said upthread, though, being trigger-happy with consequences for wrongdoers makes me uncomfortable too. Carefully considered consequences I’m fine with.
