A female radio host claims Al Franken, now Minnesota’s junior Democratic senator, made a lewd gesture while she was sleeping aboard a military plane on her way home from a USO tour several years ago. She also claimed he forcibly kissed her when they were performing together for troops overseas.
“I felt disgusting and violated,” Leeann Tweeden wrote on KABC’s website.
Tweeden, who is a radio news anchor based in Los Angeles, wrote on KABC’s website this morning about what she says was her experience.
She claims that in 2006, when Franken was a comedian and not yet a senator, he insisted on kissing her as part of a rehearsal for an act. He later groped her while she was asleep on a plane, she also claimed.
Franken, who was elected senator in 2008, responded to the accusations in a statement this morning.
“I certainly don’t remember the rehearsal for the skit in the same way, but I send my sincerest apologies to Leeann. As to the photo, it was clearly intended to be funny but wasn’t. I shouldn’t have done it,” he said.
Tweeden said she and Franken traveled to Afghanistan to entertain U.S. troops stationed there.
“On the day of the show Franken and I were alone backstage going over our lines one last time. He said to me, ‘We need to rehearse the kiss.’ I laughed and ignored him. Then he said it again. I said something like, ‘Relax Al, this isn’t ‘SNL’ … we don’t need to rehearse the kiss.’ He continued to insist, and I was beginning to get uncomfortable,” she wrote in her KABC piece.
She said that she acquiesced “so that he would stop badgering me” and that when he kissed her, he “put his hand on the back of my head, mashed his lips against mine and aggressively stuck his tongue in my mouth.”
The alleged groping incident occurred while Tweeden appears to have been asleep on the plane returning to the U.S. She says she was unaware of what allegedly took place until after she arrived home and was looking through a CD of photos that a photographer on the trip gave her.
The picture shows Tweeden apparently asleep while wearing a helmet and military vest and Franken looking at the camera while appearing to place his hands on her breasts.
“I couldn’t believe it. He groped me, without my consent, while I was asleep,” Tweeden wrote. “I felt violated all over again. Embarrassed. Belittled. Humiliated.”
