Believe the women, says Biden, just not this one
For weeks now, I’ve been getting fan mail from readers, mostly men who seem to think I’m involved in some sort of media conspiracy to cover for Joe Biden.
“Have I missed it, or have you already done a series of articles on Tara Reade’s charges against Joe Biden?”
Howard writes.
“Still nothing on Biden’s alleged sexual assault of women from you?” Bruce
writes. “You were quite vocal when allegations came out against Kavanaugh.”
“I know you were all over the Brett Kavanaugh issues based on false accusations. Now you are silent on the Tara Reade and Biden … ,” writes Scott.
“Wow, amazing that a woman would bury a woman that has brought forward her treatment by Biden. Amazing, and you have to look in the mirror each day and see the devil.”
The devil … Goodness.
These men are apparently steamed that I haven’t jumped to write a story about Tara Reade, who on March 25 accused Biden of sexually assaulting her in 1993 when she was a 28-year-old aide to the then-Delaware senator.
Specifically, that Biden pinned her to a wall in a Senate hallway, reached under her skirt and penetrated her with his fingers.
Early on, her accusation was discounted because her story has changed over time. Since then, her brother and another person who asked to remain anonymous have said Reade told them about the incident shortly after it occurred.
But roughly half a dozen former Biden aides — including people Reade said she talked to at the time — have told the Washington Post and/or New York Times that either they didn’t remember any such conversation or that it didn’t happen.
Then, an August 1993 video surfaced in which a woman called into CNN’s Larry King Show, saying that her daughter had “problems” while working for a “prominent senator” and wanting suggestions for what to do
other than going public. The woman was identified as calling from the city where Reade’s mother was living. Reade now says that woman was her now-deceased mother.
Then last week, a former neighbor told Business Insider that Reade told her about the assault in either 1995 or 1996.
“I remember her saying, here was this person that she was working for and she idolized him,” Lynda LaCasse told Insider. “And he kind of put her up against a wall. And he put his hand up her skirt and he put his fingers inside her. She felt like she was assaulted, and she really didn’t feel there was anything she could do.”.
Add to that: Lorraine Sanchez, who along with Reade worked for a California state senator in the mid-’90s. Sanchez told Insider that she recalls Reade complaining at the time that her former boss in Washington, D.C., had sexually harassed her and after she complained that she had been fired.
Last week, after weeks of dodging the question, Biden appeared on MSNBC to say there’s nothing to Reade’s accusation.
“It is not true,” he told Morning Joe’s Mika Brzezinski. “I’m saying it unequivocally — it never happened. It didn’t. It never happened.”
Republicans, are, of course, delighted and Democrats are mostly silent or standing by their man. Just as the reverse was true when similar accusations were leveled at then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
Suddenly, #MeToo seems to have changed to … what … #NeverMind?
Remember it was actress Alyssa Milano who turned the #MeToo movement into a national phenomenon when she in 2017 tweeted, “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted, write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.”
But Milano has been silent over
Reade’s sexual assault allegations against Biden.
“I just don’t feel comfortable throwing away a decent man that I’ve known for 15 years in this time of complete chaos without there being a thorough investigation,” she said in a SiriusXM interview.
Certainly, President Donald Trump’s team is fanning the flames with relish, never mind that their own guy doesn’t exactly occupy the high moral ground here. But it doesn’t matter.
What should happen is obvious. Reade now has enough corroboration to warrant an investigation in the presumptive Democratic nominee and if that investigation turns up credible evidence backing Reade’s story, Democrats should find themselves a new presumptive nominee.
Really, it’s just that simple if #MeToo matters — and not just when it happens on the other guy’s team.
Reade has called on Biden to open his Senate personnel records, which she believes will have the original complaint she filed, along with her separation papers and other documents that she believes will back up her claim.
Reade has said she filed informal complaints about unwanted touching by Biden before the alleged hallway assault and that afterward, she filed an external sexual harassment complaint that resulted in her being asked to look for another job.
Biden called for a search of Senate personnel records but the secretary of the Senate has said she lacks the legal authority to release the documents. Biden is blocking a similar search of his own Senate papers, held by the University of Delaware.
That’s just not good enough — at least, it shouldn’t be good enough — for a guy who wants to be president. A guy who not even years ago said women deserve the benefit of the doubt.
“For a woman to come forward in the glaring lights of focus, nationally, you’ve got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real,” Biden said, in backing Christine Blasey Ford’s story about Kavanaugh.
That, apparently, was then and this is now when suddenly Democrats just don’t have much to say.
Hypocrisy much?