This is an edited version of a letter I sent to Al Franken
Dear Mr. Franken:
I will begin this by telling you that I am a survivor of child sex abuse, date rape and emotional domestic violence.
Next I want to thank you for your service and say that I am sorry you are resigning, but there was one good thing that came of it. I finally felt comfortable dinging Donald Trump harshly on Facebook. I had worried about offending my conservative friends, so I only made a few, vague references to Donald Trump abusing women. Once you resigned, I repeatedly blasted my opinion that Donald Trump should resign because he abused women and girls. Not that this made any difference. (Sad emoji)
So the good guy goes, and the really bad guy remains.
Leanne Tweedon’s accusations against you smack of political opportunism. Her accusations against you could boost her street credibility as a conservative radio host. I don’t like victim shaming, but I did see the photos of her being rather sexual as an entertainer. Since she is a public person who engaged in rather sexual poses in public, her privacy is less of an issue. Mostly it is the fact that she is conservative radio show host that makes her accusations suspect.
And I remember the one woman who said you hugged her and left her hand on her breast the whole time, and then the photo came out and your hand was next to her breast but not on it.
Beyond that I don’t know about the accusations against you. Maybe they are true. I need to know more to judge.
But I do know about culture. I come from a White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) background. My great grandfather was a head groundskeeper on a landed estate in England, and his father was a head groundskeeper on another landed estate before him. My great grandfather studied horticulture at Kew Gardens and was sent to America to collect trees. I guess he sent the trees back to England, but he stayed, eventually opening a nursery.
You know how my WASP family (mostly dead now) hugged? They would touch you lightly on the shoulder and kiss the air next to your ear. It would be easy to have some confusion about touch with them. I don’t like being hugged, and for years I thought it was because I had such an uber WASP background. Then I read about child sex abuse survivors not liking being touched, and I realized why I did not like being touched.
Honestly, my experiences with abuse and date rape, make intimacy very uncomfortable as well as the issues with suicide, low self esteem, outbursts of anger....and more that came from these very severe abuses. I have also experienced sexual harassment such as the janitor who put his hand on the bottom of every girl who worked in my hometown library every time he walked by. We teenaged girls confided in each other how much we hated that, but we never told anyone.
I also experienced it on a Polish fishing vessel when I worked as Foreign Fisheries Observer on Soviet, Polish and Japanese fishing vessels in the 1980’s.
Let’s say for the sake of this argument that you really did place your hand on women’s bottoms while taking photos on the campaign trail. There is no comparison between child sex abuse and date rape on one hand and a brief fondle of a bottom on the other. One I experienced as having lasting and severe damage. The other I experienced as annoying. Moreover I learned how to avoid the latter by turning around when these disgusting men walked behind me. I don’t know how the innocent four year old me would have avoided the sex abuse or how this five foot two inch tall woman would have avoided the date rape perpetrated by two football players. To have these kinds of transgressions treated as somehow similar is to do a great disservice to victims of real abuses.
Then there are the cultural differences. I have a friend who is Jewish as is her husband. He gets loud at times and once a neighbor called Child Protective Services on him.
My friend was concerned that she was misunderstanding her husband’s actions. Since I am also a survivor of emotional domestic violence, I knew the answer.
“Are you afraid of your husband?” I asked.
“No, of course not,” she answered. “He yells for five minutes, and then it is all over.”
My ex-husband would yell at me for up to eight hours at a time. By the time our marriage ended, my constant state of being was fear and sadness. Just because you yell a bit now and then, does not make you an abuser. If you yell frequently enough and long enough to induce a fear reaction in others, then your yelling is abusive.
The same goes with sex abuse and rape and other forms of unwanted touch.
My friend added that her Jewish culture is more expressive and physical than my WASP culture, but I already knew that.
Minneapolis is multi-ethnic, but rural Minnesota has all those WASPy Norwegians and Swedes or so Garrison Keillor says. Garrison Keillor was accused of much worse abuses than you. I am sure happy that his loss from public life came recently instead of 25 years ago though.
Yeah, we really need to have this conversation about sexual abuse and harassment so a wonderful humorist such as Garrison Keillor knows better than to engage in unwanted touching.
I think an ethics investigation was what needed to happen to you, not more unless the investigation turned up evidence of more serious wrong doing. If the ethics investigation had turned up worse behavior, then it would be appropriate for you to resign.
In the meantime, lets have workshop on appropriate and inapprpriate touch and support survivors sharing their stories in public. But let us also differentiate seriously harmful wrongdoing from ill advised behavior. Sex abusers and rapers are out automatically. If the crime is a hand on the bottom, let us demand the accused work on changing his or her behavior. If they don't change then they are out.
Virginia Jones
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