Amid allegations, women left to quiz, defend Biden Related
He may not have been their first choice.
They might have endorsed Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders. They remembered, all too well, how he treated Anita Hill. They didn’t love what he called his “tactile” political style — the hugging, the touching — or that he seemed to laugh it off when confronted about it.
But he had championed the Violence Against Women Act. He had made progress on fighting campus sexual assault.
And — most importantly — he seemed to be the best bet to beat President Donald Trump in November.
So, one by one, Democratic and progressive women diligently threw their weight behind Joe Biden for president.
Then, with Biden the allbut-certain Democratic nominee, came Tara Reade. A former employee who had worked in Biden’s Senate office, Reade gave a podcast interview in late March, accusing him of sexually assaulting her in a Senate hallway in 1993.
On Friday, Biden, the former vice president, directly addressed the matter for the first time, forcefully denying that the incident took place. He did so in a conversation with Mika Brzezinski on the MSNBC show “Morning Joe,” although Brzezinski’s husband and co-host, Joe Scarborough, would sit this one out until the discussion moved on from Reade to the other news of the day.
“It’s just going to be you and me,” Brzezinski told Biden.
It was 17 minutes of a cable television interview, and it was also a microcosm for the way this saga has played out: Women have been expected to discuss the allegation against Biden. Their male colleagues have not.
The particulars of Reade’s account, and Biden’s denial, have pushed the #Metoo movement — and the politicians who supported it, such as Biden himself — into uncomfortable territory.
After three years of calling on elected officials, journalists and corporations to “believe women,” the movement faces a case where the truth seems especially difficult, if not impossible, to establish. National news outlets, including The New York Times, have investigated Reade’s allegation, and this past week, two additional women came forward to corroborate parts of her story. Yet there is no formal organization tasked with examining Reade’s claim. No eyewitnesses to the encounter.
The debate over how to assess claims about decades-old behavior is not new, but it rarely takes place in the context of a high-stakes presidential race. If liberal Democratic voters abandon Biden, it may strengthen the re-election chances of Trump, who himself has been accused of sexual assault at least a dozen times — although he rarely is asked about it.
“That’s what makes this so difficult,” said Lucy Flores, a former Nevada state assemblywoman who wrote last spring about her discomfort with how Biden had kissed and touched her during a 2014 campaign event. “We acknowledge that this is a position of impossibility for so many women, and yet so many of us are willing to do the right thing — as in, we will vote for him despite this.”
And so the burden has been placed on women to defend Biden.
“I believe Joe Biden,” Stacey Abrams said. He’s a person of “great integrity,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said. Hillary Clinton offered her endorsement.
Anita Hill, whose 1991 testimony in the confirmation hearings for Justice Clarence Thomas was overseen by Biden, called for a neutral investigation.
“Joe Biden has denied Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegations, but that should not be the end of the inquiry,” said Hill, a professor of law at Brandeis University. Given the significance of this moment, she said, the allegations against Biden and Trump should be investigated, with results that are “made available to the public.”
“Without these essential elements, uncertainty about who to believe and whether it matters will continue,” she said.
As many conservatives have noted, the response to Reade has appeared in stark contrast to the way that Democrats rallied around Christine Blasey Ford during the 2018 confirmation hearings of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, with Biden himself saying he believed that Blasey “should be given the benefit of the doubt.”
“Can we be anti-kavanaugh and anti-franken and then turn our heads?” said Samantha Ettus, cofounder of the Los Angeles Women’s Collective, which supports women running for office. (She said she was not speaking on behalf of her organization.) “I don’t think we can be selectively interested in #Metoo.”
Tina Tchen, the head of Times Up Now, an organization dedicated to combating workplace harassment, drew a distinction between Blasey’s allegation and those of Reade. The Republican-controlled Senate had the power to investigate Kavanaugh and instead, she argued, chose to rush him to confirmation. With Biden several years out of office, there’s no investigative body officially charged with looking into Reade’s claim.
“There’s not an employer — he’s not in the Senate where the ethics committee might do it,” she said. “At the end of the day, the employer is essentially the American people so that’s why we are stuck.”