Pressure mounts on Joe Biden to address sexual assault claim

Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, is facing growing pressure to publicly address an allegation of sexual assault made by Tara Reade, a former aide to his Senate office.

The former vice-president has remained silent about the accusation, a position that is seen as increasingly untenable in the wake of new reporting. Many major Democratic women’s organizations and prominent feminists have also declined to comment publicly on Reade’s claim that Biden, then a senator from Delaware, assaulted her in 1993.

Biden’s deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield said in a statement this month that “this absolutely did not happen”, but she has not commented further.

Reade’s allegation emerged as Biden’s primary victories positioned him to face Donald Trump, who has been accused of sexual misconduct and assault by more than a dozen women, in the general election. Now Democrats, who widely embraced the “believe women” ethos of the #MeToo movement, are grappling with how to respond.

On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that women’s rights activists are quietly pushing Biden to break his silence, urging him to make a statement before the end of April, which is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. According to the Times, some of the women’s groups involved drafted a public letter that they have not released, which praises Biden’s work as an “outspoken champion for survivors of sexual violence” while encouraging him to “model how to take serious allegations seriously”.

An editorial in the Washington Post called on Biden to address the claims against him and release any records related to Reade’s employment, including any complaints she may have filed while working in his office.

“Tara Reade deserves to be heard, and voters deserve to hear her,” the paper’s editorial board wrote on Wednesday. “They deserve to hear from Joe Biden, too.”

Reade was one of eight women who came forward last year with stories involving unwanted touching or displays of affection by Biden. None alleged sexual assault and Biden vowed to be “more mindful”.

At the time, Reade told a California newspaper, the Union, that Biden habitually touched her neck and shoulders when she worked as an aide in his Senate office from 1992 to 1993. She told the paper that she was asked to serve drinks at an event because Biden liked her legs and, when she refused, was sidelined and eventually pushed out of his employ.

A year later, in an interview with the leftwing podcast commentator Katie Halper, Reade alleged that Biden had pinned her against a wall and digitally penetrated her in the basement of a Capitol Hill office in the spring of 1993. She said she had not come forward with the allegation sooner because she was scared of the backlash and was still grappling with what had happened to her.

Reade said she filed a report in the Senate and claims she was forced out of his office after complaining to her supervisors, a charge disputed by several former Biden aides but corroborated in part by people she said she told at the time and in the years after.

In an interview this week with the conservative website the Daily Caller, Reade called on Biden to release any documents related to her employment. She said: “I would like to hold you accountable for what happened to me, to how your staff protected you and enabled you, bullied me multiple times into silence.”

Fresh reporting has re-energized calls for Biden to address the subject.

On Monday, Business Insider published a report based on interviews with two women who corroborated key elements of Reade’s story. Lynda LaCasse, a former neighbor of Reade, said that Reade told her about her encounter with Biden when they lived in the same California housing complex in the mid-1990s. The second woman, Lorraine Sanchez, said Reade had told her that she had been sexually harassed by her former boss while working in Washington DC.

Last week, the Intercept published the transcript of a 1993 call to Larry King’s CNN talkshow featuring a woman from California inquiring vaguely about what her daughter could do about the “problems” she encountered while working in the office of a “prominent senator”. The woman, who Reade identified as her late mother, said her daughter did not want to go public with the allegations out of respect for the senator.

BuzzFeed News reported on Tuesday that Biden’s campaign had circulated talking points to surrogates and supporters instructing them to describe him as a “fierce advocate for women” who has never faced a “complaint, allegation, hint or rumor of any impropriety or inappropriate conduct” over the course of his nearly 50-year-political career. The talking points also inaccurately suggest that a New York Times report this month concluded that the incident “did not happen”.

In the article, the New York Times spoke to three former Senate aides who said the behavior Reade described was inconsistent with Biden’s conduct and had no recollection of an assault happening. The Times also spoke to two interns who recalled that Reade abruptly stopped supervising them, supporting Reade’s claim that she had been stripped of that responsibility. Neither intern recalled any discussion of inappropriate behavior by Biden.

In a joint appearance with Hillary Clinton on Tuesday, billed by the campaign as a “women’s town hall”, Biden was asked a question about women locked in with abusive partners amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Violence against women is a huge problem, and especially right now,” he said, adding that ending violence against women has “been one of the leading causes of my life”.

While Biden has yet to speak out publicly, several of the women who he is considering as running mates have been questioned about the allegation and his conduct, angering some feminists. Writing in New York Magazine, the columnist Rebecca Traister said joining Biden’s presidential ticket amounted to drinking from a “poisoned chalice” because his promise to choose a female running mate “ensures that whoever she is, she will be forced to answer – over and over again – for Biden’s treatment of other women”.

Tarana Burke, the woman who started #MeToo, said she too was grappling with Reade’s allegation – but said it was possible for Biden to “be both accountable and electable”.

On Wednesday the #MeToo activist and actor Rose McGowan called Democrats a “cult” for, in her view, collectively downplaying Reade’s story. “I’m really sad, and I’m really tired,” she wrote on Twitter. “I normally share thoughts, but tonight it’s emotion.”