SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) – Former KTVU anchor Frank Somerville was arrested on September 15 on suspicion of battery. The arrest was the latest in a series of well-documented troubles with the law and alcohol for the venerated Bay Area newsman.
It’s been a head-spinning downfall for a respected journalist who sat behind the KTVU anchor desk for the better part of three decades.
Last month, as part of a proposed project with Frank Somerville, I had the opportunity to speak to the former anchor via phone. The station decided to pass on the project before news of his recent arrest.
“We had spoken with Frank about a potential project involving our new streaming app, KRON4+. After careful consideration KRON decided to not move forward,” said KRON4 Vice President and General Manager Chris Flynn.
During my wide-ranging conversation with Somerville on August 26, we spoke at length about his career as a news anchor, his struggles with alcohol, and the dramatic eight-month period in 2021 that saw his life and career effectively turned upside down.
Somerville also stopped short of taking full accountability for some of his past actions.
A ‘damn good’ news anchor
Somerville, in his own words, once described himself as a “damn good” news anchor.
“I connect with people. I’m vulnerable, I show emotion. People can tell that I’m real. I don’t do fake chit-chat. I don’t smile just to smile. I smile when something makes me smile. I don’t play anchor,” he explained when I asked what made him such a good anchor.
But throughout his successful career, Somerville says he harbored a secret; he was an alcoholic.
“I had carried this secret for years and when you’re an alcoholic, I took things out on my kids and my wife, and I will forever regret that. And I felt fake, I felt like a phony,” he said.
September 15 arrest
When news of his arrest on September 15 broke, I called Somerville. He immediately answered and confirmed he’d been arrested and released. He told me the incident arose following an altercation with a close family member.
He told me it was a case of self-defense.
In a now-deleted Facebook post after his release from jail, Somerville addressed the incident, writing he and the family member had a “physical fight.” Somerville maintained he was arrested despite the family member telling police they didn’t want to press charges.
Somerville wrote in part “…bad things happen in battle.” A shirtless photo accompanied the post, his face bloodied.
Arrested twice in one night
During our conversation in August, we spoke about the night of June 5, 2023, when Somerville was arrested twice in the space of nine hours for alcohol-related incidents at a family member’s house in the Berkeley Hills.
The first arrest came after police were called to respond to a family altercation on Indian Rock Avenue. Somerville was arrested on suspicion of criminal threats, public intoxication, assault and a probation violation.
He was taken to Berkeley Jail and later released.
A second call came in to police just before 3:30 a.m., and the family members reported that Somerville was back at the residence and ringing the doorbell. Police determined Somerville allegedly went back to the home to retrieve his vehicle. Once he had his car, police say he left the area then headed back to the residence on Indian Rock to “attempt to locate the property” he lost during the fight.
In our conversation, he told me that the property was his phone, which he accuses a family member of stealing.
“The bail bondsman came, and he said to me, ‘When you get home call me within an hour and give me your credit card information so we can pay the bill.’ So, I got home, this is now like two in the morning, I got home, and I couldn’t find my phone,” Somerville recalled.
Somerville was arrested a second time for suspicion of driving under the influence of alcohol and violation of his probation. He was taken back to Berkeley Jail.
During the recent interview with KRON4, Somerville questioned why the police officer on the scene did not breathalyze him.
“When I got there, I had a drink, because I wasn’t planning on driving home,” he told me. “I had five miles left on my car and so they arrested me for drunk driving even though I wasn’t driving.”
“I was just sitting in my car and so the bottom line is, they charged me with making terrorist threats and public intoxication, which I might add the Berkeley police officer who arrested me never gave me a breathalyzer test, he just assumed I was intoxicated,” he added. “Why not give a test? OK? So we’re sure.”
The charges in both incidents, Somerville said, were eventually dropped.
The year ‘everything exploded’
After decades at the top, everything unraveled for Somerville during an eight-month period in 2021, the year “everything exploded,” in his own words.
“I think the first thing that happened, that really started all this, was one weekend, I was so drunk, and I had to do the 10 o’clock news on Sunday and I didn’t know how to – there was no way I could do it. And my ex-wife said you just have to call them and tell them that you have a problem,” Somerville recalled.
“And I remember that phone call so clearly, I called Amber Eikel, who was the News Director at the time, and I said, ‘I can’t come in because I’m drunk and I’m an alcoholic,” he said.
That incident led to his first stint in rehab, which he calls a waste of time.
“I came back and I started drinking,” he said.
In one Sunday night news broadcast in May 2021, Somerville slurred his speech and struggled to pronounce several words. He maintains it was a case of taking the wrong medication — not of alcohol use.
“So, what happened with the slurring on the air is that I took two Ambien instead of my usual medication,” Somerville explained. “Total accident, stupid on my part, but that’s where I was at that point, and boy when Ambien kicks in, it is like you are drunk, you’re no longer coherent and that was the case there.”
“I’m still amazed that I drove home and didn’t hit anybody,” he recalled. “Because I had no business being on the road that night, but they sent me home.”
The following month, he took a leave of absence to focus on his health.
In August, 2021, he returned to the desk without addressing the incident. Two months later, he was suspended again. This time, Somerville says it was for seeking to add a tag about racial justice to a report on the Gabby Petito story, which was characterized by some as a case of “missing white woman syndrome“
Somerville, whose adopted daughter is Black, still stands by what he did.
“I did nothing wrong with what I said about Gabby Petito,” he said. “Everything I said was true. Everything I said was sourced. But overall, stations don’t ever stop and think, wait a minute, why are we giving this girl so much coverage?”
DUI arrest in Oakland
Two months later, Somerville, who had separated from his wife and moved into an apartment in downtown Oakland, went from reporting the headlines to becoming one.
On Dec. 30, 2021, Somerville was arrested for DUI after crashing his Porsche into another car and a pole in downtown Oakland.
He maintains he has only a limited memory of the incident, which was caught on camera in a video that went viral.
“Back then I was drinking a quart of vodka every other day, and I would drink from morning to night, and I just wanted to go to Taco Bell, and I got in my car, and I had no business getting in my car,” he told me.
“I ended up hitting someone going 12 mph and he got out of his car and said he was fine and then I pushed the car for some reason all the way across the street into a pole,” he continued. ” I have no idea why I did that. I don’t know if I was trying to hit the brake or what.”
Questions about alcohol use raised in Pam Moore interview
Away from the public eye, Somerville said his struggles with alcohol continued. In March of 2023, he sat down for his first television interview since leaving KTVU with KRON4’s Pam Moore. It’s an interview Somerville told me he can’t bear to watch.
At one point in the interview, Moore probed Somerville about his drinking and drug use. Somerville told Moore he no longer used drugs, but his response to questions about alcohol raised eyebrows at the time.
“The only times I’ve had a drink in the last six to eight months would be when I went to a Sharks game,” he told Moore.
“The only times I’ve had a drink in the last six to eight months would be when I went to a Sharks game.”
Frank Somerville
“You know most experts say if you’re addicted, you should not ever drink,” pressed Moore.
“Yeah, I’m not prepared to say I never will,” he replied with arms crossed. “It’s still a work in progress.”
Ongoing struggles, eventual sobriety
Following the arrests, Somerville continued to struggle with alcohol. In a follow-up interview with KRON4 in December 2023, Somerville admitted to having a problem with alcohol and detailed his recovery process. Somerville later relapsed.
In my interview with Somerville, he said at one point, while living in a hotel in downtown Oakland, he said he was drinking a quart of vodka a day.
“It got so bad, I was shaking, I couldn’t walk. I’d barely make it to the liquor store, which was three blocks away and what happened, and this is so embarrassing for me to say, I passed out at a bus stop on the bench or on the ground I don’t know, and I had a .4 when they took me to the hospital,” he recalled.
Eventually, he enrolled in a 90-day program at Duffy’s a residential rehab center in Napa. Since completing the program, he maintains he’s stayed sober. When we spoke on the phone last month, he said he’d been sober for 248 days.
“That’s eight months and five days,” he said.
Somerville told me it’s his girlfriend and a rigorous six-day a week workout regimen that keep him from relapsing.
“The gym is like meditation for me and it’s also a chance for me to figure out what I can really do in the gym and without one hand tied behind my back or in some cases two hands. I can be consistent, and I love that,” he said.
He also takes the alcohol deterrent drug Antabuse. When we spoke, he detailed how it’s saved him at times when he otherwise may have faltered.
“What Antabuse does is, it makes you violently ill if you drink and sadly, I tested it many years ago and it works,” he told me in one candid moment. “And that has saved me where let’s say, I’m watching a football game and a commercial comes up for vodka and it makes it look sooo good and I think, ‘Oh God, that looks good,’ but I can’t because I’m on Antabuse. And if I wasn’t I don’t want to think what might have happened.”
During my conversation with Somerville, he was adamant why he was interested in participating in a special project with KRON.
“I want them to see me now so that they can see how far I’ve come,” he told me at the beginning and the end of our conversation.
Following his September arrest, Somerville maintains he remains sober
Somerville says he has maintained his sobriety and that his September 15 arrest had nothing to do with alcohol.
“FYI I’m 9 months clean,” he posted on Facebook the day after his arrest. “And I was completely sober yesterday.”
“In fact my girlfriend and I were just about to leave for the gym,” he concluded the post with.
The post was deleted later that evening.
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