With a report from the Associated Press this weekend, the number of sources who have corroborated Tara Reade’s sex-assault and harassment allegations against Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden has reached at least six.
But even worse for the presumptive nominee, the sisterhood is turning against him. A columnist for the New York Times says it’s time to dump Biden for a better candidate, even if Reade’s allegations can’t be verified.
Biden is too wounded from the scandal to overcome it, Elizabeth Bruenig wrote, and so the time has come to put him out to pasture.
Reade, of course, isn’t Biden’s only problem. But she is the biggest one beside the suspicion that he is suffering from dementia.
Two More Friends
The AP report buried the two new corroborating witnesses at the end of story that detailed the words Reade used in the complaint she claims to have filed against Biden when she worked for him. That was 1993.
“I remember talking about him wanting me to serve drinks because he liked my legs and thought I was pretty and it made me uncomfortable,” she told AP on Friday. “I know that I was too scared to write about the sexual assault.”
Reade told the AP twice that she did not use the phrase “sexual harassment” in filing the complaint…. She said: “I talked about sexual harassment, retaliation. The main word I used — and I know I didn’t use sexual harassment — I used ‘uncomfortable.’ And I remember ‘retaliation.’”
Reade described the report after the AP discovered additional transcripts and notes from its interviews with Reade last year in which she says she “chickened out” after going to the Senate personnel office. The AP interviewed Reade in 2019 after she accused Biden of uncomfortable and inappropriate touching. She did not raise allegations of sexual assault against Biden until this year, around the time he became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
Reade joined several other women last year to say Biden is a prodigious harasser whose clumsy come-ons include unwanted backrubs, touching, kissing, prolonged hugs, and fetishistic hair sniffing. Photos and video of the former vice president’s creepy moves are legion.
Though Reade admits not filing a specific harassment or assault complaint against Biden, she told AP that she did file an “‘intake form’ at the Senate personnel office, which included her contact information, the office she worked for and some broad details of her issues with Biden.”
But nothing in AP’s story refutes Reade’s main allegation: that Biden cornered her in 1993, then pinned her against a wall and assaulted her.
She told her brother about the assault, and video of her mother discussing the difficulties with Biden on live television surfaced two weeks ago.
Last week, two women confirmed on the record that Reade told them about it. One of them was a Biden supporter who still plans to vote for him.
And now, AP reported on Friday, “two additional people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect their families’ privacy … said Reade had told them about aspects of her allegations against Biden years ago”:
One friend, who knew Reade in 1993, said Reade told them about the alleged assault when it happened. The second friend met Reade more than a decade after the alleged incident and confirmed that Reade had a conversation with the friend in 2007 or 2008 about experiencing sexual harassment from Biden while working in his Senate office.
Six people, then, have said Reade told them Biden harassed or assaulted her.
Boot Biden
No wonder the Times’s Bruenig wants Biden to step aside.
Reade’s not remembering details or even providing conflicting statements are not unusual for sex-assault victims, she wrote. And noting the obvious double-standard among Democrats vis-à-vis Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations against U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Bruenig urged Democrats to back “a thorough and fully transparent investigation” for the sake of the #MeToo movement.
But that won’t help matters:
It is also possible that this won’t just go away, and that it will demoralize voters and place Mr. Biden at a disadvantage against Mr. Trump in the general election…. For a candidate mainly favored for his presumed electability and the perception of empathy and decency, that’s a serious liability. To preserve the strides made on behalf of victims of sexual assault in the era of #MeToo, and to maximize their chances in November, Democrats need to begin formulating an alternative strategy for 2020 — one that does not include Mr. Biden.
Question is, will Democrats listen and dump Biden, or simply hope that Tara Reade goes away?
2019 photo of Tara Reade: AP Images
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
