MeToo’s latest critics say they want to help the movement. Why are they shaming women?

Critiques by journalist Emily Yoffe and others blame women for speaking out.

By Anna North  Aug 27, 2019, 12:50pm EDT

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Advocates for survivors of sexual abuse, including one with a sign reading “#Believe Survivors,” gather in the Federal Building Plaza to protest the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on September 28, 2018 in Chicago, Illinois.

Advocates for survivors of sexual abuse gather in the Federal Building Plaza to protest the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on September 28, 2018, in Chicago. Scott Olson/Getty Images

It’s been nearly two years since the current, most public phase of the #MeToo movement began.

The months of near-daily allegations against high-profile men are over, and in their place are bigger questions about how, as a society, we can reckon with those allegations.

Those questions have no easy answers. So perhaps it’s no surprise that one response at this particular point in #MeToo has been to argue that while the movement is valid, it has gone too far.

This was the subtext of Jane Mayer’s recent New Yorker investigation into the allegations against former Sen. Al Franken. And in a recent story in the libertarian magazine Reason, Emily Yoffe makes the critique more explicitly, arguing that allegations against former Los Angeles Times reporter Jonathan Kaiman reveal deep flaws in the movement.

Kaiman was accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women, including reporter Felicia Sonmez, who says that he digitally penetrated her without her consent. The allegations, which Kaiman disputes, led to an investigation by the Times and Kaiman’s eventual resignation.

Yoffe casts Kaiman as a victim of “mob justice,” and blames Sonmez and another woman, Laura Tucker, for ruining his promising career by speaking out. “We are now in a time when the uncertain circumstances surrounding one regretted sexual encounter and another hazily remembered (and fiercely disputed) intimate encounter are sufficient to destroy the accused’s life,” she writes.

Meanwhile, Sonmez says that Yoffe misrepresented many aspects of her account — and that what happened to Kaiman resulted from his actions, not her decision to talk about them.

The #MeToo movement has raised real questions about how to adjudicate allegations of sexual misconduct in a way that’s fair to all parties, when the legal system and many company human resources departments are so demonstrably unequal to the task. #MeToo’s critics have brought up some of these questions. But in the process, they often shame the women who have spoken out, casting them as part of a vindictive mob out to ruin men’s lives.

Two years into the current phase of #MeToo, the time is ripe for a conversation about what justice in sexual misconduct cases should look like. But that conversation can only be productive if it includes the voices of the people who have risked their careers, their mental health, and sometimes their safety by coming forward. We all lose if those voices are shamed back into silence.

Recent critics of #MeToo say the movement is valid — but goes too far

Critiques of the #MeToo movement began popping up soon after it gained steam. In January 2018, for example, Daphne Merkin argued in the New York Times that women, including some feminists, were criticizing #MeToo privately even as they praised it publicly — “some women, including random people I talk to in supermarket lines, have gone so far as to call it an outright witch hunt,” she wrote. The same month, the sexual misconduct allegations against Aziz Ansari led to a round of backlash: At the Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan wrote that young women were “angry and temporarily powerful, and last night they destroyed a man who didn’t deserve it.”

#MeToo backlash has continued in tandem with the movement, with some accused men joining in — John Hockenberry, for example, a former WNYC radio host who was accused of sexual harassment or unwanted messages by multiple women, wrote at Harper’s last October about the injustices he saw in his situation and the need for “a return to romance” in American life.

Some more recent critiques, however, have taken a different tone. In her New Yorker story, Mayer does not take the entire #MeToo movement to task. Rather, she casts the handling of the allegations against Franken as a threat to the movement. Mayer quotes Debra Katz, a lawyer who represented Christine Blasey Ford: “The allegations levelled against Senator Franken did not warrant his forced expulsion from the Senate, particularly given the context in which most of the behavior occurred, which was in his capacity as a comedian.”

“To treat all allegations the same is not only inappropriate,” Katz tells Mayer. “It feeds into a backlash narrative that men are vulnerable to even frivolous allegations by women.”

Yoffe is similarly concerned with threats to the movement. “#MeToo is a necessary and important corrective to some horrifying, copiously documented, and criminal-level behavior, and also to the kind of persistent harassment that still characterizes too many workplaces,” she writes.

But some allegations do not merit bringing up in the context of #MeToo, she argues: “We are now in a time when a sexual encounter can be recast in a malevolent light, no matter whether the participants all appeared to consider it consensual at the time.”

And for Yoffe, bringing up such encounters now can tarnish the movement: “creating injustice today does not undo the harms of the past; instead it undermines the integrity of the necessary effort to address sexual misconduct.”

Yoffe hangs her argument primarily on the case of Kaiman, at one time the Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times.

In a January 2018 Medium post, Tucker wrote that Kaiman had pressured her into sex, refusing to leave her apartment and coercing her to continue after she told him clearly that she wanted to stop. According to Yoffe, Kaiman remembers the night differently and believes no coercion occurred.

Sonmez, meanwhile, says that Kaiman digitally penetrated her without her consent after a night of drinking, refusing to stop until she pushed him away, and that he later had unprotected sex with her when she was very drunk.

“I am devastated by the fact that I was not more sober, so that I could say with absolute certainty whether what happened that night was rape,” Sonmez wrote in a letter to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China, a professional association of which Kaiman was a part.

According to Yoffe, Kaiman says the sex was protected and Sonmez only objected to being digitally penetrated because they were in public at the time. “Kaiman says he has never forced himself on anyone and is sickened at the idea of it,” Yoffe writes.

But after an investigation by the Los Angeles Times, Yoffe reports, Kaiman was told in August 2018 to resign or be fired; he resigned.

Now, Yoffe writes, Kaiman is “jobless and homeless” and has considered suicide. “On the basis of equivocal and heavily disputed accusations,” she writes, “Kaiman’s life is in tatters.”

Criticisms of #MeToo often include criticism of women for “going public”

In her investigation of the allegations against Franken, Mayer devotes a great deal of space to the question of whether actress Leeann Tweeden was right to be upset that Franken had mimed grabbing her breasts for a photo. She includes a detailed description of Tweeden’s previous performances with Franken, which included a kiss with an audience member: “In video footage, she seems to be gamely playing the part, setting off hoots and hollers from the crowd,” Mayer writes.

No one disputes that the photo is genuine, and Franken has apologized for it. But Mayer strongly implies that Tweeden was wrong to complain about it, at least in the way she did.

Yoffe has a similar criticism for the women who reported misconduct by Kaiman.

Of Tucker, Yoffe asks, “Why would she go public — giving Kaiman no warning — with this story of a long-ago, private event that, while regretted, did not involve a sexual assault? Especially since in telling it she was sure to damage someone who had been a friend and who held no power over her?”

Yoffe also writes that while Tucker’s testimony might not have been enough to harm Kaiman, “the Sonmez accusation changed everything.”

“Even though it is disputed by Kaiman, that charge established in the minds of many that what happened between Kaiman and Tucker was not just a single regretted event but part of a pattern,” Yoffe writes. “And pattern is an explosive concept in the world of #MeToo.”

Sonmez has responded to Yoffe’s story with a detailed thread of corrections that casts much of Yoffe’s story into doubt. For instance, Sonmez writes that another allegation against Kaiman had been shared privately before Tucker went public with hers. She also writes that Kaiman has acknowledged digitally penetrating her without her consent.

And she takes issue with the idea that her allegation established a “pattern” in the minds of investigators. “My accusation and Ms. Tucker’s are not what established that Mr. Kaiman has a pattern of misconduct,” she writes. “Mr. Kaiman’s own alleged actions are what established that.”

Shaming women does nothing to help the movement

If Yoffe’s intent was to draw attention to the imperfections in the way American society handles allegations of sexual misconduct, she chose a worthy cause. The legal system is notoriously ill-equipped to handle such allegations. The legal definition of sexual harassment is so restrictive that it does not capture much behavior that can damage people’s lives and careers. Meanwhile, allegations of sexual assault rarely lead to convictions, and people who come forward can be retraumatized by authorities who shame or blame them for their own violation.

It’s telling that Yoffe mentions the convictions of Bill Cosby and Larry Nassar — it often takes the allegations of dozens of women to make a criminal conviction stick (Cosby, notably, had to be tried twice).

Internal investigations by companies are little better. For every story like Kaiman’s, there are several like that of astrophysicist and TV host Neil deGrasse Tyson, who was investigated by his employers at Fox, the National Geographic Channel, and the American Museum of Natural History after several women accused him of sexual misconduct. In the end, he kept all of his jobs after a process that, according to the women, lacked transparency.

#MeToo has raised real questions about how, given the failings of both the legal system and company human resources departments, we should actually adjudicate claims of sexual misconduct. Yoffe’s story points to some of these questions. For example, she writes that Kaiman is “one of the least famous, least powerful men on the lists published by The New York Times and Bloomberg of those who have lost their jobs in the wake of #MeToo.”

Many of the most high-profile men accused of sexual misconduct as part of #MeToo are planning or have already executed their comebacks. Louis C.K. is performing again; Mark Halperin has a book deal. Others don’t need to make a comeback because they never faced consequences — President Trump, for example, has been accused of sexual misconduct by more than 20 women, and remains in charge of the country.

Yoffe also notes that the loss of a job and public opprobrium can lead to real psychological pain for the accused party. This is not a reason to keep someone in a job when that person might be a threat to others, but it is a reason to consider what kinds of mental health support people who lose their jobs as a result of #MeToo (or, for that matter, for any other reason) might need, and how to ensure that they get it. Suicidal depression is in no way an appropriate punishment for sexual misconduct.

The framework of restorative justice has been used on college campuses in sexual misconduct cases, and holds some promise in thinking about #MeToo on a larger scale as well. In restorative justice, the focus is on repairing the harm done, not necessarily on meting out punishment. The alleged perpetrator is often part of the process, and can receive the support necessary to address the root causes of the harm as well as to prevent reoffending.

But too often, those who say that #MeToo goes too far have called not for such holistic approaches, but for women to stay silent. Yoffe criticizes the investigative process at the Los Angeles Times, but her main thesis seems to be that if only Tucker and Sonmez had thought more before they talked about what happened to them, Kaiman would still have his job and his happiness.

People who speak up about sexual misconduct — especially if they’re women — have long been blamed, shamed, and disbelieved. They’ve long been told that their words are unseemly and that they should be quiet before they ruin men’s lives. #MeToo has served as a much-needed counterweight to these messages, a movement that tells survivors that, finally, their words matter.

As the movement matures, it’s appropriate to think through how we should respond, as a society, to those words. It’s not appropriate — it is, indeed, moving backward — to tell people not to speak them.

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Publicly, We Say #MeToo. Privately, We Have Misgivings.

By Daphne Merkin

Jan. 5, 2018

Anna Zuccaro, left, and her sister, Mia Merrill, last month unsuccessfully petitioned the Metropolitan Museum of Art to take down a painting of a young girl by Balthus.

Anna Zuccaro, left, and her sister, Mia Merrill, last month unsuccessfully petitioned the Metropolitan Museum of Art to take down a painting of a young girl by Balthus.Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

You can be sure that this weekend at the Golden Globes, Hollywood celebrities, not exactly known for their independent thinking, will turn the red carpet into a #MeToo moment replete with designer duds. Many have promised to wear black dresses to protest the stream of allegations against industry moguls and actors. Perhaps Meryl Streep will get grilled — again — about what she knew about Harvey Weinstein. The rest of us will diligently follow along on Twitter, sharing hashtags and suitably pious opprobrium.

But privately, I suspect, many of us, including many longstanding feminists, will be rolling our eyes, having had it with the reflexive and unnuanced sense of outrage that has accompanied this cause from its inception, turning a bona fide moment of moral accountability into a series of ad hoc and sometimes unproven accusations.

For many weeks now, the conversation that has been going on in private about this reckoning is radically different from the public one. This is not a good sign, suggesting the sort of social intimidation that is the underside of a culture of political correctness, such as we are increasingly living in.

The women I know — of all ages — have responded by and large with a mixture of slightly horrified excitement (bordering on titillation) as to who will be the next man accused and overt disbelief.

Publicly, they say the right things, expressing approval and joining in the chorus of voices that applaud the takedown of maleficent characters who prey on vulnerable women in the workplace.

In private it’s a different story. “Grow up, this is real life,” I hear these same feminist friends say. “What ever happened to flirting?” and “What about the women who are the predators?” Some women, including random people I talk to in supermarket lines, have gone so far as to call it an outright witch hunt.

It goes without saying that no one is coming to the defense of heinous sorts, like Kevin Spacey and Matt Lauer. But the trickle-down effect to cases like those of Garrison Keillor, Jonathan Schwartz, Ryan Lizza and Al Franken, in which the accusations are scattered, anonymous or, as far as the public knows, very vague and unspecific, has been troubling.

Perhaps even more troubling is that we seem to be returning to a victimology paradigm for young women, in particular, in which they are perceived to be — and perceive themselves to be — as frail as Victorian housewives.

Consider the fact that the campaign last month against the Met to remove a Balthus painting that shows a young girl in a suggestive light was organized by two young Manhattan feminists. Fortunately, they were unsuccessful. This is the kind of censorship practiced by religious zealots.

What happened to women’s agency? That’s what I find myself wondering as I hear story after story of adult women who helplessly acquiesce to sexual demands. I find it especially curious given that a majority of women I know have been in situations in which men have come on to them — at work or otherwise. They have routinely said, “I’m not interested” or “Get your hands off me right now.” And they’ve taken the risk that comes with it.

The fact that such unwelcome advances persist, and often in the office, is, yes, evidence of sexism and the abusive power of the patriarchy. But I don’t believe that scattershot, life-destroying denunciations are the way to upend it. In our current climate, to be accused is to be convicted. Due process is nowhere to be found.

And what exactly are men being accused of? What is the difference between harassment and assault and “inappropriate conduct”? There is a disturbing lack of clarity about the terms being thrown around and a lack of distinction regarding what the spectrum of objectionable behavior really is. Shouldn’t sexual harassment, for instance, imply a degree of hostility? Is kissing someone in affection, however inappropriately, or showing someone a photo of a nude male torso necessarily predatory behavior?

I think this confusion reflects a deeper ambivalence about how we want and expect people to behave. Expressing sexual interest is inherently messy and, frankly, nonconsensual — one person, typically the man, bites the bullet by expressing interest in the other, typically the woman — whether it happens at work or at a bar. Some are now suggesting that come-ons need to be constricted to a repressive degree. Asking for oral consent before proceeding with a sexual advance seems both innately clumsy and retrograde, like going back to the childhood game of “Mother, May I?” We are witnessing the re-moralization of sex, not via the Judeo-Christian ethos but via a legalistic, corporate consensus.

Stripping sex of eros isn’t the solution. Nor is calling out individual offenders, one by one. We need a broader and more thoroughgoing overhaul, one that begins with the way we bring up our sons and daughters.

These are scary times, for women as well as men. There is an inquisitorial whiff in the air, and my particular fear is that in true American fashion, all subtlety and reflection is being lost. Next we’ll be torching people for the content of their fantasies.

Aziz Ansari’s new standup set, and its complicated, necessary role in #MeToo

I saw the comedian perform in Chicago. His latest material could take the #MeToo conversation to a new place.

By Anna North  Mar 20, 2019, 7:00am EDT

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Aziz Ansari isn’t afraid to talk about sexual misconduct.

R. Kelly, Michael Jackson, the strangeness of watching the workplace romance of The Office in a post-#MeToo world — all came up during Ansari’s show in March at the Chicago Theatre, part of an international tour that includes upcoming dates in the UK, Sweden, and Denmark, as well as elsewhere in the US.

The tour is Ansari’s first major one since he was accused, last year, of repeatedly pressuring a woman for sex during a date that left her feeling “violated.” The allegation became one of the most controversial of the #MeToo era, with some questioning whether a story about unwelcome behavior on a date — not workplace harassment or assault — should be discussed in the context of #MeToo.

The Chicago Theatre before Aziz Ansari’s performance on March 5, 2019

The Chicago Theatre before Aziz Ansari’s performance on March 5, 2019. Anna North/Vox

Before the sold-out show, several fans in attendance told me they expected him to address the allegation in some way. “It seems like the elephant in the room,” one said.

Ansari didn’t bring up his own story until the very end of the set. But he made it clear right away that he wouldn’t be shying away from the issues at the core of the #MeToo movement. Where some accused men have retreated into anger in the wake of #MeToo, he showed that his perspective is thoughtful, nuanced, and — at least to some degree — self-aware.

As I walked out into the freezing Chicago night after the show was over, it was clear to me that Ansari has a role to play in #MeToo. His discussion of the allegation against him, when it came, left a lot to be desired. But by bringing up his allegation in his set, alongside discussion of the allegations against Kelly and Jackson, Ansari was implicitly rejecting the argument that someone’s behavior on a date doesn’t belong in discussions of #MeToo.

Cell phone use was prohibited at Ansari’s March 5 show, and audience members had to lock their phones in special pouches

Cellphone use was prohibited at Ansari’s March 5 show, and audience members had to lock their phones in special pouches. Anna North/Vox

More than perhaps any other allegation of the #MeToo era, the accusation against Ansari has struck a chord with men. Many are disturbed by the fact that the story is public at all — I know because I get emails about it all the time. For a few others, it has prompted a serious personal reckoning. Either way, I think a lot of men see something of themselves in Ansari. That makes the fact that he’s willing to stay in the #MeToo conversation incredibly valuable. It encourages ordinary men to stay in that conversation too.

After the allegation, Ansari complained about “wokeness” in his comedy

In January 2018, with the #MeToo movement gathering steam across the country, the website Babe.net published an article telling the story of a woman going by the pseudonym Grace. She said that during a September 2017 date that ended at Ansari’s apartment, the comedian pressured her to have sex with him, ignoring or missing many signals that she didn’t want to.

After the story was published, Ansari released a statement saying he had “engaged in sexual activity” with Grace, “which by all indications was completely consensual.” When he learned she had been uncomfortable, he wrote, “I was surprised and concerned. I took her words to heart and responded privately after taking the time to process what she had said.”

After releasing the statement, he kept a lower public profile for several months. But in the fall of 2018, he reemerged with a low-key standup tour, “Working Out New Material.” The comedian’s “new material” displayed a “suspicion about wokeness and its excesses,” according to the New Yorker’s Eren Orbey. At one show, he poked fun at “zealous and performative leftists,” in Orbey’s words, and criticized Twitter users for calling out cultural appropriation.

“Everyone weighs in on everything,” he complained. “They don’t know anything. People don’t wanna just say, ‘I don’t know.’”

Ansari’s comedy has always had a fogeyish streak, as when he joked in his 2015 Live at Madison Square Garden special about the difficulty of making plans in the age of smartphones (“if you’re alive right now and you have a phone, you’re a rude, shitty person”). But in the wake of the allegation against him, his reactionary side seemed to expand.

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I found this disappointing, in part because I believed Ansari could do better. He had shown, prior to the allegation, that he was aware of the harassment women face and was capable of addressing it, in an amusing and non-trivializing way, in his work. A retreat into lazy jokes about “woke” people — just one step away, to my mind, from time-worn clichés about “PC culture” — felt like a waste of his talent, as well as an immature response to a situation that demanded deeper consideration.

In early 2019, however, Ansari seemed to take a more contemplative turn. At a pop-up show in New York in February, he addressed Grace’s allegation directly for the first time since his initial statement, according to Jesse David Fox of Vulture.

“There were times I felt really upset and humiliated and embarrassed, and ultimately I just felt terrible this person felt this way,” he told the crowd. But, he said, “It made me think about a lot, and I hope I’ve become a better person.”

He added that a friend had told him that the allegation made him rethink every date he’d ever been on. If the story “has made not just me but other guys think about this, and just be more thoughtful and aware and willing to go that extra mile, and make sure someone else is comfortable in that moment, that’s a good thing,” Ansari said.

After reading coverage of Ansari’s February set, I wanted to hear his comments about Grace’s allegation in their full context. More than anything, I was curious about whether Ansari, once a valuable and funny voice on relationships, gender, and social mores in America, could still be that kind of voice today — and what that would say about the role of accused people in the evolution of #MeToo.

Before the show, I talked with a number of attendees, nearly all of whom had heard about the allegation against Ansari, and most of whom hoped he’d address it.

“Society as a whole is figuring out how to talk about these issues on a spectrum,” Natasha Anand, who came to the show with three friends, told me. The allegation against Ansari “came at a time where people were very quick to say that everything is black and white, and there exists this gray area,” she added. “We have to be open to living in the gray.”

Ansari is making sexual misconduct a major topic of his latest tour

The set I saw in Chicago was both better and worse than I expected.

Dressed casually in a T-shirt and tight jeans, Ansari projected confidence as he strode up and down the stage. At one point, he pulled a stool close to the edge to grill an apparently white audience member on her opinion of Crazy Rich Asians. He was at ease enough to make his fans ill at ease.

The show covered much of the ground Orbey described from his fall set, but did so in a way that felt new. His focus was not internet outrage or “wokeness” writ large, but rather white people who are obsessed with seeming — as opposed to being — anti-racist.

“Say what you will about racists, they’re usually very brief,” Ansari said. “Newly woke white people are exhausting.” (Audience members were required to secure our phones in special Yondr pouches that prevented us from recording the performance. I took copious handwritten notes, but some transcription errors are possible.)

Some of his most compelling material was about sexual abuse. He asked the audience how many in attendance were “muting” R. Kelly, boycotting his music in the wake of a docuseries and social media campaign drawing attention to allegations of sexual abuse against the singer, a Chicago native. Many audience members clapped. A little later, though, he asked how many were muting Michael Jackson — also the subject of abuse allegations highlighted in a recent documentary — and noted the much sparser applause.

Ansari implied that some people might be willing to give Jackson a pass because they only knew of two allegations against him. Then the comedian singled out an audience member named Brian, asking if he would stop listening to Jackson’s music if Jackson were accused of abusing a thousand children. Five hundred? Two hundred and fifty?

“Brian has a certain number of kids he’ll let slide, and it’s between 250 and 500,” Ansari joked.

The framing of the question was over the top, of course. And Ansari wouldn’t be the first to draw the parallel between Kelly and Jackson. But to do so at a comedy show and force audience members to think about their own choices was a bold move — especially since Ansari must have known it would remind some at the theater of the allegation against him.

His efforts to address the allegation against him aren’t completely satisfying

Every time the issue of sexual misconduct came up, I felt a hush fall over the theater, as though the audience was waiting for Ansari to bring up the allegation. (It wasn’t just my imagination — “I really just spent the whole time wondering if he was ever going to mention it,” an audience member told Zach Freeman of the Chicago Tribune.)

Finally, at the very end of the set, Ansari addressed Grace’s story. His whole demeanor changed — his voice, which had easily filled the theater, grew smaller and faster. “I know people are curious how I feel,” he said. Then he made essentially the same statement he’d made in his pop-up show in February, saying he’d been scared, embarrassed, and humiliated, and felt bad that Grace (whom he didn’t name) felt the way she did. He also told the same anecdote about his friend rethinking his previous dates thanks to Ansari’s experience, and said that if other men learned from the allegation against him, “that’s a good thing.”

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23-year-old Grace* went out with Aziz Ansari in September. Afterwards she said she felt "violated" and described it as "one of the worst experiences she's had with a man." Read the full story on http://babe.net . https://babe.net/2018/01/13/aziz-ansari-28355 …

I went on a date with Aziz Ansari. It turned into the worst night of my life

Exclusive -- A young photographer told the comedian: ‘I want to make sure you're aware so maybe the next girl doesn't have to cry on the ride home’

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On the one hand, forcing oneself to bring up an allegation of sexual misconduct, again and again, throughout an international tour, is certainly a form of penance, perhaps one uniquely suited to a comedian. On the other, the statement felt less satisfying to me sitting in the Chicago Theatre than it had when I read about it in February.

Perhaps it was just the familiarity that allowed me to see its shortcomings more clearly — I wanted Ansari to focus less on how he felt and more on how Grace felt about the experience. Ansari also didn’t take direct responsibility or apologize to Grace as part of his comments — he may not feel he owes her an apology. (Ansari has not responded to my request for comment for this story.)

And as the set ended, I was reminded that throughout this year, as Ansari has had the opportunity to think through how to address the allegation in his act, Grace has had little opportunity to control the ways her motivations and decisions have been dissected — and often decried — in the media.

Ansari has always been a smart social critic, and his set in Chicago was strongest when he made us squirm in our seats. But he didn’t seem ready to turn quite as critical an eye on himself. He had moments, as when he noted that in his 2010 special, Intimate Moments for a Sensual Evening, he praised Kelly’s music and said he “hopes he really is innocent of all those terrible things he’s accused of”:

That bit “has not aged well,” Ansari admitted.

But compared to his riff on “newly woke white people” or his questioning of Brian about Michael Jackson, Ansari’s approach to the allegation against him felt a bit half-baked, like he wasn’t quite ready to ask himself the kind of hard questions he asked the audience.

Men care a lot about the allegations against Ansari. That makes his response matter.

In the past year, I’ve probably gotten more messages from men — both friends and strangers on the internet — about Aziz Ansari than about anyone else accused as part of #MeToo.

“What about Grace?” one man wrote to me recently. “She mauled this man publicly for in essence being a bad lover.”

Typically, men argue that what Ansari is accused of isn’t severe enough to warrant discussion as part of this particular cultural moment. But a few men have said that Grace’s story caused them to reexamine some of their behavior. One wrote anonymously at Vox that after reading the Babe.net article, “I had a sickening moment of truth: I’ve done that.”

I think men’s interest is a reason we should be talking about Grace’s story, because it clearly strikes a nerve.

A lot of men can probably see themselves in the allegation against Ansari. That doesn’t mean they deserve to lose their jobs or face criminal prosecution, but it does mean they could benefit from some examination of gender, power, and consent.

Aziz Ansari dons a “Time’s Up” pin at The Golden Globe Awards on January 7, 2018 in Beverly Hills, California.

Aziz Ansari dons a “Time’s Up” pin at The Golden Globe Awards on January 7, 2018, in Beverly Hills, California. Greg Doherty/Getty Images

From his set, it seems like Ansari agrees. He may not be quite ready to subject himself to the kind of funny, biting criticism he unleashed on Brian, and maybe he doesn’t feel his date with Grace warrants it. But he is willing to make his experience part of the #MeToo conversation and allow it to be a lesson for other men.

And some men may be more willing to listen to someone like Ansari — a male comedian who makes them laugh, who’s been through something they can probably relate to — than they are to women talking or writing about #MeToo, especially when the conversation turns to those “gray areas” Anand talked about. Most people agree that what Harvey Weinstein is accused of is heinous and wrong. But it might require somebody like Ansari, with whom many men feel comfortable, to get them to take a hard look at their own behavior and make changes.

Throughout the evening, Ansari returned to the intertwined themes of personal growth and political progress. “We’re all shitty people,” he said at one point, but “we become aware of our blind spots and we get better in time.”

Ansari’s words about Grace’s story weren’t necessarily as groundbreaking as they could have been, but they showed he’s open to having a conversation with his fans about what he’s been accused of. And if he’s serious about becoming aware of his weaknesses and getting better with time, maybe that conversation is just beginning.

IN THIS STREAM

CULTURE

The Humiliation of Aziz Ansari

Allegations against the comedian are proof that women are angry, temporarily powerful—and very, very dangerous.

CAITLIN FLANAGAN

MARIO ANZUONI / REUTERS

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Sexual mores in the West have changed so rapidly over the past 100 years that by the time you reach 50, intimate accounts of commonplace sexual events of the young seem like science fiction: You understand the vocabulary and the sentence structure, but all of the events take place in outer space. You’re just too old.

This was my experience reading the account of one young woman’s alleged sexual encounter with Aziz Ansari, published by the website Babe this weekend. The world in which it constituted an episode of sexual assault was so far from my own two experiences of near date rape (which took place, respectively, during the Carter and Reagan administrations, roughly between the kidnapping of the Iran hostages and the start of the Falklands War) that I just couldn’t pick up the tune. But, like the recent New Yorker story “Cat Person”—about a soulless and disappointing hookup between two people who mostly knew each other through texts—the account has proved deeply resonant and meaningful to a great number of young women, who have responded in large numbers on social media, saying that it is frighteningly and infuriatingly similar to crushing experiences of their own. It is therefore worth reading and, in its way, is an important contribution to the present conversation.

Here’s how the story goes: A young woman, who is given the identity-protecting name “Grace” in the story, was excited to encounter Ansari at a party in Los Angeles, and even though he initially brushed her off, when he saw that they both had the same kind of old-fashioned camera, he paid attention to her and got her number. He texted her when they both got back to New York, asking whether she wanted to go out, and she was so excited, she spent a lot of time choosing her outfit and texting pictures of it to friends. They had a glass of wine at his apartment, and then he rushed her through dinner at an expensive restaurant and brought her back to his apartment. Within minutes of returning, she was sitting on the kitchen counter and he was—apparently consensually—performing oral sex on her (here the older reader’s eyes widen, because this was hardly the first move in the “one-night stands” of yesteryear), but then went on, per her account, to pressure her for sex in a variety of ways that were not honorable. Eventually, overcome by her emotions at the way the night was going, she told him, “You guys are all the fucking same,” and left crying. I thought it was the most significant line in the story: This has happened to her many times before. What led her to believe that this time would be different?

* * *

I was a teenager in the late 1970s, long past the great awakening (sexual intercourse began in 1963, which was plenty of time for me), but as far away from Girl Power as World War I was from the Tet Offensive. The great girl-shaping institutions, significantly the magazines and advice books and novels that I devoured, were decades away from being handed over to actual girls and young women to write and edit, and they were still filled with the cautionary advice and moralistic codes of the ’50s. With the exception of the explicit physical details, stories like Grace’s—which usually appeared in the form of “as told to,” and which were probably the invention of editors and the work product of middle-aged women writers—were so common as to be almost regular features of these cultural products. In fact, the bitterly disappointed girl crying in a taxi muttering, “They’re all the same,” was almost a trope. Make a few changes to Grace’s story and it would fit right into the narrative of those books and magazines, which would have dissected what happened to her in a pitiless way.

When she saw Ansari at the party, she was excited by his celebrity—“Grace said it was surreal to be meeting up with Ansari, a successful comedian and major celebrity”—which the magazines would have told us was shallow; he brushed her off, but she kept after him, which they would have called desperate; doing so meant ignoring her actual date of the evening, which they would have called cruel. Agreeing to meet at his apartment—instead of expecting him to come to her place to pick her up—they would have called unwise; ditto drinking with him alone. Drinking, we were told, could lead to a girl’s getting “carried away,” which was the way female sexual desire was always characterized in these things—as in, “She got carried away the night of the prom.” As for what happened sexually, the writers would have blamed her completely: What was she thinking, getting drunk with an older man she hardly knew, after revealing her eagerness to get close to him? The signal rule about dating, from its inception in the 1920s to right around the time of the Falklands War, was that if anything bad happened to a girl on a date, it was her fault.

Those magazines didn’t prepare teenage girls for sports or stem or huge careers; the kind of world-conquering, taking-numbers strength that is the common language of the most-middle-of-the road cultural products aimed at today’s girls was totally absent. But in one essential aspect they reminded us that we were strong in a way that so many modern girls are weak. They told us over and over again that if a man tried to push you into anything you didn’t want, even just a kiss, you told him flat out you weren’t doing it. If he kept going, you got away from him. You were always to have “mad money” with you: cab fare in case he got “fresh” and then refused to drive you home. They told you to slap him if you had to; they told you to get out of the car and start wailing if you had to. They told you to do whatever it took to stop him from using your body in any way you didn’t want, and under no circumstances to go down without a fight. In so many ways, compared with today’s young women, we were weak; we were being prepared for being wives and mothers, not occupants of the C-Suite. But as far as getting away from a man who was trying to pressure us into sex we didn’t want, we were strong.

Was Grace frozen, terrified, stuck? No. She tells us that she wanted something from Ansari and that she was trying to figure out how to get it. She wanted affection, kindness, attention. Perhaps she hoped to maybe even become the famous man’s girlfriend. He wasn’t interested. What she felt afterward—rejected yet another time, by yet another man—was regret. And what she and the writer who told her story created was 3,000 words of revenge porn. The clinical detail in which the story is told is intended not to validate her account as much as it is to hurt and humiliate Ansari. Together, the two women may have destroyed Ansari’s career, which is now the punishment for every kind of male sexual misconduct, from the grotesque to the disappointing.

Twenty-four hours ago—this is the speed at which we are now operating—Aziz Ansari was a man whom many people admired and whose work, although very well paid, also performed a social good. He was the first exposure many young Americans had to a Muslim man who was aspirational, funny, immersed in the same culture that they are. Now he has been—in a professional sense—assassinated, on the basis of one woman’s anonymous account. Many of the college-educated white women who so vocally support this movement are entirely on her side. The feminist writer and speaker Jessica Valenti tweeted, “A lot of men will read that post about Aziz Ansari and see an everyday, reasonable sexual interaction. But part of what women are saying right now is that what the culture considers ‘normal’ sexual encounters are not working for us, and oftentimes harmful.”

I thought it would take a little longer for the hit squad of privileged young white women to open fire on brown-skinned men. I had assumed that on the basis of intersectionality and all that, they’d stay laser focused on college-educated white men for another few months. But we’re at warp speed now, and the revolution—in many ways so good and so important—is starting to sweep up all sorts of people into its conflagration: the monstrous, the cruel, and the simply unlucky. Apparently there is a whole country full of young women who don’t know how to call a cab, and who have spent a lot of time picking out pretty outfits for dates they hoped would be nights to remember. They’re angry and temporarily powerful, and last night they destroyed a man who didn’t deserve it.

Exile

And a year of trying to find a road back from personal and public shame

By John Hockenberry

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If you know anything about me, John Hockenberry, it is probably that I am a familiar voice from public radio. You likely know that I use a wheelchair because of a 1976 car accident and the resultant spinal cord injury, received in the twilight of adolescence at age nineteen. More recently you may know of me as a correspondent for ABC and then NBC News and finally as the host of the public radio program The Takeaway from 2008 to 2017, when my contract was not renewed. Possibly you are aware of me as the father of five children: two sets of twins—three girls and a boy, aged twenty and seventeen—and another eight-year-old boy.

A cluttered storage unit in Brooklyn now contains fragments of the life I no longer live. My Emmy awards for work in television and my Peabody awards, framed pictures from travels all around the world, a signed statement of service from President Obama from my time as a member of his Commission on White House Fellowships, are all ghoulishly visible through plastic wrap and tape. A corner filled with camping equipment and spare wheelchair parts constitutes my sole Plan B at this point. The rest of the boxes I wonder whether I’ll even open in the years I have left. I once more silently list the names in my mind: anyone whom I have somehow hurt. For my work colleagues I have said my piece and have run out of energy. I have also faced unrelenting anger from both male and female colleagues. Or, more common and more painful, I have faced their stony and, in my view, cowardly silence. Only one of my accusers reached out or responded to my heartfelt queries. She had very useful and meaningful things to say, for which I am grateful.

In 2007 I joined a public radio team that wanted to develop a show to take on NPR’s audience and fund-raising behemoth Morning Edition. It was one of the hardest tasks imaginable at a time of great uncertainty in journalism, with many bitter editorial fights. In the end we made The Takeaway a successful new program broadcast around the country to an audience of 2 million. We failed at challenging Morning Edition in am drive time, though, and the consequences of that failure left painful memories. I recall those days with exhaustion. People who remember me in those rough times as condescending and bullying got the chance to revisit tough editorial battles from years in the past when I ended up in the bitter discussion of sexual assault, powerful broadcast hosts, and powerless women employees that began last fall.1

1 Asked why Hockenberry’s contract was not renewed, a spokesperson for WNYC declined to comment on “confidential personnel matters,” but confirmed in an email that he had been officially reported for sexual harassment by co-workers and contributors, that there were HR complaints against him, and that there was an internal investigation following his departure.

I have never been accused of anything that, in my view, could be construed as criminal or coercive. But in the blink of an eye I have gone from being someone recognized on the streets of New York City as a journalist, author, and advocate for people with disabilities to someone who fears recognition and trembles at the prospect of running into some radio listener who has come to find me an object of pity or reproach. My mission here in part is to let you know a lot more of the truth about me and to deny what you may have heard that is false but gets repeated over and over without challenge.

I am surely guilty of bad judgment. I have learned in the hardest way the price of not understanding or caring how my actions are perceived by others. Despite acknowledgment by my accusers that I am no rapist or sex offender, the unarguable discomfort and anguish of my co-workers have thrown me into a category in which society at large chooses, for whatever reason, not to distinguish between the charge and act of rape and some improper, failed, and awkward attempts at courtship. This blindness isn’t just about me; I believe it has roots in other social problems in America. This country has always been an uneasy and often contradictory fusion of sexual puritanism, social progressivism, secular tolerance, and the extreme zealotry of intolerance. Throughout our history, these contradictions have constrained and crippled our attempts to achieve gender equality, racial justice, and true democracy.

This is not to say that history gets me off the hook. In a painful time as my marriage was coming apart, I outrageously suggested to a married co-worker that we have an affair. I also pathetically confessed romantic feelings to a brilliant young producer I worked closely with while in a hotel room I had invited her to and watched her leave, upset, when it was clear she wanted nothing to do with me.2 However misguided I was, there was no physical coercion, no groping or attempts at pushing beyond being told no. My respect and regard for these women did not ever become persistent sexual demands. I deny being a racist bully in the tough editorial days of the birth of The Takeaway. I was overbearing and obnoxious and was called out for it, as my employment record shows. I also deeply regret adding to what was a very difficult time. I certainly lost plenty of editorial arguments and carried out my duties as a host to reflect the consensus of the team rather than my own megalomaniacal impulses. I deny directing my strict editorial demands only at women employees. Any lapses in my emotional intensity were dealt with internally at work, and I readily expressed my remorse in front of the staff. In the end my main accuser wasn’t an employee of The Takeaway but a former guest who took some friendly emails from me and made them into something in her own mind that I can neither dispute nor confront. Writing in New York magazine’s The Cut, Suki Kim says I made her feel “uncomfortable.”?3 I’m sorry I ever gave her such an impression. I never sought or wanted a relationship with her other than as a contributor to our show, which, I believed, needed the voices of smart women.

2 Both women dispute the characterization of these events in this account and claim they have been downplayed.

3 In an email to Harper’s Magazine, Kim wrote, “My reporting on John Hockenberry’s actions when he was a host at WNYC has already been vetted, fact-checked, and published in a national magazine. I stand by the facts in my article, which wasn’t about Hockenberry and myself but about many women at WNYC who strenuously objected to his behavior, and a station leadership that failed to enforce a safe work environment.”

Iunderstand that I have to confront bad judgments and mistakes I made in my personal and professional lives. I freely admit that during some very hard times I betrayed my wife of more than twenty years. We had spent much time working in couples therapy to resolve our troubles, which were not unusual for married people under considerable stress, let alone with a disability that significantly impeded all kinds of physical intimacy. I would say, looking back, that we needed therapy and a language for discussing our physical and emotional needs much earlier. As a disabled man taking on “normal life” as an adult in the Seventies, I now see that my own confused sexuality needed some personal guidance long ago.

I hope that in offering some kind of context for my misfortunes I can also provide a basis for the beginning of a constructive conversation about sexuality in the twenty-first century. Among my many discoveries over the past year is that I now think we need to begin to fill a void of human understanding created when the centuries-old, flawed, repressive, and degrading traditions of courtship manners and sexual decorum were wiped out at the end of the twentieth century. Do I dare make a spirited defense of something once called romance from the darkness of this exile, at a nadir of my personal credibility, at a moment when all of civilization seems to be in turmoil, over what is a plausible narrative of male/female attraction? Not only do I dare, knowing what righteous anger is out there, I really believe I have no choice. Who cares what I think? Possibly no one, but whatever you may know about me, I can assure you that I didn’t vanish once I was cast adrift in public scandal. I have five children who need to understand and learn from their father’s misjudgments, and I have to learn how to go on after such a complete repudiation. Whether or not others are interested, I have no choice but to make sense of recent events.

For almost a year I have lived as a pariah facing cold silence or open hostility in public. I have watched presumed friends vanish. I have listened to colleagues, lawyers, and PR professionals tell me that I am unemployable. “You are no longer a person, you are an archetype,” said one supportive male friend. “You are caught in the overcorrection of this revolution,” a supportive female friend told me over dinner. “All revolutions have their overcorrection.” These are difficult realities to accept, let alone argue with. Even Thomas Jefferson at one point supported the Jacobins’ Reign of Terror in France. I may not support the zealotry with which I have been dismantled, I may deny being some officer or agent of the patriarchy, but I wholeheartedly endorse the higher cause of gender equality and a better means for men and women to communicate.

In the past year I have found it impossible to get serious business meetings based on anything other than sympathy. I have watched as freelance work has been canceled. Less than a week before accusations about me appeared in the media, I was having lunch with people eager to produce a new program to replace Charlie Rose. Then I was swept away as completely as Rose, at one point even being implicitly cast as an understudy for his own improper behavior. Offers to ghostwrite under a different name or no name at all have been refused or canceled. For a time the only employment I could contemplate was detailed on an email list seeking disabled senior citizens to be greeters at Walmart stores in Utah and Georgia.

By now probably most people in America have gone back and asked themselves whether events in their sexual past are truly settled. Men and women have shared in this reexamination, even if their motives are vastly different—women looking for evidence of victimization, men looking back largely to confirm their exoneration. Memories of key events in virtually everyone’s personal sexual development have reopened to a fresh, sometimes frightening, sometimes even public view. Whatever my own lapses in judgment, the events that forced me to look again at behavior I had thought settled or accounted for are but a small episode in the vastness of the #MeToo movement’s recalibration of millions of events.

What passes for personal guidance on sexuality today is a lexicon of jargon with the goal of avoiding STDs and perverts, and warnings about those child kidnappers parked up the street in the white vans that moms and dads of the Eighties mentioned in their “no talking to strangers” speeches to their now grown-up kids. The concern for safety is worthwhile. But as a substitute for the elaborate emotional zone called romance, it is not worthwhile. I am not going to confuse matters of the heart with capital crimes. Being a misguided romantic, or being born at the wrong time, or taking the wrong cues from the sexual revolution of the Sixties, or having a disability that leaves one impotent at the age of nineteen—none of this is a justification for offensive behavior toward women. But is a life sentence of unemployment without possibility of furlough, the suffering of my children, and financial ruin an appropriate consequence? Does my being expunged from the profession in which I have worked for decades constitute a step on the road to true gender equality? Is my life a reasonable price exacted in the pursuit of justice, or is my situation an injustice born of a deeper dysfunction in the matters of gender and a fear of confronting anything beyond revenge, purges, and humiliation?

I meanwhile have had to rethink events going back to my days in middle school in the Sixties. I also reexamined movies I saw, books I read, conversations I had, and romantic and sexual milestones of all kinds. I grew up in the time of the Vladimir Nabokov novel Lolita, considered pornography before it was declared a work of art. How is Lolita thought of today? I embraced the freethinking spirit of Zorba the Greek when I played him onstage in high school. Was this wise? I read the first edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves. Did I gain anything from that early Mother Earth candor about vulvae and clitorises? I witnessed the growth of feminist voices in literature, politics, and pop culture. As I look back at it all, some of my youthful admirations hold up, some decidedly do not. Quite by surprise, and maybe the biggest shock of all, in this past year I have become a huge fan of the radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin. More about that later.

The anger mobilized against me has also become a fear of being seen defending someone “like me.” My own teenage daughters have experienced this fear. It is not pleasant for a father to experience. There has been no public defense of me or much of an effort to salvage someone who spent a lifetime devoted to serving the public and seeking accountability for the powerful. The accused stand accused, the victims have told their stories, but a broader conversation feels like it has yet to begin. We stand today in silent shame along the spectrum of genders, across a chasm without a useful language for redemption and, even worse, with no language for building relationships other than ones filled with suspicion and confusion. The traditional cues of romance and modesty—as flawed and hypocritical as they were—have been replaced by dry discussions of orgasms, genital size, and the limits of misogynist hip-hop lyrics.

I would easily bow out as the obsolete old man at the family reunion if I had any sense that this new, angry language was an improvement on anything, or if I hadn’t spent years listening to people express their contempt for dating scenes, bar scenes, bedroom scenes where the cheerless courtships of our time play out. I would happily dismiss myself as an old stupid if I thought any of today’s stories of love and heartbreak rivaled the power of traditional romance, which has been declared dead and replaced by the well-documented hookup culture. What scene of today can make any sense of these overdressed words of passion from Lord Byron:

When lover’s vows

Seem sweet in every whisper’d word;

And gentle winds, and waters near,

Make music to the lonely ear.

Each flower the dews have lightly wet,

And in the sky the stars are met

Emailing something like this to a co-worker could get you fired today, if anyone even understood it.

Instead of the traditional romances, I see the narratives of porn and victimization drawn out in blogs and confessionals that seem to promise little pleasure or fun. My own children often speak of a generalized and oppressive sexual tension over all encounters, dates, and flirtations. Alcohol and drugs dull the awkwardness, and to my great surprise my own progressive teenagers and their peers (both boys and girls) report they quite often have no clear indication where things are headed or whether anyone has made a decision. In the workplace, there’s no place for Byron’s “gentle winds, and waters near [that] make music to the lonely ear.” But by today’s standards Byron was an incestuous misogynist, hardly a model date.

In the course of my exile I have had time to ponder over things that go unquestioned, through the anger and snark, in what passes for aggressive and supposedly healthy candor about sex and gender. A few months back, a writer on the website Medium thought I needed to read “the numbers” about oral sex for women, to look at specific techniques diagrammed in a PDF I didn’t have the courage to download, or to read the chatty blog post “What’s Up with Going Down? Let’s talk about oral sex equality.”

Hey, let’s not. As a paraplegic man whose total lack of sensation has motivated a certain amount of adventurous improvisation in order to have any kind of sex life, I hardly need a primer on sexual techniques. But this bloggy clinical discussion of bodily functions dressed up as feminism is no replacement for the traditional language of romantic modesty, unless it’s the romance of a medical textbook. This is the opposite of romance, a word that barely has meaning today.

Unlike the blunt and bracingly honest-seeming, sexually explicit comedy of Amy Schumer or (now discredited) Louis CK, romance does not get to the point or get down to business. In our time the language of modesty and manner—with all its coy stops and starts, excruciating digressions, and flirty delays that stalled the pure physical release of sexual intercourse—has been replaced by no lead-up, no delays, and lots of confusion. The hookup narrative starts with a blowjob, continues with a parade of sex toys and orifices that flashes by in a few seconds (nanoseconds if the couple is drunk), and ends at worst in accusations of rape and lifelong regrets, or, at best, with the interminable discussion of who should have done what to whom and why. Did I actually say yes to that? Did you say thank you? What shade of gray was that? This agony of sexual indecision and bewilderment is how my kids and their peers often describe their sexual experiences. As I listen I am horrified but thinking with a tiny sliver of parental relief: a more effective form of birth control I cannot imagine.

Ihave watched this year from my solitary confinement as stories besides mine emerged from the #MeToo movement. I saw how they were seized upon and chewed through a din of hateful blogs and tweets just as I had seen myself, in online comments, equated with Harvey Weinstein or called a sicko and much worse. The female physical therapists I had been going to weekly for years looked back on their encounters with me and decided they could no longer treat my arthritic joints after they read the reports about me. This was unbelievably hurtful, but there was nothing to be done. I read online comments from public radio listeners, perfect strangers who now claimed they always suspected I was a racist predator. I recall, most painfully, being compared in a comment to the most degrading and reprehensible disability stereotype in the movies: wheelchair-using Mr. Potter, played by Lionel Barrymore in the film It’s a Wonderful Life.

It was open season on me, just as with others, in the public radio world. The inchoate anger of #MeToo was suddenly given license to target me, to make me an example, whether intended or not, to characterize me as the symbol of a tolerant radio culture of abuse, to see that I never worked in public radio again, to make sure any young women I met were cautious and vigilant and kept their distance. It has worked. But this isn’t only about me. Even if I conceded the worst possible view of my own behavior, #MeToo does not seem to consider the effect my being tossed out onto an iceberg has on my five children, especially my three daughters. Witnessing their bewilderment over my public disgrace and watching all my kids emotionally veering from fury to pity over issues of dating, the workplace, romance, and sex while I have barely any credibility to help or guide them is a pain I wish on no one, not even my accusers.

There is an element to all this that feels generational, and tripping over the increasingly incompatible languages of the young and the old is hardly unmapped territory. Call me crazy, but I am convinced that if in a collective culture something is being hauled out as garbage in the crucial domain of human gender relations, social equity, and norms of love and mating, then something new probably needs to replace it. This generational piece has been referred to in the tepid and rare critique of the way things have played out since the ground-zero Weinstein revelations (i.e., from actress Catherine Deneuve), but very little else has.

I meanwhile have had the time to look back on virtually every sexual encounter or milestone in my life, all the influential books and movies that helped shape my character and conduct as a man, and see them through a revisionist prism. Was I an aggressor, a manipulator, a wielder of the crude weapons of the patriarchy; was I a rapist? Did I consent to what happened? Did I have consent for what I did?

Today I’m not so sure about forgiveness or redemption or what constitutes an appropriately confident male personality on any level. I have reread a lot of books that either discuss or build a story line around the sexual norms of the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties. I have developed a small personal canon of works and experiences that I have had to or chosen to reexamine.

I reread Lolita and became completely certain that Nabokov would have been arrested if it were published today. Surely Nabokov’s marital transgressions would have been made public and would have changed the context of the novel. I was worried that even being seen with the book in public would confirm my offenses. I carried it on the subway once, and the impression that everyone was staring at me was so palpable that I got off at the next stop and went home by bus.

Nabokov celebrates the brain stem arousal that defines the character of Humbert Humbert and tells the story of how it leads to suffering and destruction. Lolita was shocking in the Fifties. The novel generated an outrage that largely came from how it violated a language of appropriate sexuality as well as publishing norms, norms that seem as remote today as a distant galaxy. It was later recognized as a legitimate work of art, but back then Lolita was, at worst, impolite and recklessly ahead of schedule in the evolution toward modern sexual norms. It was not a celebration of criminality in 1955; an obscenity, not a sexual assault.

I feel absolutely certain that Lolita would never be published today. In 2018 the most heinous obscenities are all about children. Any content that suggests child sex trafficking is categorized as extreme criminality, even while everything else is permitted in the banal world of pop culture and twenty-first-century online porn. Lolita, once a novel about a man powerless to control his lusts and lorded over by a tragic teenaged sexual superhero, today feels like a literary invitation to rape the powerless girl intern whose attractions are claimed by the patriarchy in the form of a middle-aged, all-powerful white male.

Lolita doesn’t really hold up in our time as an exploration of universal passion and romantic obsession, but it has found a new life. In Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi’s courageous memoir, Nabokov’s novel becomes a surrogate for all that is forbidden in religion-enslaved Iran. The book’s sexual details become navigable landmarks on a journey to self-awareness for some young people there. Nafisi makes the book serve as a talisman of the forbidden, but its sexual qualities are simply part of the details of the story rather than pornographic sparks waiting to be censored. Nafisi finds within Lolita a useful guidebook for recognizing how complicit we might become in our own imprisonment.

I found the women described in Reading Lolita in Tehran refreshing pioneers of intellectual freedom and stewards of reinvention in their potentially unshackled nation. Whereas the women in my presumably unshackled America seem to be more like the religious police of Iran in ways that they themselves cannot see, or refuse to see, right now. Again, I do not dispute the sources of the anger from centuries of gender inequality. I do question as dubious the value of letting anger stifle a language of reconciliation between men and women. Lolita, in the end, had nowhere to go, Nabokov writes again and again in his novel. To my great surprise, in 2018 I find myself identifying with Lolita, her innocence lost along with any identity other than sexual. I say that knowing it may bring down a wrath from my critics and accusers much greater than what I have endured up until now.

In looking back at what I think of as the defining sexual experiences of my youth, I am struck with how private they all were. I had somehow received the message that such issues weren’t to be discussed, although those years are seen as times of striking sexual candor. I can recall no evidence of that candor now. I never told my parents about getting molested by a strange bald man in a white sweater in a movie theater in Syracuse, New York, as an eighth grader while I was watching a matinee of Hitchcock’s Psycho. The man went for my zipper in the dark theater, and my terror was matched only by the size of my involuntary erection. My own body was apparently ready to jump in his lap, but my brain had a veto and commanded me to jump up and get away from him. It taught me the fear of speaking up, a fear that is not exclusive to one gender.

Such fear notwithstanding, my blank understanding of what sex was and how to approach girls in the late Sixties took place amid the swirl of radical change taking place in music, permissive dating, and the shirtless utopia of Woodstock. Being a nerdy, bookish sort, I conflated the verses of Byron and Shelley and Yeats with the Beatles, Dylan, politics, puberty, and Vietnam War protests. It all seemed to go together in a joyful heroic dance of discovery and empowerment.

Now all of that has been unhinged by my current iniquity. I have had no job for an entire year for the first time in my adult life, and when I am not filling out forms to receive social benefits for unemployed disabled people with lost income, my focus of creativity has been piano lessons and learning a piece by Romantic composer Johannes Brahms. Intermezzo in B Minor, Opus 119 No. 1 has been my companion. Written close to the end of the composer’s life, it is a summation of Brahms’s musical ideas on Romanticism, a somber look at mortality and, as I discovered for myself, his own troubled life and tortured loves.

Had I not been accused of being a sexual harasser I doubt I would have ever looked into the emotional life of Brahms. I would not have learned that he found sex with people he loved an agony and that it was only prostitutes who satisfied the hunger of his libido and were his preferred sexual partners. At a piano recital in June, I played my pieces along with a bunch of children, including my two sons, who were the stars of the concert. For me this became among the most stressful public performances of my life. The arty hipster venue in Bushwick, Brooklyn, was packed with parents who looked as though they had just contributed to the public radio pledge drive on their way over. I was challenged to ignore or evaluate the staring of the parents, and I could do neither. All I could do was sit at the end of a line of kid performers like some lost grandpa at the pediatrician’s office. Were all the stares plain old wheelchair gawking, or was it “that’s the guy” recognition? I kept my eyes down and waited for my turn to play.

The Romantic composers were not known for their tolerance of women or clarity in relationships. What would the narcissistic Chopin and his destructive relationship with George Sand make of the #MeToo movement? How would undisciplined Schubert, wracked with syphilis, answer an accusation of sexual harassment? The famously misogynist Brahms surely would have dismissed the liberation language of women in the workplace as bluntly as any Taliban mullah. In 2018 the brilliance of the Romantics suddenly looks more like a musical roofie from the nineteenth century to get women to swoon and submit.

All of this added to my anxiety, but in the end Brahms’s Intermezzo in B Minor was a success, if not exactly a triumph. I received welcome and enthusiastic compliments on my playing from some of the formerly menacing-looking parents in the audience, who commented on the emotional power of the music. Reports of the death of romance are apparently premature.

Two final reexaminations of my own life experiences in the past year of #MeToo purgatory delivered the most powerful evidence to me of not only how deeply and irrevocably things have changed but also how urgently those changes need to be addressed. For nearly all my adult life, the memory from my senior year of high school of being cast as Zorba in the musical based on the classic novel by Nikos Kazantzakis has been a proud one. The 1974 show is still talked about in my hometown.

Whatever theatrical talent I had, coupled with a distinct shortage of Mediterranean swarthiness in the Grand Rapids, Michigan, suburb where I lived, meant that a clumsy blond dork from the high school debate team would get the chance to play one of the most famous romantic figures in twentieth-century literature. At the tender age of seventeen I was playing the role of an aging free spirit who danced, chased women, and talked openly of his sexual conquests to anyone who would listen. The passion and freedom of Zorba became a model for romance and manhood in my life, something I consider now to have been a case of dreadful mentoring or at the very least some nasty bad luck. Kazantzakis makes his Zorba both a critic of the modern scientific repudiation of pagan traditions and demons and someone who embraces a progressive world of free love and romance. Zorba makes love at the drop of a hat. His claim that he worships women by sexually conquering them would undoubtedly get him a chilly meeting with HR and a toss to the streets today.

As I look back on those events now, they seem to have contributed to a judgment that the collaborative adventure of journalism was a setting for powerful relationships that would include sex and romance as well as the heroic narrative of finding the truth. But the novel Zorba the Greek doesn’t hold up in our time: the women characters are empty puppets, and all of life seems simply to be about men overcoming their obsessions with success and women applauding when they do.

What is shocking to me is how, after two generations of so-called sexual liberation and the quest to achieve equality and standing for women and other groups like gays and trans people, we seem further apart than ever. Men’s and women’s expectations and goals in relationships in the workplace and elsewhere barely resemble each other, and the language for communicating what those different expectations might be barely exists.

I should mention that I have been married twice and divorced once (soon to be twice), so aside from having a dismal record as a spouse, in both cases these relationships came about on the job. In the first case I married a woman who was older than me and was my boss at a health care facility after we’d spent several months secretly living together. In the second case I married someone who was a decade younger and could have credibly fit into the by now familiar #MeToo category of young women in the media business under the power of high-profile men on the air. I was a correspondent at ABC News and she was an associate producer when we met. The clichés of network sexual drama were well known in the Nineties when I began in television. You either did or you didn’t. Everyone was conscious of being thought of as the male correspondent or executive who played around after work (whether single or married) or the woman producer or executive who did the same. The gossip was constant, and enormous efforts were devoted to maintaining secrecy, some of which efforts have been documented in the recent media scandals.

In the summer of 1995, at around the same time that my fiancée, Alison, and I were making the final plans for an October wedding, the book Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin was rereleased in a paperback edition that contained a foreword Dworkin herself wrote. Dworkin was infamous for arguing that the nature of heterosexual sex implied domination of women by men, and the provocative language she used to make that point caused people to conclude that she was equating intercourse with rape. It was a claim that she always denied, but the radicalism of the argument ensured that she would become forever the unattractive feminist in overalls who believed that all heterosexual sex was a form of rape. It also ensured that she would be dismissed by most people outside the radical cult of admirers she attracted on liberal college campuses and elsewhere.

I discussed interviewing Dworkin for an ABC News profile in 1995. I argued that in the middle of the national obsession over the O. J. Simpson case, Dworkin offered a different look at celebrity, sex, and power. I was convinced that a conversation with an articulate radical feminist making what seemed to be an outrageous claim that she clearly had no intention of losing a debate over on national television would be great to watch. I looked for everything in her writing that would make for an incendiary on-camera interview. I suspect I was exactly the type of person she had in mind when she spoke about the people who reacted to her book when it was originally published in 1987:

People who have not read it, reduced to slogans by journalists posing as critics or sages or deep thinkers, treated as if it were odious and hateful by every asshole who thinks that what will heal this violent world is more respect for dead white men.

ABC News couldn’t have been less interested in Dworkin at a time when all the networks were clawing at one another to put attractive women on TV to talk about the Simpson case. To make a long story less so, I put Intercourse down, got married, and over the next twenty years had five children, bounced from ABC to NBC, did a lot of freelancing, got a fellowship at the MIT Media Lab, and eventually landed back in public radio in 2008 to start The Takeaway.

A decade later and a few months after the scandal broke that wiped out my career, living alone without a job or the prospect of one, I came across Dworkin once again. She died in 2005, and her work was really not part of the post-Weinstein conversation about sex and violence. I reread Intercourse, expecting to become more depressed and hopeless about everything in my own dead white male life, but like a lot of what’s gone on in the past year it was an unexpected revelation. Dworkin’s words were honest, brilliant, prescient, and actually comforting.

Men possess women when men fuck women because both experience the man being male. This is the stunning logic of male supremacy. In this view, which is the predominant one, maleness is aggressive and violent; and so fucking, in which both the man and the woman experience maleness, essentially demands the disappearance of the woman as an individual; thus, in being fucked, she is possessed: ceases to exist as a discrete individual: is taken over.

Remarkably, it is not the man who is considered possessed in intercourse, even though he (his penis) is buried inside another human being; and his penis is surrounded by strong muscles that contract like a fist shutting tight and release with a force that pushes hard on the tender thing, always so vulnerable no matter how hard. He is not possessed even though his penis is gone—disappeared inside someone else, enveloped, smothered, in the muscled lining of flesh that he never sees, only feels, gripping, releasing, gripping, tighter, harder, firmer, then pushing out: and can he get out alive?

This is one of the more intentionally shocking passages, but when Dworkin argues more politically she is just as provocative. What stands out to me today is how precisely her fusion of pornography and politics predicts the present-day anxiety and confusion. She anticipates like some prophet our inability to distinguish the power-dominance component of sex from the ways in which sex might actually grant men and women physical equality. Dworkin’s ideas still feel as daring today as they did more than thirty years ago, when their pure shock value sent her packing to the fringe of the feminist debate in a nation that had said good riddance to the Equal Rights Amendment a decade earlier. For me Dworkin’s language and clarity underscored precisely what was so frustrating and painful about my own personal predicament. The inability or unwillingness of people in 2018 to distinguish my behavior from rape is a corollary to Dworkin’s often-cited, and often misconstrued, sex-equals-rape proposition. Dworkin denied that she ever equated intercourse and rape, and I understand now her deeply subtle point that if we don’t explicitly address inequality between men and women in all interactions, including sex, we are condemned to a spiral of miscues and mistrust until we can assume only the worst about one another, replacing the hope of love and romance with the forensic chill of vigilance and the fear of assault.

Would Dworkin argue today that there is a way out of all this? She certainly argued it then. Dworkin dismissed biological imperatives regarding sex and insisted that humans should explicitly modify sexuality in manners and practice to reflect modern notions of equity and justice. Might Dworkin say in 2018, If we are not willing to explicitly state the rules of gender equity and create in those rules an alternative romantic construct, then we are doomed to live and relive the primitive rape and possession identities our physical bodies are fated to deliver? #MeToo has created a presumption of rape in every encounter without seeing the urgency of supplying a new language for listening to and conferring consent or recognizing that men and women and all sexual partners in our time need a new landscape for experiencing one another intellectually, romantically, and emotionally, or must accept the fate of being brutally possessed by the biological primitivism of the sex act alone. Surely with 7 billion people on planet earth, sexuality is not about some procreative imperative anymore.

I would give anything to know what Dworkin would say about what’s going on now. Would she put my foot on a meat hook and bash away at me with a bat? Would she embrace me as her penis-less paraplegic male buddy? Would she drive this debate or dismiss the whole thing as celebrity fine print, preferring to focus on the larger global struggle for gender equality, on people like Malala Yousafzai in Pakistan and women’s rights activists in Saudi Arabia? Malala, Dworkin might say, has much more important things to think about than the unemployment of an American public radio host.

Ithink it is not mere nostalgia to want a return to romance. My longing amid all the regret of the past year is not simply the misguided morality of a lost, humbled Unitarian journalist trying to get the world to say “never mind.” Whatever my troubles, I think it is an exciting moment at a time when so much has changed in our understanding of gender. I feel blessed to be a father at a time when my daughters have the means, like never before, to be safe and empowered as they grow sexually. I feel proud to believe that my sons will be among the most sensitive and sensual males to have ever walked the earth. To that I can add that above all I believe this crackpot-sounding imperative to reinvent romance is a mission I hope to be a part of. I can’t leave it to the folks in HR and the algorithm designers of internet dating sites (even though my oldest daughter is dating a coder for Tinder right now . . . sigh). In the din of anger and rejection of me and my ideas that I expect will come, even the whisper of agreement that a new modern concept of romance might be worth pursuing could turn out to be more important than anything I accomplished in my career in journalism. Creating a new universal scaffold of love and romance is not far-fetched for a twenty-first century that needs to be suddenly intentional about all sorts of dynamics formerly on autopilot. Just add it to the to-do list along with climate change, income inequality, and racial justice. Time to get to work.

A REPORTER AT LARGEJULY 29, 2019 ISSUE

THE CASE OF AL FRANKEN

A close look at the accusations against the former senator.

By Jane Mayer

July 22, 2019

Portrait of Franken.

When Franken was asked if he regretted his decision to resign from the Senate, he said, “Oh, yeah. Absolutely.”Photograph by Geordie Wood for The New Yorker

Last month, in Minneapolis, I climbed the stairs of a row house to find Al Franken, Minnesota’s disgraced former senator, wandering around in jeans and stocking feet. It was a sunny day, but the shades were mostly drawn. Takeout containers of hummus and carrot sticks were set out on the kitchen table. His wife, Franni Bryson, was stuck in their apartment in Washington, D.C., with a cold, and he had evidently done the best he could to be hospitable. But the place felt like the kind of man cave where someone hides out from the world, which is more or less what Franken has been doing since he resigned, in December, 2017, amid accusations of sexual impropriety.

There had been occasional sightings of him: in Washington, people mentioned having glimpsed him riding the Metro or browsing alone in a bookstore; there was gossip that he had fallen into a depression, and had been seen in a fetal position on a friend’s couch. But Franken had experienced one of the most abrupt downfalls in recent political memory. He had been perhaps the most recognizable figure in the Senate, in part because he’d entered it as a celebrity: a best-selling author and a former writer and performer on “Saturday Night Live.” Now Franken was just one more face in a gallery of previously powerful men who had been brought down by the #MeToo movement, and whom no one wanted to hear from again. America had ghosted him.

Only two years ago, Franken was being talked up as a possible challenger to President Donald Trump in 2020. In Senate hearings, Franken had proved himself to be one of the most effective critics of the Trump Administration. His tough questioning of Jeff Sessions, Trump’s nominee for Attorney General, had led Sessions to recuse himself from the investigation into Russian influence in the 2016 election, and prompted the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel.

As it turns out, Franken’s only role in the 2020 Presidential campaign has been as a figure of controversy. On June 4th, Pete Buttigieg was widely criticized on social media for saying that he would not have pressured Franken to resign—as had virtually all his Democratic rivals who were then in the Senate—without first learning more about the alleged incidents. At the same time, the Presidential candidacy of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has been plagued by questions about her role as the first of three dozen Democratic senators to demand Franken’s resignation. Gillibrand has cast herself as a feminist champion of “zero tolerance” toward sexual impropriety, but Democratic donors sympathetic to Franken have stunted her fund-raising and, Gillibrand says, tried to “intimidate” her “into silence.”

Franken’s fall was stunningly swift: he resigned only three weeks after Leeann Tweeden, a conservative talk-radio host, accused him of having forced an unwanted kiss on her during a 2006 U.S.O. tour. Seven more women followed with accusations against Franken; all of them centered on inappropriate touches or kisses. Half the accusers’ names have still not become public. Although both Franken and Tweeden called for an independent investigation into her charges, none took place. This reticence reflects the cultural moment: in an era when women’s accusations of sexual discrimination and harassment are finally being taken seriously, after years of belittlement and dismissal, some see it as offensive to subject accusers to scrutiny. “Believe Women” has become a credo of the #MeToo movement.

At his house, Franken said he understood that, in such an atmosphere, the public might not be eager to hear his grievances. Holding his head in his hands, he said, “I don’t think people who have been sexually assaulted, and those kinds of things, want to hear from people who have been #MeToo’d that they’re victims.” Yet, he added, being on the losing side of the #MeToo movement, which he fervently supports, has led him to spend time thinking about such matters as due process, proportionality of punishment, and the consequences of Internet-fuelled outrage. He told me that his therapist had likened his experience to “what happens when primates are shunned and humiliated by the rest of the other primates.” Their reaction, Franken said, with a mirthless laugh, “is ‘I’m going to die alone in the jungle.’ ”

Now sixty-eight, Franken is short and sturdily built, with bristly gray hair, tortoiseshell glasses, and a wide, froglike mouth from which he tends to talk out of one corner. Despite his current isolation, Franken is recognized nearly everywhere he goes, and he often gets stopped on the street. “I can’t go anywhere without people reminding me of this, usually with some version of ‘You shouldn’t have resigned,’ ” Franken said. He appreciates the support, but such comments torment him about his departure from the Senate. He tends to respond curtly, “Yup.”

A lifeguard needs help getting down from his chair before saving a drowning person.

“I’d be happy to rescue you, but first can you help me down from this chair?”

When I asked him if he truly regretted his decision to resign, he said, “Oh, yeah. Absolutely.” He wishes that he had appeared before a Senate Ethics Committee hearing, as he had requested, allowing him to marshal facts that countered the narrative aired in the press. It is extremely rare for a senator to resign under pressure. No senator has been expelled since the Civil War, and in modern times only three have resigned under the threat of expulsion: Harrison Williams, in 1982, Bob Packwood, in 1995, and John Ensign, in 2011. Williams resigned after he was convicted of bribery and conspiracy; Packwood faced numerous sexual-assault accusations; Ensign was accused of making illegal payoffs to hide an affair.

A remarkable number of Franken’s Senate colleagues have regrets about their own roles in his fall. Seven current and former U.S. senators who demanded Franken’s resignation in 2017 told me that they’d been wrong to do so. Such admissions are unusual in an institution whose members rarely concede mistakes. Patrick Leahy, the veteran Democrat from Vermont, said that his decision to seek Franken’s resignation without first getting all the facts was “one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made” in forty-five years in the Senate. Heidi Heitkamp, the former senator from North Dakota, told me, “If there’s one decision I’ve made that I would take back, it’s the decision to call for his resignation. It was made in the heat of the moment, without concern for exactly what this was.” Tammy Duckworth, the junior Democratic senator from Illinois, told me that the Senate Ethics Committee “should have been allowed to move forward.” She said it was important to acknowledge the trauma that Franken’s accusers had gone through, but added, “We needed more facts. That due process didn’t happen is not good for our democracy.” Angus King, the Independent senator from Maine, said that he’d “regretted it ever since” he joined the call for Franken’s resignation. “There’s no excuse for sexual assault,” he said. “But Al deserved more of a process. I don’t denigrate the allegations, but this was the political equivalent of capital punishment.” Senator Jeff Merkley, of Oregon, told me, “This was a rush to judgment that didn’t allow any of us to fully explore what this was about. I took the judgment of my peers rather than independently examining the circumstances. In my heart, I’ve not felt right about it.” Bill Nelson, the former Florida senator, said, “I realized almost right away I’d made a mistake. I felt terrible. I should have stood up for due process to render what it’s supposed to—the truth.” Tom Udall, the senior Democratic senator from New Mexico, said, “I made a mistake. I started having second thoughts shortly after he stepped down. He had the right to be heard by an independent investigative body. I’ve heard from people around my state, and around the country, saying that they think he got railroaded. It doesn’t seem fair. I’m a lawyer. I really believe in due process.”

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Former Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who watched the drama unfold from retirement, told me, “It’s terrible what happened to him. It was unfair. It took the legs out from under him. He was a very fine senator.” Many voters have also protested Franken’s decision. A Change.org petition urging Franken to retract his resignation received more than seventy-five thousand signatures. It declared, “There’s a difference between abuse and a mistake.”

In recent months, Franken has witnessed a prominent Democrat survive a similar political storm: this past spring, several women accused Joe Biden of unwanted kissing or touching at rallies and other political events. Biden apologized but never stopped campaigning for President. Unlike Biden, though, Franken was caught on camera. His undoing began with a photograph, which was released by a conservative talk-radio station on November 16, 2017. The image was taken in 2006, the year before Franken first ran for the Senate. At the time, he was on his seventh U.S.O. tour, entertaining American troops abroad as a comedian. The photograph captures him on a military plane, mugging for the camera as he performs a lecherous pantomime. He’s leering at the lens with his hands outstretched toward the breasts of his U.S.O. co-star, Tweeden, who is wearing a military helmet, fatigues, and a bulletproof vest. Franken’s hands appear to be practically touching her chest, and Tweeden looks to be asleep—and therefore not consenting to the joke.

Some people saw the photograph as a mere gag. Emily Yoffe, writing in The Atlantic, called the image “an inoffensive burlesque of a burlesque.” Yoffe, who has argued that men accused of sexual misdeeds deserve more due process, noted that Franken and Tweeden were “on a U.S.O. tour, which is a raunchy vaudeville throwback.” But the minute the photograph surfaced it went viral, and condemnation came from both conservatives and liberals. Breitbart, which loathed Franken’s politics, elicited gleeful comments from readers after it posted a piece from Slate, a liberal publication, headlined “Franken Should Resign Immediately.” The article argued that “there is no rational reason to doubt the truth of Tweeden’s accusations, no legitimate defense of Franken’s actions, and no ambiguity.” Sean Hannity, Fox News’ biggest star, also quoted the Slate piece, and on his show he interviewed Tweeden—a friend who had been a guest on his show dozens of times, often as a booster of the military. The media uproar was further heightened by an impassioned personal statement released by Tweeden’s Los Angeles radio station, KABC-AM, which provided her account of the story behind the photograph.

The damning image, Tweeden said, was the culmination of a campaign of sexual harassment that Franken had subjected her to after she had spurned his advances at the start of the U.S.O. tour, which lasted two weeks. It was Tweeden’s ninth U.S.O. gig, but her first with Franken. She alleged that he had written a skit with a kissing scene expressly for her, telling her, “When I found out you were coming on this tour, I wrote a little scene, if you will, with you in it.” She said that when she saw the script, which required them to kiss, “I suspected what he was after, but I figured I could turn my head at the last minute.”

According to Tweeden’s statement, after they landed in Kuwait, the tour’s first stop, Franken told her, “We need to practice the kissing scene.” At first, she said, she “blew him off,” but “he persisted” so aggressively that it “reminded me of, like, the Harvey Weinstein tape”; Weinstein, she noted, had been taped “badgering” a resistant sexual victim. Just five weeks before Tweeden released her statement, the Times and this magazine had published allegations accusing Weinstein of serial sexual harassment, assault, and rape. The resulting outcry had emboldened women across the country to speak out about their own victimization; online, the hashtag #MeToo emerged. Tweeden cited these developments as having inspired her to come forward about Franken.

She wrote that, in 2006, she’d initially told Franken that it was unnecessary to rehearse, saying, “Al, this isn’t ‘S.N.L.’ ” She relented only so that he would “shut up.” The rehearsal occurred, she said, in a makeshift gym behind the stage. When they got to the kiss, Tweeden said, “he just put his hand on the back of my head, and he mashed his face against it.” She went on, “He stuck his tongue in my mouth so fast—and all that I could remember is that his lips were really wet, and it was slimy.” Privately, she began thinking of Franken as Fish Lips. She emphasized that she’d fought back: “I pushed him off with my hands, and I remember, I almost punched him.” Afterward, her hands instinctively clenched “into fists” whenever she saw him. She said that she had warned him that “if he ever did that to me again I wouldn’t be so nice about it the next time.” Tweeden said, “I was violated.”

Tweeden wrote that she “never had a voluntary conversation with Franken again.” When they performed the kiss onstage, she said, “trust me, he didn’t get close to my face.” She said that, because she had felt powerless, she hadn’t reported the assault to the military authorities. She claimed that she had “told a few others on the tour what Franken had done and how I felt,” but her prepared statement provided no names of corroborators. Franken, she said, “repaid me with petty insults” for having rejected him. He doodled “devil horns” on a head shot of hers. As a final act of reprisal, Franken demeaned her with the photograph of her sleeping. Tweeden remembered clearly that the photograph had been taken on the final day of the tour, Christmas Eve, as “we began the 36-hour trip home to L.A.” and “our C-17 cargo plane took off from Afghanistan.”

Tweeden concluded her statement by declaring, “Senator Franken, you wrote the script. But there’s nothing funny about sexual assault.” She continued, “You knew exactly what you were doing. You forcibly kissed me without my consent, grabbed my breasts while I was sleeping, and had someone take a photo of you doing it, knowing I would see it later, and be ashamed.”

She said that it wasn’t until she returned home and received a CD of images from the tour photographer that she saw the image of Franken pretending to grope her while she slept. “I felt violated all over again,” she said. At that moment, she had wanted to “shout my story to the world,” but hadn’t felt secure enough. Now, she said, she wanted “other victims of sexual assault to be able to speak out,” adding, “I want the days of silence to be over.”

Tweeden went public the Thursday before Thanksgiving, while Congress was wrapping up for the holiday break. At 9:54 a.m., Ed Shelleby, Franken’s deputy chief of staff, was at his desk in the Capitol when he noticed that a strange e-mail had arrived in an office account. The subject line was “Comment Requested,” and the sender was Nathan Baker, the news director at KABC-AM. The e-mail said that the station’s “morning drive anchor,” Leeann Tweeden, had written “a piece about experiences she had with Senator Franken while on a U.S.O. tour.” It noted, “If you have any reaction or comment from the Senator we would of course include it in our coverage.” There was a link to Tweeden’s statement and to the photograph, both of which had already been posted on the Internet. Shelleby called Franken’s chief of staff, Jeff Lomonaco. “We gotta get Al!” Shelleby said. “We’ve got this thing! ”

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Franken was in a meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Lomonaco ran through a series of corridors and pulled him out.

A track list for a CD catered toward dogs.

“What’s going on?” Franken said.

“It’s important,” Lomonaco said.

“But I want to vote,” Franken protested.

Lomonaco showed him the KABC-AM story and the photograph.

Oh, my God, my life! My life! was Franken’s first thought. He remembered the picture being taken, but he was stunned by Tweeden’s account. He had thought that they were on friendly terms. In 2009, she had attended a U.S.O. awards ceremony, in Washington, honoring him; photographs of the event capture them laughing together. He had no memory of her having balked at the kissing scene, and knew that he hadn’t written it for her. He had written it in 2003, and performed it on other U.S.O. tours before meeting her.

In Franken’s 2017 book, “Al Franken, Giant of the Senate,” which was published before Tweeden’s accusations, he writes of being preoccupied during the 2006 tour with deciding whether to run for public office. Others on the trip confirm this, recalling that he spent much of his downtime studying policy positions with an assistant, Andy Barr. Records show that Franken had already set up a political-action committee, and he announced his Senate bid soon after returning home.

Tweeden may well have felt harassed, and even violated, by Franken, but he insisted to me that her version of events is “just not true.” He confirmed that he had rehearsed the skit with her, noting, “You always rehearse.” The script, he recalled, called for a man to “surprise” a woman with a kiss, in a “sort of sudden” way, and though Tweeden had read the script, it’s possible that in the moment he startled her. Tweeden wasn’t an actress—before going into broadcasting, she had been a Frederick’s of Hollywood model—so she may have been unfamiliar with rehearsals. But Franken said, of Tweeden, “I don’t remember her being taken aback.” He adamantly denied having stuck his tongue in her mouth.

Franken’s longtime fund-raiser, A. J. Goodman, a former criminal-defense lawyer, told me that it was “easy to see how it could have grossed Tweeden out” to be kissed by Franken. At the time, Franken was fifty-five, and his clothes tended toward mom jeans and garish windbreakers. “He was like your uncle Morty,” Goodman recalled. “He wasn’t Cary Grant. But tongue down the throat? No. I’ve done hundreds of events with this guy. I’ve been on the road and on his book tours with him.” She said that Franken was “five hundred per cent devoted” to Bryson, his wife, whom he met during his freshman year at Harvard. “He can be a jerk, but he’s all about his family,” Goodman said. (Franken and Bryson have a daughter, a son, and four grandchildren.)

In Hollywood, Franken’s reputation had been far from wild. According to Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad’s book, “Saturday Night,” when Franken worked on “S.N.L.” he was seen as a stickler and a “self-appointed hallway monitor” figure. James Downey, who spent decades writing for the show, told me, of Franken, “He’s lots of things, some delightful, some annoying. He can be very aggressive interpersonally. He can say mean things, or use other people as props. He can seem more confident that the audience will find him adorable than he ought to. His estimate of his charm can be overconfident. But I’ve known him for forty-seven years and he’s the very last person who would be a sexual harasser.”

As Franken absorbed Tweeden’s statement and the photograph, he realized that, given the recent rise of the #MeToo movement, “anyone who wanted to read the photo as confirming what I was accused of could do that. I understood that right away. And boom—I was instantly in shock.”

Franken wasn’t the only one. Two actresses who had performed the same role as Tweeden on earlier U.S.O. tours with him, Karri Turner and Traylor Portman, immediately recognized that Tweeden was wrong to say that Franken had written the part in order to kiss her. Both women told me that they fully supported the #MeToo movement and could speak only to their own experiences. But Turner confirmed that she had acted in the same skit in 2003. Video footage of her performing it, which can be seen online, shows that the script was altered for Tweeden only by cutting references to “JAG,” a TV show in which Turner starred. In a statement, Turner said that “no woman should have to deal with any type of harassment, ever!” But on her two U.S.O. tours with Franken, she said, “there was nothing inappropriate toward me,” adding, “I only experienced a person that was eager to make soldiers laugh.”

Traylor Portman, who used her maiden name, Traylor Howard, while appearing on the TV show “Monk,” said that she also played the role in Franken’s skit, in 2005. “It’s not accurate for her to say it was written for her,” Portman told me. She had rehearsed the kissing scene with Franken, and hadn’t objected, because “you’re going to practice—that’s what professionals do.” She said that the scene involved “what looked like kissing but wasn’t,” adding, “It’s just for comic relief. I guess you could turn your head, but whatever—it’s nothing. I was in sitcoms. You just play it for laughs.”

Portman went on, “I get the whole #MeToo thing, and a whole lot of horrible stuff has happened, and it needed to change. But that’s not what was happening here.” She added, “Franken is a good man. I remember him talking so sweetly and lovingly about his wife.” Portman recalled, “There were Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders there, and he didn’t pay any special attention to them. He had a good rapport with everyone. He was hilarious. He was just trying to get them to laugh. It was about entertaining people who were risking their lives.” Asked about the allegation that Franken drew “devil horns” on Tweeden’s head shot, Portman said, “It doesn’t sound out of line for him—but please. To get offended by that sounds ridiculous, like fourth grade.”

Mr. Met introduces himself to a fan.

“Please, call me Michael—Mr. Met is my father’s name.”

Franken’s claim that he wrote the skit years before Tweeden’s performance was also borne out by interviews that he did on NPR in 2004 and 2005. He described the skit as a throwback to the frankly lascivious U.S.O. sketches that Bob Hope used to perform with Raquel Welch. The conceit of Franken’s skit is that a nerdy male officer has written a part for a beautiful younger woman, and she has to audition for it. As she reads aloud from the script, she grows suspicious but keeps going, eventually reaching the line “Now kiss me!” To her disgust, the officer lustily does so. The stage directions in the 2006 version of the script say “Al grabs Leeann and plants a kiss on her. Leeann fights him off.” She then reproaches him, saying, “You just wrote this so that you could kiss me!”

“Yeah,” Franken’s character admits. (In videos of the skit, the audience bursts out laughing.)

The young woman protests, “If I were going to kiss anybody here, it would be one of these brave men—or women.” Pointing to the audience, she calls a random soldier onstage, who begins reading from the script. When the soldier says, “Now kiss me!,” the stage directions call for “a long deep kiss” from Tweeden. In video footage, she seems to be gamely playing the part, setting off hoots and hollers from the crowd.

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It was “surreal,” Franken told me, that Tweeden had publicly said of him, “I think he wrote that sketch just to kiss me”; her language was essentially borrowed from his skit. Moreover, her fighting him off and expressing anger had also been scripted by him. But it seemed impossible to relay such nuances to the press. Explaining that her accusations appropriated jokes from comic routines that they’d performed together would be as dizzying as describing an Escher drawing.

The U.S.O. skit didn’t end with the kissing scene. In a coda, Franken appears as a doctor who has just had “a cancellation” in his appointment schedule. Tweeden’s character is informed that “a woman your age should have a complete breast examination every year”; Franken then approaches her with his arms outstretched and his hands aimed at her chest. The script calls for Tweeden’s character to protest, “Al! At ease!” Franken, with a dirty-old-man nod to the audience, replies, “I’m afraid it’s a little too late for that.”

The joke was not memorable, yet when Shajn Cabrera saw the 2006 photograph of Franken on the plane, approaching Tweeden’s chest with his arms outstretched, he immediately recalled the “Dr. Franken” skit. Cabrera had been on the plane when the photograph was taken. At the time, he was a special assistant to the Sergeant Major of the Army, who hosts the U.S.O. tours. “I was the one who put the trip together,” Cabrera said. Looking at the photograph, he thought that “it was a hundred per cent in line with that skit when he does the breast exam.” The image, he said, “was not at all malicious.”

It’s understandable that Tweeden objected to Franken’s having reënacted the gag for a photograph while she was asleep. But when she wrote, “How dare anyone grab my breasts like this and think it’s funny?,” she omitted the fact that she had performed the “breast exam” bit multiple times. Metadata from the camera suggests that, contrary to Tweeden’s statement, the image was taken not on Christmas Eve, 2006, as a final taunt, but on December 21st. Photographs of a stage performance the previous day show Franken advancing toward Tweeden with splayed hands as she fends him off with a script, smiling in a winter coat and a Santa Claus hat.

Consenting to an act onstage is not the same as consenting to an act while sleeping. Rebecca Solnit, the writer known, among other things, for identifying the phenomenon of mansplaining, told me, “One of the key things about consent is it’s not blanket consent. The actor playing Romeo doesn’t get to kiss Juliet offstage because it’s in the script that they did onstage.”

Yet Bonnie Turner, a writer who worked with Franken on “S.N.L.,” said of Tweeden, “It showed bad faith, and was really wrongheaded of her, not to say that the skit was something they’d rehearsed and done over and over, night after night.” Cabrera told me that, when he saw the photograph, he felt sure that Franken had just been “goofing around” at the time.

Tweeden participated in other ribald U.S.O. skits. In one routine, she tells the audience that, as a morale booster, she has agreed to have sex with a soldier whose name Franken will pull from a box, explaining, “These are extraordinary circumstances.” The gag is that every name she picks is Franken’s, because he’s stuffed the raffle box. In a 2005 U.S.O. show with Robin Williams, Tweeden jumped into his arms, wrapped a leg around his waist, and spanked his bottom as he suggestively waved a plastic water bottle in front of his fly.

Given Tweeden’s repeated participation in such U.S.O. skits, Cabrera said that when he first heard about her allegations “it was shocking to me.” He noted that all the scripts had been approved by the Army, though he acknowledged that such humor might now be seen as inappropriate. He “never saw any animosity” between Franken and Tweeden, and noted, “No complaints were ever addressed to the Sergeant Major of the Army, and our job was to make sure everyone was happy.”

Though Tweeden has said that she felt too intimidated to complain to those in charge, she claims that she confided in several other people on the tour. But she declined to provide any names to me, or to be interviewed for this story. Two friends, who acted as intermediaries, said that she saw no gain in reopening the subject, which had exposed her to virulent online attacks.

I spoke with eight participants in the 2006 tour, including Julie Dintleman, the military escort who was assigned to Tweeden; none observed Tweeden being upset with Franken. “I don’t remember anything like that,” Dintleman said. Her assignment was to be almost continually at Tweeden’s side, except when the stars went to their quarters for “bed down.” Todd Tabb, a retired Air Force pilot who served as Franken’s military escort on an earlier U.S.O. tour, added that, ordinarily, “any incident would have been witnessed by a military officer with the ability to have someone arrested on the spot if there was an assault. Entertainers were treated carefully so that incidents did not occur. I was instructed to even go into the rest rooms, so I was never out of sight of the celebrity.” Though he wasn’t on the 2006 trip, he said, “I can’t imagine how someone wasn’t watching when they rehearsed.”

A deer starts dancing in a car's headlights instead of stereotypically freezing from fear.

“Well, of course we don’t all freeze up in the spotlight.”

Jerry Amoury, who was then a trombone player in the Army band, was onstage during every show with Franken and Tweeden in 2006, and performed on two other U.S.O. tours with Franken. Amoury said, of Tweeden, “I’m not mitigating what she said, and if someone says something the ethical thing is to listen. But, based on my experience, it makes no sense.” As Amoury recalls it, Franken directed “no inappropriate energy” toward Tweeden, and he observed no tension between them. He said that Franken’s “humor could be blunt,” but, he added, “he was not a lecher, and didn’t have a wandering eye.” The photograph of Tweeden, he said, certainly “looked sexist out of context,” but “in context the whole thing was like being stuck on a smelly bus. Those planes are loud, there was a wrestler on board, and people were taking funny pictures. It was campy.”

In Tweeden’s telling, Franken “had someone take a photo” expressly to humiliate her. Doug McIntyre, a co-host and confidant of Tweeden’s at the radio station, who helped her prepare her public statement, told me, “She alleged that Franken got the Army photographer to take the picture, and put it on a disk, so her disk had this one extra picture. It was the caboose. She took it as the final ‘F.U.’ from Franken. The only person who got it was her.” He said that Tweeden had especially objected to this “bullying,” and that Franken’s pose in the photograph was no mere joke. “A comedian does jokes for an audience, but this was an audience of one,” he said.

This is incorrect. Many people on the trip also received CDs that included the photograph. Andy Barr, the Franken assistant, received the CD, which I have seen. He is a pack rat, and kept the original packaging. The mailer, postmarked January 9, 2007, is stamped “Official Business.” The return address is “Department of the Army, Office of the Chief of Public Affairs.” The disk’s label says “U.S.O.” and its plastic case includes a personal note from and contact information for Montigo White, an Army photographer on the trip, who wrote, “It was a pleasure to serve with you on the 2006 Tour.” White, now a command sergeant major in the Army’s Defense Information School, declined requests for comment. His wife, reached at their house, in Alexandria, Virginia, said, “I’m not confirming or denying that he took the picture.”

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Franken recalls the incident that ended his career as lasting a split second. “I remember stepping on the plane, somebody saying, ‘Al, take a picture,’ and pointing to Leeann.” Pictures taken within a few minutes on the same camera roll show Franken doing other gags: in one, he’s delivering a mock speech; in another, he’s dancing with White, the Army photographer. It was near the end of what Franken called “a bawdy tour.” He said, “We were punchy. I was goofing around.” Even so, Franken admitted, the photograph of Tweeden could be seen as having crossed a line. “What’s wrong with the picture to me is that she’s asleep,” he said. “If you’re asleep, you’re not giving your consent.” When he saw the image that November morning, he said, “I genuinely, genuinely felt bad about that.”

Many people who worked in comedy with Franken defended his behavior more strongly than he did himself. Jane Curtin, who regards him as one of the few non-sexist men she worked with at “S.N.L.,” said, “They were doing a U.S.O. tour. They’re notoriously burlesque. The photo was funny because she’s wearing a flak jacket, and he’s looking straight at the camera and pretending he’s trying to fondle her breasts. But the humor is he can’t get to them—if a bullet can’t get them, Al can’t get them.” James Downey said, “Much of what Al does when goofing around involves adopting the persona of a douche bag. When I saw the photo, I knew exactly what he was doing. The joke was about him. He was doing ‘an asshole.’ ” Christine Zander, who wrote for “S.N.L.” between 1987 and 1993, said, “It was a mockery of someone acting in bad taste,” adding, “It’s so absurd she turned something that was written—these were trunk pieces, old sketches—into something improvised just for her.” Zander went on, “It’s tragic. All the women who know him from ‘S.N.L.’ and in New York and L.A.”—thirty-six in all—“signed a petition, but it wasn’t enough.” She added, “It makes you feel terrible and depressed, especially when there are people running the country who need to be charged.”

Franken’s friend Eli Attie, a former speechwriter for Al Gore who moved to Hollywood to write for “The West Wing” and other shows, told me, “Things he’s done as a comedian look very different through the prism of a senator.” He observed, “The comedy world is very different from politics. In writers’ rooms, they try to be loose. They say outrageous, unfiltered things. In politics, you try to censor yourself. You’re always fearful you’ll offend. You have to play error-free ball.”

Abig part of Franken’s political problem was the way the story broke. KABC-AM released Tweeden’s material on its Web site, giving it the look of a proper news story. In reality, the station, which is owned by Cumulus Media, was a struggling conservative talk-radio station whose survival plan was to become the most pro-Trump station in Los Angeles. Three top staffers there had been meeting secretly for weeks, after hours, with Tweeden to prepare her statement, but it hadn’t been vetted with even the most cursory fact-checking. Nobody contacted Franken until after the story had been posted online. The station gave Franken less advance warning than it gave the Drudge Report, which it tipped off the previous day. After posting the story, Tweeden embarked on a media tour, starting with a live press conference and proceeding to interviews with CNN’s Jake Tapper (who had been alerted the previous day), Sean Hannity, and the cast of “The View.”

Lomonaco, Franken’s former chief of staff, said, “Typically, reporters will reach out to you for comment, so you have a heads-up, and some opportunity to put your best foot forward. But KABC posted it first and only then reached out to us. It was such an important framing moment. It had the veneer of a legitimate news story without having to abide by any of the conventions of journalism.”

McIntyre, Tweeden’s former co-host at the station, told me that he had “bluntly” lobbied to give Franken more time to respond but was overruled by Drew Hayes, the station’s operations director, and by Nathan Baker, the news director, both of whom feared that the story would leak. McIntyre and Baker confirmed to me that nobody fact-checked Tweeden’s account. They evidently didn’t ask for the names of the people on the U.S.O. tour whom Tweeden said she had confided in at the time; in fact, they made no effort to reach anyone who’d been on the trip. They didn’t check the date of the photograph, or look at online videos showing other actresses performing the same role on earlier tours. They didn’t realize that although Tweeden claimed she never let Franken get near her face after the first rehearsal, there were numerous images of her performing the kiss scene with Franken afterward. Nor did they review the script or the photographs showing Tweeden laughing onstage as Franken struck the same “breast exam” pose.

“The photograph speaks for itself,” McIntyre told me. “That carried the day.” He explained that, “as a local radio station, we didn’t have the investigative tools at hand” to vet her account. But he had worked closely with Tweeden for nine months, and had confidence in “the integrity of her character.” She was “a trusted employee who had a photograph,” he said, adding, “If we didn’t trust her, she couldn’t have been our news anchor.”

McIntyre, who describes himself as a Never Trump Republican, has since left the station, which, he said, has “taken a more pro-Trump position since I left, as a business decision.” Hayes, the operations director, declined to be interviewed. In 2011, under his management, Trump appeared on the air at least once; the station also provided an early platform to Steve Bannon. In 2016, according to a well-informed source, Hayes began chastising on-air talent if they criticized Trump. Hayes’s Twitter account shows that in 2016 the family Christmas tree was decorated with a crocheted Trump ornament, and that in 2018 his son had an internship with the Republican National Committee. Baker, who describes himself as politically independent, has since left KABC-AM to work as a senior strategist at Madison McQueen, a conservative media company; among other things, he has helped create ads for Senator Ted Cruz. While at KABC-AM, he was also a consulting producer with PJ Media, a hyper-partisan conservative-opinion platform. He told me that, as KABC-AM’s news director, he had felt obliged to contact Franken’s office; at the same time, he “didn’t want to step on Leeann telling a story that was very difficult for her.”

In interviews, Tweeden has described her decision to speak out as torturous. She has said that she “wanted to say something” earlier, but people she knew “said, ‘Oh, my God, you will get annihilated and never work in this town again,’ and I was afraid.” At the time of the 2006 U.S.O. tour, Tweeden was transitioning from modelling to broadcasting, and she was an on-air correspondent for Fox Sports’ “Best Damn Sports Show Period.” She went on to host a late-night poker show on NBC.

During those years, Tweeden shared the damning photograph of Franken with a few good friends, including Hannity. On Super Bowl Sunday in 2005, Hannity introduced her to his audience as a “right-winger” who was there to discuss the game. But he soon asked her how she, as a conservative, could pose “halfway naked on the covers” of magazines such as Playboy and FHM. “I do it with the troops in mind,” she said, and described how much she enjoyed signing such photographs for soldiers while doing U.S.O. tours. “I want to be this generation’s Raquel Welch,” she said. By the time of the 2006 U.S.O. trip, Tweeden had begun referring to Hannity as a friend.

A signpost points in numerous directions all of which are labeled with Trump quotes.

According to McIntyre, Hannity wanted to use the photograph in 2007, when it would have derailed Franken’s first Senate bid. But he deferred to Tweeden, who feared that, because she had been a lingerie model, her credibility would be attacked. “To Sean Hannity’s credit, he never said a word about it,” McIntyre told me. (Hannity, through a spokesperson, praised Tweeden as “patriotic” and called Franken “literally insane.”) McIntyre emphasized that Tweeden and KABC-AM deliberately chose not to break the story with Hannity, or on Fox, because they didn’t want it to be tainted with charges of political bias.

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There was a history of deep animosity between Fox News’ conservative hosts and Franken. Fox sued Franken over his 2003 best-seller, “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them,” which relentlessly disparages the network and its big star at the time, Bill O’Reilly. It includes a chapter mocking Hannity as, among other things, “an angry, Irish Ape-man.” Franken writes that, after having a greenroom shouting match with Hannity about Rush Limbaugh, in 1996, he “had never in my life hated a person more.” Fox dropped the suit, but O’Reilly reportedly threatened vengeance. When Andrea Mackris later sued O’Reilly for sexually harassing her while she was a producer at Fox News, she revealed that, in 2004, O’Reilly had told her, “If you cross Fox News Channel, it’s not just me, it’s Roger Ailes”—at the time the head of the network—“who will go after you. . . . Ailes operates behind the scenes, strategizes and makes things happen so that one day BAM! The person gets what’s coming to them but never sees it coming. Look at Al Franken, one day he’s going to get a knock on his door and life as he’s known it will change forever. That day will happen, trust me.” When Tweeden accused Franken, one of his wife’s first thoughts was of O’Reilly’s prediction.

Tweeden may have had reasons to worry about how her story would be received. In the past, she had been accused of making misstatements about her life. In 2002, when she was twenty-eight, she appeared on “The Howard Stern Show” to promote her inclusion in FHM’s “100 Sexiest Women” feature. Stern questioned a claim, in her official bio, that she had turned down admission to Harvard University in order to model. At first, Tweeden chatted with Stern about growing up in Manassas, Virginia, where her father was a mechanic in the Air Force. She said that she had graduated from high school at sixteen and “ran off with a thirty-year-old guy” at seventeen. Stern asked, “Didn’t you say you got into Harvard, but you turned it down for modelling?” She answered, “Yeah, I was going to go.” Stern said, “What do you mean you were going to go? You didn’t get in!” Tweeden stuck to her story, explaining that her mother was friends with someone who got the children of celebrities into Ivy League schools—and could have secured her a spot, too. Stern asked for her SAT scores; she said that she couldn’t remember them, but guessed that they were around twelve hundred. “You couldn’t get into Harvard!” he said. Tweeden insisted, “I guarantee you, if I had wanted to, I could, absolutely.” Stern joked, “I was going to go to Harvard, but they didn’t want me. I was going to do Pam Anderson last night, too.”

Tweeden had also taken some controversial political stands. In 2011, in an appearance on “Hannity,” she sided with “birthers,” calling on President Barack Obama to produce a birth certificate to prove his citizenship, and praised Trump, who had been stoking racist suspicions about Obama’s identity. “I think Donald Trump is brilliant,” she added. “Who knows how far he could go?”

In February, 2017, Tweeden was hired as a news anchor on KABC-AM’s show “McIntyre in the Morning.” That spring, McIntyre mentioned Franken on the air and noticed that Tweeden “flinched.” He later asked her about it, and she said, “Let’s just say I’m not a fan.” On October 30, 2017, as the Harvey Weinstein story was inspiring a torrent of other sexual-harassment accusations, “McIntyre in the Morning” did a phone interview with Jackie Speier, a Democratic representative in California, who said that, as a young congressional aide, she had been sexually assaulted by a chief of staff; he had held her face and stuck his tongue in her mouth. During the break, Tweeden said to McIntyre that this was what Franken “did to me.” Speier’s allegation, however, involved a boss assaulting a subordinate in an office; Franken and Tweeden were volunteers performing a scripted kiss, and he had no supervisory authority over her.

Tweeden had access to the eleven-year-old photograph on her phone, and she showed it to McIntyre. “The picture is what got my attention,” McIntyre told me. Without it, he said, he wouldn’t have done the story, adding, “It wasn’t sexual assault, or rape, or anything approaching that. It was degradation and humiliation, and she had proof.”

He asked Tweeden if she wanted to go public, warning her that accusing a political figure would make her “fair game.” Her husband was in the Air Force, and they had two small children. McIntyre told me that, a few days later, Tweeden said that she was ready. (Baker recalled that the preliminary discussions had gone on for months.)

Tweeden began working through every detail with McIntyre and Baker, and, later, with Hayes. McIntyre also suggested that Tweeden talk to her friend Lauren Sivan, a former anchor for the station, who was one of the witnesses against Weinstein. Sivan had risked her reputation to speak out about Weinstein’s having masturbated in front of her. When Tweeden told her about Franken, Sivan said to me, “the story, it was strange—because they were doing it as a skit.” She sympathized with Tweeden, whom she described as having felt “mocked and humiliated” by Franken. But she wasn’t sure how a public accusation would be received. She suggested that Tweeden take the story to a mainstream outlet, and even gave her the name of a reputable reporter. Instead, Sivan told me, Hayes controlled the process, which she considered a “mistake,” because “it’s a right-wing conservative radio station” and “it seemed like they just wanted to milk the story.” Nevertheless, Sivan said, of Tweeden, “it was absolutely something she wanted to do—I think she hated Franken.”

A week before Tweeden went public, Roy Moore, the Republican nominee in a special Senate election in Alabama, was accused of engaging in inappropriate behavior with several teen-age girls, one of whom was fourteen at the time. Moore denied the allegations, and Trump, who had endorsed Moore, stuck by him. But the allegations handed Democrats a wedge issue and put Republicans on the defensive. Hannity was particularly on the spot: having dismissed Moore’s conduct as “consensual” and mere “kissing,” he issued a rare on-air apology.

At the same time that the Republican Party was contending with the scandal, Franken was rising in prominence, in part because of his deft cross-examinations of such Trump Administration appointees as Betsy DeVos and Rick Perry. Bystanders applauded when Franken walked into Washington restaurants. His latest book had reached No. 1 on the Times best-seller list. Feminists had welcomed his support of the #MeToo movement, and praised him for drafting a bill to prohibit mandatory arbitration in employment-related cases of sexual harassment and discrimination. The legislation would guarantee women the right to publicly press charges, rather than submit to secret settlements. He was also praised for supporting advanced training for law-enforcement officers who dealt with rape victims.

But along with the adulation came detractors. Several far-right news sites appear to have known about Tweeden’s story shortly before it broke. In Southern California, a gossip Web site, Crazy Days and Nights, was contacted by an anonymous tipster who predicted that Franken was about to get caught in a sex scandal. There was a link to an online message board where someone calling himself Sam Spade was claiming that Franken had “groped” his aunt on a New York City subway in the nineteen-seventies. (Asked about this, Franken joked, “Ah, yes, Aunt Gertrude—I remember her well.”) Archives show that “Sam Spade” separately posted a message saying that he “hoped Al Franken would die a slow painful death.”

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At 1 a.m. on November 16th, Roger Stone, the notorious right-wing operative, announced, on Twitter, “It’s Al Franken’s ‘time in the barrel.’ Franken next in long list of Democrats to be accused of ‘grabby’ behavior.” After Tweeden’s story was posted, Alex Jones, the extremist radio host, boasted on his show that Stone had told him, in advance, “Get ready. Franken’s next.” Stone told me that an executive at Fox who was friendly with Tweeden had tipped him off.

Sean Hannity exulted when the news broke. Tweeden called in to his radio show live, and Hannity described her as “a longtime friend.” Hannity, who, when Ailes died, celebrated him as one of America’s “great patriotic warriors,” pronounced the Franken photograph “disgusting”—and declared that Franken had been accused of “sexual molestation.” Trump joined the fray on Twitter, insinuating that the photograph documented an assault in progress: “Where do his hands go in pictures 2, 3, 4, 5, & 6?”

A man vacuuming daydreams about people celebrating him for helping out with chores with a banner that reads Ned Helped Out.

Twelve minutes after KABC-AM went on the air with the news, Franken’s office got its first press inquiry, and hundreds soon followed. Shelleby, the deputy chief of staff, recalls, “It was bedlam. No one looked into the details. There was no way to catch up.”

Franken tried to devise a response, but, he told me, he found it “impossible to explain the context of the goofing around everybody had been doing, so I just said, ‘It was a joke—it wasn’t funny, and I apologize.’ ” His statement was lambasted on social media as hopelessly inadequate. He released a longer, more self-critical apology. But, he told me, “I was in shock, and I wasn’t thinking as clearly as I should have.” He went on, “You feel very trapped. And the press was just reporting it as she said it.”

Norman Ornstein, a political scientist with the American Enterprise Institute, who is one of Franken’s oldest friends, explained that nobody felt it would be helpful to correct Tweeden’s inaccuracies, such as clarifying that the skit had been written years before she and Franken rehearsed it. “You can’t start by attacking the accuser,” he said. “You’ll look like a jerk and probably be a jerk.”

Franken thought that the only way to make his case was to appear before the Senate Ethics Committee. He called for a hearing almost immediately. The committee can subpoena witnesses and gather documentary evidence. He said, “I knew we’d get the photographer and other people on the plane” as witnesses, adding, “I felt that the truth would be out.” The committee, which is bipartisan, is often slow and lax—in 2018, it received a hundred and thirty-eight reports of rules violations, and none resulted in a disciplinary action—but it was nevertheless an established forum for weighing such allegations. And Franken, by calling for an independent investigation into his own conduct, distinguished himself from Trump and most other recent targets of sexual-misconduct charges. Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, immediately endorsed Franken’s request, and the process was set in motion.

Franken, meanwhile, sent a personal apology to Tweeden, which she read aloud on “The View.” He wrote, “There’s no excuse, and I understand why you could feel violated by that photo. I remember that rehearsal differently, but what’s important is the impact it had on you—and you felt violated by my actions, and for that I apologize.” When Tweeden accepted the apology, and said that she wasn’t asking him to resign from office, Franken thought that the worst was behind him.

But Tweeden’s charges were soon followed by seven additional allegations of groping or unwanted kisses. A pattern of misbehavior is often crucial to proving sexual misconduct. Franken told me, “My first instinct was ‘This doesn’t make any sense. This didn’t happen.’ But then, when they started adding up, I said, ‘Well, maybe I’m doing something I’m not aware of.’ ” He added, “But this was out of the blue for me.”

His staff, too, was flabbergasted. Franken had many high-level women advisers, including a chief of staff and a communications director. They ran his campaigns, did his polling, raised funds, and directed his state office. Staffers were accustomed to keeping a close eye on Franken, but only because they feared that his sense of humor might get him into trouble. This had occasionally happened: in his first campaign, he’d barely survived a flap about a tasteless article that he had once written, for Playboy, about scientific advances in sex robots. He also made cracks—such as honking “More important than you!” as he cut in front of tourists in the Senate security line—that rubbed some people the wrong way. (In the Senate chamber, though, Franken was careful to remove jokes from his repertoire, especially during his first term; he wanted voters to see him as a statesman, not as a comedian.)

Alana Petersen, his longtime state director, told me that she had trained Franken’s staff to place someone within arm’s reach whenever he was in public. These minders took names of potential donors, followed up on constituents’ questions, and stood guard against possibly offensive humor. “There was never a single complaint,” Petersen said, about mistreatment of women. “And, frankly, I wouldn’t have put up with it.” All three people who served Franken as his chief of staff say that they never saw him behave inappropriately toward women. One of them, Casey Aden-Wansbury, told me, “This was not a case where there was some kind of open secret, as you sometimes see on the Hill.”

There was a related issue, however, where the staff had intervened: Franken could be physically obtuse. Staffers had told him not to swing his arms so much when he walked, and to close his mouth when he chewed. Petersen told me that he had “monster hands” and sometimes clapped her on the back so hard that it knocked the wind out of her. When he ate, spittle often flew across the table. “He’s sort of clumsy,” Gabrielle Zuckerman, who worked with him at Air America, the progressive talk-radio network, told me, recalling that a heavy backpack once caused him to fall off a chair, pinning him on his back like a turtle. He left the house with his shirt half tucked, and failed to pick up wet towels when staying with friends. He tended to hug many people, and kiss some, even on the mouth. “It was the New York hello-goodbye kiss,” a longtime adviser told me. The talk-show host Randi Rhodes and the comedian Sarah Silverman have described Franken as a social—not a sexual—“lip-kisser.” Silverman told GQ, “He has no sexuality.” (Afterward, Franken sent her a facetious note saying, “Thanks a lot.”) Nevertheless, after Franken kissed a female acquaintance on the mouth in 2007, during his first campaign, an aide from South Dakota, David Benson, took him aside and said, “Don’t do that.” “Really?” Franken said. Benson warned him that people might misinterpret it.

Franken told me that he became more careful after that. “I’m a very physical person,” he said. “I guess maybe sometimes I’m oblivious.” He added, “I’ve been a hugger all my life. When I take pictures, I bring people in close.” He recalled that he often turned people toward the light for a better angle, reminding me, “I used to be in show business.” When posing with kids, he jokingly put them in a headlock. “The family would often laugh about it,” Franken said. But once, when he did this in the Capitol, another senator, Chris Murphy, warned him, “That looks like something that will bring joy and happiness to a thousand families—until it ends your career.”

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Franken emphasized that he’d never heard any complaints about his behavior toward women—“not firsthand, secondhand, or thirdhand”—until the day Tweeden’s story broke. Jess McIntosh, who was his spokesperson from 2007 to 2010, said, “I’ve taken thousands of those photos with him and I’ve never seen any behavior that was questionable. We were together non-stop—like, the only two people staying in a hotel—and nothing happened. I felt completely comfortable.”

To Franken’s dismay, he had no memory of any of the alleged accusers except Tweeden. He had met the seven women long ago, mostly in fleeting interactions in crowded venues, posing for photographs with them. Only two incidents were alleged to have happened after Franken was elected to the Senate. A woman named Lindsay Menz told CNN that, at the Minnesota State Fair in 2010, her husband had taken a photograph of her with Franken, and that Franken had grabbed her bottom while posing. She said that the episode had lasted three to four seconds, and that Franken’s hand had been “wrapped tightly around my butt cheek.” (Menz didn’t respond to requests for an interview.)

The other claim accusing Franken of misconduct as a senator involved an inaugural party for Obama, in 2009. A liberal journalist named Tina Dupuy said that she had asked Franken to pose with her for a photograph. Minutes later, she posted the image on the Web site FishbowlLA, saying, “Totally stoked. So suck it.” Dupuy told me that, despite her apparent excitement at the time, it had been an upsetting encounter; Franken, she said, had squeezed her waist in a creepy way for several seconds. “It wasn’t violent rape,” she acknowledged. “But it was, like, ‘Ick!’ ” She told the press that, at the time, she had put on weight, and felt uneasy about her body. A. J. Goodman, who was with Franken when the photograph was taken, said, “She asked for the picture, put her arm around his shoulder—what was he supposed to do? How’s he supposed to know how she feels? He’s not a mind reader.”

A patient in a hospital bed is being crushed by medical equipment.

“As soon as we find a place to put this outdated medical equipment, you should be feeling better.”

Sarah Silverman points out that the photo-op allegations, even if true, are of a different magnitude than the kind of grotesque misconduct that has often been exposed in the #MeToo era. “This isn’t Kavanaugh,” she said. “It isn’t Roy Moore.” In fact, one of Franken’s photo-op accusers told the Huffington Post that she voted for him afterward.

Two of the seven accusers were unnamed women who claimed that he had attempted to kiss them without their consent. Both incidents took place while he was hosting a comedic political show for Air America. One woman got an unwanted kiss on the cheek after turning her head to avoid his mouth. The other sidestepped him.

The first incident occurred on April 28, 2006, in Brattleboro, Vermont, where Franken was broadcasting a live show at the Latchis Theatre, in front of seven hundred and fifty people. When a local elected official came onstage to hand him an award, he kissed her. The woman, whose name is being withheld at her request, declined to speak to me on the record. But she told her story, anonymously, to Jezebel, saying that she felt certain Franken had been aiming to give her a “wet, open-mouthed kiss.” She told Jezebel, “I felt demeaned. I felt put in my place.” She said that, although they were in a public place, nobody noticed the encounter. But Christian Avard, a local reporter, witnessed it, and told me, “I think it was supposed to be ‘Thank you very much,’ but it looked like a bad kiss on his part.”

About a week or two before Tweeden stepped forward, the former Vermont official tried to report Franken to the Boston Globe. The newspaper has standards requiring #MeToo accusers to be identified or to corroborate their story through documents and witnesses—preferably, people outside their immediate circle. The Globe deemed the story too weak. After Tweeden came forward, the woman called KABC-AM, but the station also passed. (McIntyre, Tweeden’s former co-host, told me he felt that blind accusations were unfair.) But, on November 30th, Jezebel ran the woman’s anonymous account, citing as corroboration an unnamed sister in whom the former Vermont official had confided.

Around then, Goodman called Franken and said, “Al, just tell me—I’ll always be with you, no matter what, but I have to know.” On the brink of tears, he told her, “There’s nothing!”

Jeff Lomonaco, his former chief of staff, said, “I’ll go to my grave thinking Al Franken is not a predatory person,” adding, “It was all very upsetting, because we all thought the #MeToo stuff was a very important conversation for the country to be having.” Andy Barr said, of Franken, “He is a warm, tactile person, especially when taking pictures,” adding that he could see how this behavior could be misunderstood. “There’s a difference between molesting someone and being friendly. But there may not be a difference between feeling molested and feeling that someone’s being friendly.” The only way forward, Franken’s staffers decided, was for him to take responsibility for having made women feel disrespected, while stressing that he hadn’t meant to do so.

The strategy backfired. At a moment when allegations of egregious sexual misconduct against such men as Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K., Mark Halperin, Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, Russell Simmons, and John Conyers were resulting in serious repercussions, Franken’s statement came off as insufficiently contrite.

Senate Democrats, meanwhile, were under increasing pressure from the media and women’s groups to explain why they were castigating Roy Moore but not Al Franken. Many Democrats felt that they needed to distance themselves from Franken in order to win in Alabama. Joe Trippi, the political consultant to Doug Jones, the Democrat who eventually defeated Moore, told me that, in reality, Franken had little bearing on the race. But Washington is its own ecosystem, and Democratic women in the Senate felt particularly exposed. They were put on the spot by the media much more than their male colleagues were, and they feared looking hypocritical. Rebecca Traister, a writer-at-large for New York, told me, “It’s obtuse to say ‘Let’s have an investigation’ and pretend that solves it. Investigations take months. Meanwhile, women like Kirsten Gillibrand were being grilled on it every day.” As new allegations kept coming, Traister said, “Al Franken was letting his caucus suffer.”

On December 1, 2017, seven female Democratic senators—Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Claire McCaskill, Mazie Hirono, Patty Murray, Maggie Hassan, and Catherine Cortez Masto—met with Chuck Schumer to tell him that most of them were on the verge of demanding Franken’s resignation. At least one of them had already drafted such a statement, and the group’s resolve hardened further when some of its members learned of an impending Politico story that contained a seventh allegation, by a former Senate staff member. The accuser, whose name is being withheld at her request, was known to some of the seven female senators. The woman said that, in 2006, when Franken was still a comedian, he had made her uneasy by looking as if he planned to kiss her. The senator she had worked for hadn’t known of the allegation at the time, but vouched for her credibility.

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According to someone familiar with the situation, Schumer spoke with Franken later that day, advising him to take the issue more seriously and to reach out to the women senators. Franken has no recollection of this conversation, but says that it’s wrong to suggest he wasn’t already taking the matter seriously. His plan was still to respond to Tweeden’s claims at the Senate Ethics Committee hearing. “I was going by the book,” Franken told me. “We didn’t think we should mount a lobbying campaign. But then it all started cascading.” He faults Schumer for not insisting to his caucus that an investigation was under way, and that due process required facts before a verdict. “Look, the Leader is called the Leader for a reason,” Franken told me.

On December 6th, Politico posted the story of the anonymous congressional staffer, under the headline “Another Woman Says Franken Tried to Forcibly Kiss Her.” The accuser said that, in 2006, she had accompanied the senator she used to work for to a taping of Franken’s Air America show. The senator left, and the accuser was gathering her papers when she looked up and saw Franken practically in her face. “He was between me and the door, and he was coming at me to kiss me,” the woman said. “It was very quick, and I think my brain had to work really hard to be, like, ‘Wait, what is happening?’ But I knew whatever was happening was not right, and I ducked.” According to the woman, Franken then said, “It’s my right as an entertainer.” Jess McIntosh, who worked for emily’s List after her years with Franken, and is an outspoken advocate of women’s issues, told me, “There’s zero chance he said he was entitled to kiss someone because he was in show business. He’s not entitled to anything, as he sees it. What he does say is ‘Sorry, it’s a show-business thing,’ when he’s moving someone into the light for a picture, or if he’s made a bad joke.” But the portrait of Franken in Politico reminded some people of Trump’s infamous claim, in the “Access Hollywood” tape, that celebrities like him could just grab women “by the pussy.”

Franken told me that it “was something I would never do or say.” He added, “Maybe it could have been a misunderstanding. If she seemed freaked out or something, I may have said, ‘Sorry, I was just trying to give you a hug, and that’s what we do in show business.’ Or something like that.” The story quoted him saying that the accusation was “categorically not true,” and that he looked forward to an Ethics Committee hearing. But Franken recalls thinking, This is really bad. It makes me look like I did something terrible.

Not long ago, I asked the woman if she thought that Franken had been making a sexual advance or a clumsy thank-you gesture.

A person walking down a street while it's raining is wearing a raincoat and holding a tiny umbrella for his phone.

“Is there a difference?” she replied. “If someone tries to do something to you unwanted?” From her standpoint, because she was at work—a professional woman deserving respect—his intentions didn’t matter.

Franken has maintained that the woman’s story was the allegation “that killed me.” I asked her if his behavior was bad enough to end his Senate career.

“I didn’t end his Senate career—he did,” she said.

Franken was stricken when I related her comments to him. “Look,” he said. “This has really affected my family. I loved being in the Senate. I loved my staff—we had fun and we got good things done, big and small, and they all meant something to me.” He started to cry. “For her to say that, it’s just so callous. It’s just so wrong.” Rubbing his eyes beneath his glasses, he said, “I ended my career by saying ‘Thanks’ to her—that’s what she’s saying.”

Minutes after Politico posted the story, Senator Gillibrand’s chief of staff called Franken’s to say that Gillibrand was going to demand his resignation. Franken was stung by Gillibrand’s failure to call him personally. They had been friends and squash partners. In a later call, Gillibrand’s chief of staff offered to have Gillibrand speak with Franken, but by that time Franken was frantically conferring with his staff and his family. Franken’s office proposed that Franken’s daughter speak with Gillibrand instead, but Gillibrand declined.

Gillibrand then went on Facebook and posted her demand that Franken resign: “Enough is enough. The women who have come forward are brave and I believe them. While it’s true that his behavior is not the same as the criminal conduct alleged against Roy Moore, or Harvey Weinstein, or President Trump, it is still unquestionably wrong, and should not be tolerated.”

Minutes later, at a previously scheduled press conference, Gillibrand added insult to injury: she reiterated her call for Franken to resign while also trumpeting her sponsorship of a new bill that banned mandatory arbitration of sexual-harassment claims. She didn’t mention that Franken had originated the legislation—and had given it to Gillibrand to sponsor, out of concern that it might be imperilled by his scandal.

I recently asked Gillibrand why she felt that Franken had to go. She said, “We had eight credible allegations, and they had been corroborated, in real time, by the press corps.” She acknowledged that she hadn’t spoken to any accusers, to assess their credibility, but said, “I had been a leader in this space of sexual harassment and assault, and it was weighing on me.” Franken was “entitled to whichever process he wants,” she said. “But he wasn’t entitled to me carrying his water, and defending him with my silence.” She acknowledged that the accusations against Franken “were different” from the kind of rape or molestation charges made against many other #MeToo targets. “But the women who came forward felt it was sexual harassment,” she said. “So it was.”

Gillibrand’s call for Franken’s resignation triggered an immediate backlash. Ricki Seidman, a Democratic communications consultant in Washington, who worked with Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, in 1991, immediately posted a scorching response. “As a victim of sexual assault, you are cheapening my experience by leading a call for Senator Franken, who has been a champion for women, to step down based on the flimsy accounts that have come to light to date,” Seidman wrote. “Knowing of far worse behavior in the Senate, and FAR worse behavior among Republicans like Donald Trump and Roy Moore, the fact that you are equating Senator Franken with them, I find abhorrent and INSULTING to women.” Major Democratic donors, including Susie Tompkins Buell, the co-founder of the Esprit and North Face clothing lines, who had backed Gillibrand in the past, also turned against her. Buell told me that Gillibrand’s move was “opportunistic,” adding, “It was like a vigilante thing, it was so fast and so presumptuous. I hope women learn from this. You can’t rush to judgment. You ruin people’s lives.”

Gillibrand told me, “I’d do it again today,” adding, “If a few wealthy donors are angry about that, it’s on them.”

Soon after Gillibrand declared that Franken must resign, Senator Murray, who is in the Democratic leadership, made the same call, sending a signal to colleagues that the push was coming from the top. The Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a friend of Franken’s, recalls being astonished that there had been no emergency meeting of the Democratic caucus. “A reasonably organized group of our caucus decided to do this without giving their own colleagues a heads-up,” he said. “This was about demanding that a member of our own caucus resign from the Senate. It was a big deal.” From that point on, he said, “it was like a slow-rolling stampede through the day, waiting to see who would bolt next, with no meeting, no hearing, no process.”

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Franken asked to meet with Schumer, who suggested talking at his apartment in downtown D.C., in order to avoid the press. “It was like a scene out of a movie,” Franken recalled. Schumer sat on the edge of his bed while Franken and his wife, who had come to lend moral support, pleaded for more time. According to Franken, Schumer told him to quit by 5 p.m.; otherwise, he would instruct the entire Democratic caucus to demand Franken’s resignation. Schumer’s spokesperson denied that Schumer had threatened to organize the rest of the caucus against Franken. But he confirmed that Schumer told Franken that he needed to announce his resignation by five o’clock. Schumer also said that if Franken stayed he could be censured and stripped of committee assignments.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Franken told me. “I asked him for due process and he said no.”

By the end of the day, thirty-six Democratic senators had publicly demanded Franken’s resignation, including Schumer, who had known Franken since they had overlapped at Harvard. Schumer declined to be interviewed, but sent a statement: “Al Franken’s decision to step down was the right decision—for the good of the Senate and the good of the country. I regret losing him as a colleague but given the circumstances, it was inevitable.”

Franken, his wife, his children, and a group of staff and advisers argued late into the night about what to do. Shaken, Franken had asked his chief of staff, “Do you think I’m this terrible person?” His wife wanted to fight on, but his children worried about his well-being, and everyone’s biggest concern was that, if he remained a pariah, he couldn’t represent Minnesota effectively. Franken could have toughed it out like New Jersey’s Democratic senator Bob Menendez, who hung on despite having been indicted on federal corruption charges, in 2015. (Democrats hadn’t demanded Menendez’s resignation, largely because New Jersey’s governor at the time was a Republican and would have appointed a Republican replacement; in Franken’s case, the Minnesota governor was a Democrat.) But Franken decided he had to resign.

Drew Littman, Franken’s first chief of staff, told me, “People said he didn’t have to do it, but he’s so social—his nerves are exposed all the time. It was like going to school and thinking these people are your friends and they really like you, and then one day they all get together and beat you up. You don’t want to go back to that school after that.” Norman Ornstein, Franken’s friend, said, “It was no more a choice than jumping after they make you walk the plank.”

The next day, Franken gave a short resignation speech. Gillibrand and other Senate colleagues flocked to hug him afterward. But Franken told me, “I’m angry at my colleagues who did this. I think they were just trying to get past one bad news cycle.” For months, he ignored phone calls and cancelled dates with friends. “It got pretty dark,” he said. “I became clinically depressed. I wasn’t a hundred per cent cognitively. I needed medication.”

Franken feels deeply sorry that he made women uncomfortable, and is still trying to understand and learn from what he did wrong. But he told me that “differentiating different kinds of behavior is important.” He also argued, “The idea that anybody who accuses someone of something is always right—that’s not the case. That isn’t reality.”

For some activists in the women’s movement, Franken’s resignation was a welcome milestone. Linda Hirshman, the author of the recent book “Reckoning: The Epic Battle Against Sexual Abuse and Harassment,” told me, “Franken clearly intended to touch these women, and in doing so he violated their right to bodily integrity.” She argues that the Democratic Party has belatedly made up for having excused Bill Clinton’s treatment of women, adding that it’s “finally starting to be the party that protects women from having their asses grabbed.”

Other feminists see the episode as a necessary corrective. Traister, who thinks that the behavior described in the media qualifies as sexual harassment, told me, “One of the troubling things about this is that there aren’t easy answers. When you change rules, you end up penalizing people who were caught behaving according to the old rules. But if you don’t change the rules they will never change.”

The lawyer Debra Katz, who has represented Christine Blasey Ford and other sexual-harassment victims, remains troubled by Franken’s case. She contends, “The allegations levelled against Senator Franken did not warrant his forced expulsion from the Senate, particularly given the context in which most of the behavior occurred, which was in his capacity as a comedian.” She adds, “All offensive behavior should be addressed, but not all offensive behavior warrants the most severe sanction.” Katz sees Franken as a cautionary tale for the #MeToo movement. “To treat all allegations the same is not only inappropriate,” she warns. “It feeds into a backlash narrative that men are vulnerable to even frivolous allegations by women.” ♦

Published in the print edition of the July 29, 2019, issue.

Jane Mayer has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995.