Veteran Bay Area news anchor Frank Somerville arrested again amid alcohol-fueled assault allegations
Somerville, 67, is under investigation for allegedly choking his daughter during a home confrontation, while detailing last year’s attack on his partner and her daughter in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle.
A veteran Bay Area television anchor was arrested Monday on new charges and is under investigation for allegedly choking his own daughter during a confrontation at his California home, authorities said. Frank Somerville, 67, a Berkeley native who spent 31 years at the Fox affiliate KTVU, has faced a string of alcohol-related incidents in recent years and is now facing a fourth arrest in five years.
According to the Alameda County District Attorney's Office, on November 19 Somerville punched his girlfriend, 59-year-old Elaine Coleman, and then punched her daughter, 28-year-old Madeline Gordon, when Gordon tried to intervene. Somerville has said the violence occurred before he began treatment for his substance issues in December 2024 and that he is now clean. In a San Francisco Chronicle interview published this week, Somerville described last year’s assault on his partner and her daughter and acknowledged he was completely drunk at the time.
Coleman filed a restraining order three days after his arrest, claiming abuse toward her and her daughter, but she later dropped it, and the couple remained together.
Gordon testified that Somerville pushed her into their television, pulled her hair and punched her in the face, and that he tried to hold her down by the neck. She described extreme chest pain from bruised ribs, an injured finger and hair loss attributed to the assault.
In August 2024 Somerville posted a photo with Coleman calling her his soulmate, alongside other posts that highlighted a lifestyle focused on no processed foods and no alcohol. Coleman said that the day of the attack he had been drinking all day and she worried he might be experiencing a mental health episode. She asked courts to order Somerville to pay the costs of her emergency room visit, the furniture damages and her attorneys’ fees, and to require him to enter an intervention program. She also noted that the couple chose not to pursue a restraining order because they did not view Somerville as an ongoing threat at that time.
Somerville said he acted in self-defense when his daughter scratched his face, leaving a bloody wound, and he contended that if his intent had been to render her unconscious, she would have been.
This latest arrest is not Somerville’s first run-in with the law. He has previously been arrested twice in 12 hours in 2023 after drunken fights with his brother, and he faced another round of charges in June 2023 for public intoxication. His contract with KTVU expired after the 2022 Porsche crash, following suspensions in 2021 for slurring his words on air and for disagreements with producers over coverage of the Gabby Petito case. The Daily Mail has reached out to Coleman for comment.