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Whoopi Goldberg Compares Al Franken to Central Park Five

The hosts of ‘The View’ struggled through the news that a second woman has accused Sen. Franken of groping.

A second woman has come forward to allege sexual misconduct by Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) and The View doesn’t quite know how to feel about that.

“Is this going to continue to create a fervor, do you think there are more folks out there?” moderator Whoopi Goldberg asked at the top of the segment on Monday morning. “Should he resign? What should he do?”

“I have no reason not to believe the girl,” Joy Behar, a longtime friend of Franken’s said of the woman who says the senator grabbed her behind during a photo-op at the Minnesota State Fair in 2010. But she said she did find it “odd” that Franken would be so “careless” in his behavior given the fact that he was so meticulous about avoiding any attempts at humor during his first term in the Senate.

Both Behar and Sara Haines stressed that the allegations against Franken are “very different” from those that have been leveled against Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore. “You can’t paint with broad strokes on this,” Haines said. “All the victims are victims and if they felt not safe or not OK, that is to be believed and to be listened to. But you can’t then put them all in the same barrel of punishments.”

Building off of that, Sunny Hostin said she’s not sure asking Franken to resign from the Senate is the “appropriate response” to these allegations. “No senator has been asked to resign, ever,” she said. “The last time someone was expelled from the Senate was like a hundred and fifty-five years ago.”

“In the old days, didn’t people used to do investigations?” Goldberg asked. “The behavior is unconscionable,” she added, “but I do think, because we’ve seen so many different responses to things, that it would be probably a really good idea for us to take a breath and start investigating stuff.”

From there, Goldberg brought up the Central Park Five, a group of five black teenagers who were falsely convicted of rape nearly 30 years ago. “It wasn’t them,” Goldberg said. “And these kids spent years in prison.” She argued that women accusing men of sexual misconduct should be able to make their cases “in open court,” despite the fact that in many of these cases, the statute of limitation for any legal action has passed.

“It’s really the court of public opinion more than an actual court,” Behar reminded her, before pivoting the conversation to the president. “If Franken has to resign, then Trump needs to resign,” she said, “because he’s just as guilty of harassing women and he has 16 accusers so far!”

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Matt WilsteinSenior Editor

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