Biden is absolute: Alleged sex assault ‘never, never happened’
Former Vice President Joe Biden on Friday denied an allegation of sexual assault by a former Senate aide, Tara Reade, breaking a monthlong silence that had frustrated some Democratic activists as his presidential campaign grapples with issues of accountability and gender.
In an interview on MSNBC, Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, tried to address concerns about Reade’s claim by saying that she had a right to be heard while also insisting that he had not assaulted her. “No, it is not true,” Biden said. “I’m saying unequivocally it never, never happened.”
Biden also called on the National Archives to release any existing complaint related to the allegation, even as he continued to oppose requests to release his Senate papers, which, he said, do not contain personnel records.
“The former staffer has said she filed a complaint back in 1993,” Biden said. “But
she does not have a record of this alleged complaint.”
In his interview, Biden, appearing from his makeshift home television studio in Delaware, faced a range of questions from host Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC’s
Morning Joe. It was the first time Biden faced questions on the allegations in a public setting.
“I don’t remember any type of complaint she may have made,” Biden said when asked if he remembered Reade or the complaint. “It was 27 years ago, and I don’t remember, nor does anyone else that I’m aware of.”
The weeks of indecision about how to respond publicly to Reade highlighted, in part, the former vice president’s great reliance on female voters as a political base that he cannot afford to alienate, and the determination of Democrats to champion a zero-tolerance standard for abuse of women.
President Donald Trump has been accused of more than a dozen incidents of sexual harassment, assault and rape, and in the 2016 election confronted the release of a recording in which he was heard in his own voice boasting about groping women. Yet Trump has dismissed them out of hand, sometimes attacking his accusers.
Reade’s allegation of assault by Biden has flummoxed the former vice president and his campaign, unnerved Democrats about his electoral prospects, and frustrated women’s groups that have long seen Biden as an ally and have more recently found themselves struggling to address the claim against him.
A video statement released by his campaign a year ago, when Biden faced questions about touching that some women said made them uncomfortable, received mixed reviews from his party, with some Democrats worrying that he seemed stilted and defensive.
RECORDS NOW AN ISSUE
Officials at the Republican National Committee jumped
on Biden’s remarks Friday, with questions surrounding the release of his Senate papers at the University of Delaware emerging as a new flash point in the campaign.
Under repeated questioning from Brzezinski, Biden insisted that those papers would not contain information relevant to the allegation, saying that employment records are kept at the National Archives. Biden was also emphatic that such a search of the National Archives would yield no complaint.
“I’m confident there’s nothing,” he said. “I’m not worried about it at all. If there is a complaint, that’s where it would be. And if it’s there, put it out. But I’ve never seen it. No one has that I’m aware of.”
A Biden aide said the campaign had not done a search of the National Archives records.
Reade said she filed a complaint with a congressional personnel office detailing sexual harassment by Biden when she worked in his office. She does not have a copy, she said, and such paperwork has not been located. The complaint, she said, does not mention the assault.
The New York Times reviewed an official copy of her employment history from the Senate that she provided showing she was hired in December 1992 and paid by Biden’s office until August 1993.
Reade did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday. The National Archives deflected inquiries to Capitol Hill, saying, “Senate personnel complaints from 1993 would have remained under the control of the Senate.”
A spokeswoman for the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights said confidentiality rules bar the office from commenting on “whether specific claims may or may not have been filed.”
Last year, Reade and seven other women came forward to accuse Biden of kissing, hugging or touching them in ways that made them feel uncomfortable. She did not publicly mention the assault at the time and only came forward with the allegation in late March.
Several friends of Reade have said she told them about a traumatic sexual incident involving Biden. Nearly two dozen people who worked with Biden during the early 1990s, including many who worked with Reade, told the
Times they had no recollection of sexual misconduct by Biden — with Reade or any other woman.
In 2017, Reade retweeted praise for Biden and his work combating sexual assault. In more recent months, her Twitter feed has featured support for Sen. Bernie Sanders, whom she supported in the California primary.
Reade said she has no political
motives and does not want to be used by either party for partisan attacks.
Biden declined to offer a theory about Reade’s motivations for her claims.
“I’m not going to question her motive,” Biden said. “I don’t understand it.”
Biden said he had not reached out to Reade and that he was not aware of any other complaint that had been filed against him. He said he had “never asked anybody to sign” a nondisclosure agreement. “There are no NDAs, period, in my case,” he said. “None.”
In a tense exchange late in the interview, Biden repeatedly resisted the idea of querying his Senate papers at the University of Delaware, saying they do not contain personnel records.
“Why not just do a search for Tara Reade’s name?” Brzezinski asked.
“Who does that search?” Biden replied. Brzezinski suggested the university or a commission could conduct it. Biden then returned to his initial point — that any complaint would be contained in the archives, not his papers.
He suggested that releasing the papers in a campaign setting could lead to out-ofcontext attacks and jeopardize private conversations with officials and appeared resistant to a search of Reade’s name.
SIDING WITH BIDEN
In his statement, Biden
said that women who make allegations “should be heard, not silenced,” but their stories also warrant scrutiny. He went on to raise “the full and growing record of inconsistencies in her story, which has changed repeatedly in both small and big ways.”
While Biden had remained quiet on the subject until Friday, a number of prominent Democrats had been pressed on the matter and sided with Biden, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, even as activists had started to urge the former vice president increasingly loudly to address the matter directly.
A number of Biden’s potential running mates, including Sens. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Kamala Harris of California, as well as Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia House minority leader, have also voiced support for Biden, noting his work, for instance, on the Violence Against Women Act. And after his comments Friday, Times Up Now, an organization dedicated to combating workplace harassment, offered implicit praise for Biden and much sharper criticism for Trump.
Tina Tchen, president and chief executive of the organization, said Biden “did what he had to do” in his remarks by taking the “allegations seriously” while respecting Reade’s right to speak out.
Reade tried to get legal and public relations support from the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, an initiative established by prominent women in Hollywood to fight sexual harassment that’s an affiliate of Tchen’s group.
The Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, which does not represent clients, gave her a list of lawyers with expertise in such cases. The fund does not typically assist survivors without legal representation. Reade said none took her case then and she remains without a lawyer.
Some Republicans have sought to paint Democrats as hypocrites, suggesting they are holding Reade’s allegation to a different standard compared with the one they used for accusations of sexual assault against Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 2018.
At one point Biden grew visibly frustrated as Brzezinski asked him about his past comments on how sexual assault allegations should be viewed, citing his remarks about Christine Blasey Ford’s assault accusation against Kavanaugh.
Biden had said, “You’ve got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real.”
Brzezinski asked, “Are women to be believed, are women to be believed, unless it pertains to you?”
“Look, women are to believed, given the benefit of the doubt, if they come forward and say something that is, that they said happen to them, they should start off with the presumption they are telling the truth,” he said. “Then you have to look at the circumstances and the facts. And the facts in this case do not exist; they never happened.”
In light of his own situation, Trump himself is stepping delicately around the Biden controversy.
“He’s going to have to make his own decision,” Trump said in a podcast interview Friday with Dan Bongino, a conservative commentator and radio show host. “I’m not going to be telling him what to do.” The president added that it would be a “great thing” if Biden had records that could “dispose” of Reade’s allegation.
Information for this article was contributed by Katie Glueck, Lisa Lerer and Sydney Ember of The New York Times; by Alexandra Jaffe, Bill Barrow, Jill Colvin, Darlene Superville and Brian Slodysko of The Associated Press; and by Sean Sullivan, Matt Viser and Annie Linskey of The Washington Post.