An axed news anchor, frequently in the limelight for his bizarre drunken rampages, added a fourth arrest to his tally after he allegedly assaulted his daughter during a “physical fight” over money.
Frank Somerville, who’s quickly begun to spend more time behind bars than he ever did in front of the camera at KTVU-TV, was arrested again on Monday.
The arrest broke his two-year record of staying out of trouble, while he says he was beginning his sobriety journey.
The Oakland Police Department told SFGate that it is investigating a reported assault that took place Monday just before 5:45 p.m., but the officials didn’t name any of the people involved.
However, Somerville, 67, outed himself when he took to social media to speak his truth about the reported altercation — and immediately pivoted blame to his daughter.
He described his daughter as a “full blown weed addict” who came to his home “in withdrawal” and haggling for money, he wrote on Facebook.
Somerville claimed he told her to leave, but then they “got into a physical fight” as he tried “to tell her to calm down.”
Once his daughter fled the residence, Somerville called his ex-wife, who frantically asked him to come to her house “because she was scared that [their daughter] was going to try to hurt her too.”
When Somerville arrived at his ex’s house, though, police were there waiting for him after his daughter apparently reported their fight. Somerville claimed his daughter told the cops that she didn’t want to press charges.
“I love my daughter more than anything in the world. I would never deliberately try to hurt her. But bad things happen in battle. I can only hope my daughter gets treatment,” Somerville wrote.
He added that he’s reached nine months of sobriety and was “completely sober” at the time of the alleged assault.
Somerville was quickly released on bail, according to Alameda County Sheriff’s Office inmate records.
The disgraced news anchor had a rocky few years as he continuously fell into trouble with the law, while struggling with alcoholism.
In 2021, Somerville was “trashed,” per his own admission on-air two years later, when he plowed into another driver while on a taco run. Around the same time, he appeared live on a news broadcast, slurring his words, but blamed the snafu on a set of Ambien pills he took by mistake.
Then, in June 2023, he was somehow arrested twice in one night while on an out-of-control bender. The first arrest stemmed from a fight where he pummeled his brother, and the second when he was found sitting in his car while clearly intoxicated.
His spiral was apparently spurred by ongoing divorce proceedings with his now-ex-wife, who filed to dissolve their union just one week after his first arrest in 2021.
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