JOE BIDEN And Tara Reade. “Believe All Women” Biden Says. OK Then, Why Don’t You Believe Tara? Why is MeToo Silencing Her?
When it comes to #MeToo sexual misconduct issues, former Vice President Joe Biden, has made it no secret where he stands: automatically believe women. “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,” said Biden during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
As vice president, Biden played an important role to compel colleges and universities to take sexual violence more seriously—and to adopt policies that limited the due process rights and presumption of innocence for accused students. In recent years, his rhetoric has been in lockstep with #MeToo activists. Despite his public pronunciations on the subject of never touching women without their explicit verbal consent, Biden has previously faced accusations that he was too handsy with people. But now the former vice president is facing a much more serious accusation of sexual assault, from a former staffer named Tara Reade.
Reade describes herself as a “California-based victim rights advocate and activist” in her interview with the journalist Katie Halper. Reade says she worked for Biden in the early 1990s and asserts that she was unambiguously assaulted by him in 1993. According to Reade, he began kissing her without her permission, pushed her against a wall, reached under her skirt, and penetrated her with his fingers. “He said ‘come on man, I heard you liked me.” “For me, it was like, everything shattered. I looked up to him, he was this champion of women’s rights. I couldn’t believe it was happening. It was surreal.”
Reade had already complained to her bosses about sexual harassment in Biden’s office—but had shared the more serious accusation against Biden with a few close confidants. She tried to talk to a supervisor about what had happened, but was shut her down. She filled out an official form detailing her assault. As detailed in an Intercept piece, she reached out to Time’s Up, a project of the National Women’s Law Center that provides support to #MeToo victims. Eventually Reade learned that no assistance from Time’s Up could be provided because the person she was accusing, Biden, was a candidate for federal office.
The public relations firm that works on behalf of the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund is SKDKnickerbocker, whose managing director, Anita Dunn, is the top adviser to Biden’s presidential campaign. The Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund is set up as a 501(c)3 nonprofit housed within the National Women’s Law Center. It was launched in December 2017 and was the most successful GoFundMe, raising more than $24 million. The group has committed more than $10 million toward funding cases.
It seems unlikely the Reade accusation can sink Biden’s candidacy, but whether Democratic primary voters and the mainstream media are willing to air it out as they did Kavanaugh’s will tell us a lot about what “believe all women” actually means.
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