As soon as I told Franken about my experience, he showed incredible interest in this part of my story, and he asked what I would change about it. I told him that I wanted law enforcement to be trained with the same type of program that my nurse had gone through. Over the next year, his office worked with me to craft legislation to do just that. The focus of our bill was to provide funding for grants for trauma-informed trainings for law enforcement. I met some absolutely amazing women who worked for Franken’s office and put an extraordinary amount of care into this bill. I could barely contain my excitement when we announced it together in October; it was the first truly positive thing to have come out of the worst experience of my life.

But my overwhelmingly positive experiences with Franken do not negate what Leeann Tweeden went through.