This is the First Part of a series of diaries I’m doing that will scrutinize the allegations against former U.S. Senator Al Franken
Two nights ago on MSNBC, Lawrence O’Donnell was forced to retract his supposed scoop claiming that Trump had co-signed his Deutsche bank loans with Russian Oligarchs. Even though O’Donnell repeatedly stated “if true” while making the claim, people on Twitter spread the news around acting as if it was true. That’s the power of making an accusation in the world of the internet, everyone automatically has an opinion about it and nobody tries to decipher what’s really true.
As much as we wanted the story to be accurate, Lawrence did the right thing by retracting his scoop. Even when your opponent is constantly lying at you, more lies aren’t going to make the situation better. If a story relies on one person as the source, you don’t run with the story as soon as you finish listening to their statement. You have to thoroughly cross check your source to make sure they’re not lying to you.
That’s why we need to take a look back at one of the most divisive moments in the party’s recent history, Al Franken being accused of sexual misconduct and being pressured to resign from the Senate, and look at everything the accusers claimed to have happened. It’s been close to 2 years since the first accusations came out and most people already have an opinion on what whether Franken deserved to resign or not. The most common thing people bring up is the photo of Franken supposedly groping Leann Tweeden and the fact that 8 women have come forward with claims against Franken. But despite the fact that Franken had an unusually high number of accusers, there’s a searing problem with most of them, there are too many discrepancies in their stories that don’t pass the smell test upon closer inspection.
It looks more and more likely that the websites that published these stories allowed the women to tell their stories unchallenged without crosschecking them or researching their authenticity. Let me state that I’m not saying all of these women are liars, my focus is on the media (CNN, Huff Post, The Atlantic, Politico, and Jezebel) for failing to do proper background checks on their sources which can lead to disastrous consequences when they’re not thoroughly vetted.
In 2014, Sabrina Erdely of Rolling Stone magazine published the infamous story “A Rape on Campus” where a girl named Jackie claimed to have been gang raped by a group of frat boys as part of an initiation. The resulting backlash made the fraternity subjected to vandalism such as graffiti on the building and the windows being broken with bottles and cinder blocks.
However, key discrepancies began to be revealed about Jackie’s story such as the fraternity stating that they didn’t have a party on the night in question, and that their pledging happens in Spring, not Autumn like Jackie claimed.
Via Washington Post
The fraternity also said it has reviewed the roster of employees at the university’s Aquatic and Fitness Center for 2012 and found that it does not include a member of the fraternity — a detail Jackie provided in her account to Rolling Stone and in interviews with The Post — and that no member of the house matches the description detailed in the Rolling Stone account. The statement also said that the house does not have pledges during the fall semester.
“Moreover, no ritualized sexual assault is part of our pledging or initiating process,” the fraternity said. “This notion is vile, and we vehemently refute this claim.”
Jackie’s story fell apart when Jackie’s friends began to refute her own claims about having bruises along with Jackie’s claim that her friends told her not to go to the police. Rolling Stone was forced to retract the story, Erdeley was eventually fired, and Rolling Stone was forced to settle civil suits with the University of Virginia for defamation.
Consider how the Franken story started compared to other prominent #MeToo moments like the stories about Harvey Weinstein, Charlie Rose, and Max Landis. They all had major news sources (New Yorker, Wash Post, Daily Beast) write lengthy articles about them where the news sources contacted dozens of independent witnesses along with friends and family of the accusers to verify their claims before publishing the stories. However, Franken’s allegations started on a right wing radio station and the other allegations came dripping in from other websites one after another. Relying solely on one person’s accusation for a sexual harassment story is incredibly risky because it can easily blow up in your face if you’re not careful about the person’s authenticity. In 2017, a new Roy Moore accuser named Jaime Phillips went to the Washington Post and claimed she had a sexual relationship with Roy Moore and had an abortion for him. Instead of publishing the story immediately, the Post did more digging into her past and found out the accuser was a plant from James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas and was trying to discredit the Post’s Roy Moore coverage.
Via Vox
Inconsistencies in Phillips’s explosive stories quickly raised suspicion. The place she gave as her employer had no record of her. An online search uncovered a GoFundMe account page registered to a Jaime Phillips who was moving to New York “to combat the lies and deceipt of the liberal MSM.” She claimed in an interview filmed by Washington Post videographers that she was interviewing for a job at the Daily Caller, but the woman she named as her interviewer wasn’t actually employed at the conservative website.
At the end of that interview, Phillips said, “I think I probably just want to cancel and not go through with it at this point.”
The Post says the woman was later spotted entering the New York offices of Project Veritas.
It’s one of the reasons why the most truthful #MeToo articles doesn’t usually have one person as the sole source of information. Running a story without fact checking your sources and not contacting independent witnesses can crush your credibility and your career.
I’m going to be creating more posts soon detailing the other allegations and why they don’t pass muster. I have no idea if anybody is going to actually change their minds from what I write since a lot of people tend to have their opinions about the matter set in stone. But there never was a proper investigation into all of the allegations and we have to rely on hearsay and out of context photos to believe the allegations in the first place. We can’t be a party that resorts to mob rule and sweeping our mistakes under the rug, we need to confront what happened to make sure we’re not tricked into eating our own ever again.
Friday, Aug 30, 2019 · 5:45:58 PM +00:00
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Andy1116
I was nervous about how this was going to go down and the reactions were exactly pretty much what I expected. I know that this is going to be divisive for the people here, but the allegations were never given proper scrutiny and there is a tendency to believe that Franken was guilty and the allegations were all credible because there were 8 of them.
The main source I’m using (his name is Josh Mashey and he gave me permission to reference his work) spent at least 6-7 months investigating every tiny minutiae of the Franken allegations which includes cross checking the accusers testimony with their personal and social media history, investigating the rooms and floor plans of where the incidents were supposed to have happened, and scanned hundreds if not thousands of photos that were taken with Franken.
Here are the results:
At least 3 women deliberately lied about Franken.
The remaining 5 allegations have problems with their accuracy once the stories are scrutinized. These 5 allegations can’t be proven to have been deliberate lies, but there’s a high possibility of a malleable memory.
In order to prove I’m serious about looking over the allegations, the next diary I post will prove that another one of the accusers outside of Leanne Tweeden definitely lied about what happened with Franken.
Friday, Aug 30, 2019 · 11:59:28 PM +00:00
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Andy1116
Update 2: In response to the criticism here, let me state a few things for the record.
- I’m not doing this because I want to generate controversy for the election. If I did, I would have published it MUCH closer to the Iowa caucuses.
- The point of these diaries isn’t to spread some misogynistic BS that you can’t believe anything a sexual assault victim claims. The point is that sexual assault victim claims need to be taken seriously while also being thoroughly investigated before being published. Making an unsupported sexual assault allegation isn’t something exclusively done by women
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. In late 2017, The Hollywood Reporter published a story by a man named Scott Brunton claiming that George Takei sexually assaulted him in 1981. Takei was pilloried all over social media over the allegations. But months later, Brunton’s story was scrutinized and numerous inconsistencies came out such as the fact that his belief that he was drugged or roofied by Takei was shot down by toxicologists and he was most likely postural hypotension exacerbated by alcohol. Also, Brunton claimed that he told his ex-boyfriend Jay what happened immediately afterwards, but Jay denied that he ever did. Read more about that case in The Observer (link in The Observer text).
My point is that the problem wasn’t that the women came forward, it’s that the news sites were too hasty to publish the allegations before cross checking the accusers. It took Ronan Farrow 10 months to get enough concrete evidence before publishing his story on Harvey Weinstein which NYT writer David Carr failed to publish about twice because he couldn’t confirm the whole story on the record. It took NYT writer Emily Steel 6 months before she was confident enough to publish her story on Bill O’Reilly that sank his career at Fox News. All 8 of the Franken allegations came out and were published in a matter of days in a span of 3 weeks. That’s nowhere near enough time to verify the stories of each accuser.
If the party made a mistake regarding Franken, we need to own up to it, not double down in denial.