We can all agree that grabbing the rear end of someone you are not in a relationship with and who doesn’t like that is wrong. But we must also consider the severity of accusations and what responses are appropriate.
Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, former head of the CDC under President Barack Obama, allegedly squeezed the posterior of a 55-year-old female friend whom he had known for 30 years while she was leaving an event at his apartment in Brooklyn Heights back in October 2017. By the woman’s own account, Frieden did this while their spouses weren’t looking and apologized later, blaming the alleged incident on personal problems. Yet nearly six months later, the woman — described by The New York Times as “a vocal #MeToo activist” prior to the incident — decided to write an article about how she was no longer merely an activist but now a “victim.”
She didn’t name her “abuser,” as the Times described Frieden, but three months after she wrote her article, she went to police and told them about the butt-grabbing nine months earlier.
Frieden was arrested and charged with “forcible touching, third-degree sexual abuse and harassment,” according to the Times. He was released without bail but ordered to surrender his passport and to not contact the woman, whom the Times won’t name because it “does not name victims of sex crimes without their consent.”
Frieden has pleaded not guilty to the accusation.
American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers took to Twitter to denounce the arrest, asking if the proper response was “to tell him to buzz off” instead of calling the cops a year after the alleged incident.
In a follow-up tweet, Sommers wondered if “any woman [can] accuse any guy she happens not to like of grabbing her a** at a party last year – get him arrested, publicly shamed and ruined?”
Headline updated to reflect the fact that Frieden has merely been accused, not convicted.