Dems’ 2020 mantra: ‘Believe women’ ... but vet any claims
WASHINGTON — “Believe women” was never a call to believe all women automatically.
That’s what leading Democrats, including the prominent figures of the #MeToo movement, are suggesting as they stand behind former Vice President Joe Biden and his bid to unseat President Donald Trump. From House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the female senators who ran for president and prominent Hollywood activists, they’re not backing down after Biden publicly denied a former aide’s accusation that he assaulted her in 1993.
“It never happened,” Biden said Friday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“B e l i ev i n g wo m e n means taking the woman’s claim seriously when she steps forward, and then vet it, look into it. That’s true in this case as well,” he said. “But in the end, the truth is what matters, and in this case, the truth is the claims are false.”
There was a clear discomfort and perhaps resentment with being on defense on the issue while campaigning against a president accused by more than two dozen women of sexual misconduct. Trump has denied the allegations. Especially galling to some is the charge by Republicans that Democrats are giving Biden a pass they didn’t afford Justice Brett Kavanaugh when he denied Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation of sexual assault when they were teenagers.
Pelosi, the nation’s highest-ranking Democrat, recognized the maw and curtly stepped around it.
“I don’t need a lecture or a speech,” she said at her weekly news conference as she cut into a reporter’s question about a double
Rep. Richard Komi, a state legislator in Manchester, New Hampshire, resigned Saturday after he posted a tweet that dismissed sexual assault allegations against Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden as unlikely because of the way women’s bodies are constructed.
Komi, a Democrat, tweeted that a woman’s anatomy would make it difficult to digitally penetrate her without “some cooperation from the female herself.”
The tweet, since deleted, prompted House Speaker Steve Shurtleff to call for Komi’s resignation late Friday over what he described as an “outrageous and offensive tweet about sexual assault and survivors of sexual assault.”
Reade alleges that Biden pushed her against a wall in the basement of a Capitol Hill office building in the spring of 1993, groped her and penetrated her with his finger. Last year, Reade publicly accused Biden of inappropriate touching, but she did not allege sexual assault.
standard. “With all the respect in the world for any woman who comes forward, I have the highest regard for Joe Biden. And that’s what I have to say about that.”
Karen Finney, a prominent Democratic strategist and message-maker who worked for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, rejected the Kavanaugh comparison outright.
In the context of sexual assault allegations, Finney said “believe women” doesn’t mean accepting as fact any assertion, but instead means affording women the default credibility to take claims seriously.
“If you start from the premise that this person is
telling the truth, then you do the investigation and look at the facts,” she said, “and if the facts tell a different story, then that’s an important conversation to have.”
Biden’s supporters in the Senate, too, have stood by him, including some who challenged him for the nomination and are now said to be on his short list for a running mate.
But a few hours after his appearance on MSNBC, Trump’s campaign posted a video featuring many of them — Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Kamala Harris of California and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii — saying in the past that female accusers should be believed.