When Our Allies Are Accused of Harassment<br />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<br />that Ms. Menz came away from our interaction feeling disrespected.”<br />Yet I am still not sure I made the right call.<br />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<br />and cultural contributions, and whose alleged misdeeds fall far short of criminal.<br />That photo — the unconscious woman, the leering grin — is a weight Democrats shouldn’t have to carry, given<br />that they’ve lately been insisting that it’s disqualifying for a candidate to grab a woman sexually against her will.<br />It seemed cruel to expect Democratic women to make Jesuitical arguments<br />that the shadows under Franken’s hands meant he wasn’t really touching Tweeden’s chest.<br />It’s not a coincidence that the post-Harvey Weinstein purge of sexual harassers has been largely<br />confined to liberal-leaning fields like Hollywood, media and the Democratic Party.<br />Last Thursday, after a photograph emerged of Senator Al Franken either groping or pretending<br />to grope a sleeping woman, Leeann Tweeden, with whom he’d been traveling on a 2006 U. S.O.
