Serious Tara Reade

[VisionofMilotic]

This is a topic about sexual assault. If discussing this news story could potentially be upsetting to you I would not advise you to read this if it might trigger any trauma or discomfort.

The Tara Reade story has been getting downplayed by major media outlets for months, and only recently spotlighted with close scrutiny on the national stage. I think it is a very important piece of news however, and I personally was moved hearing about it, and believe Tara. I would like to see if there's any deep discussion to be had about it here while the investigation continues. I think we have a mature enough audience to be able to have a respectful conversation about this, debate, ask questions and just share our opinions.

Tara Reade was an assistant to the former Vice President and current Democratic nominee for President Joe Biden. She alleges that he assaulted her in 1993. Of the seven allegations of harassment and misconduct against Biden Reade's claims are the most serious if true. She says that when she was delivering then Senator Biden's bag to him on Capital Hill he held her against a wall, went under blouse, forcibly kissed her, lifted her skirt and penetrated her with his hands.

Reade also says that she complained to staff about then senator Biden, and continuous harassment she experienced, but was retaliated against by being demoted and finally fired. Biden has emphatically denied Reade's claims as entirely false, and asserted that no evidence can be found to support this story.

Reade says she submitted a formal harassment claim at Biden's office, and that nobody ever contacted her despite her written complaint.

Biden's campaign released a statement from Marianne Baker, then manager of the Biden office who says that she has worked with Biden for many years when he was a senator, and never witnessed any improper behavior from him or received any reports of an incident from Reade or any of his other employees. The New York Times however has recently updated their investigation, reporting the discovery of two witnesses who were interns supervised by Reade, corroborating that they remember Reade and she was apruptly stripped of her duties in the time frame she alleges.

https://theintercept.com/2020/04/24/new-evidence-tara-reade-joe-biden/

Biden has said that he if Reade filed a complaint it would be held in The Senate's National Archive, and that he has called on them to produce such a document if it exists, and that they cannot do so.

Richard McHugh, reporter with Business Insider, says that he contacted the archives, and was told that a complaint of this kind would likely have been made with Fair Employment Practices Offices, and may be housed with Biden's senatorial papers at the University of Delaware.

The University of Delaware was to make it's senate papers related to Biden public, but the access level was changed so that nothing will be released until after Joe Biden leaves public life. Biden is not currently authorizing a publication of his personal documents from the university, citing that the paperwork there would not be connected to Tara Reade, but what is contained there would be too sensitive and against the public interest to release.

https://www.businessinsider.com/former-neighbor-corroborates-joe-bidens-accuser-2020-4

My personal opinion is that business will likely continue as usual like after the Kavanaugh and Clinton accusations. I'm not happy about it though, and think this goes to show how bad things have gotten that the November election is really going to be a battle for the White House between two people with a history of sexual harassment and misconduct allegations, Trump and Biden.

What are your thoughts about the events described by Tara Reade? Do you think these are credible accusations? If yes, what should/can be done?

If you are interested in hearing more here is an interview with Tara Reade on Democracy Now by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez.


This is the interview by Mika Brzezinski of Joe Biden responding to the allegations on Morning Joe.

 

[Nah]

The unfortunate thing with sex assault cases, especially old ones like this one, is that it's typically not a crime that leaves a lot of long lasting concrete evidence to prove it either way. Usually all you really have is testimony, unless you're lucky and something else exists as well. So discussion of the matter usually ends up coming down to people picking out whatever information and inconsistencies in the stories and information available to the public fits their pre-conceived notion on the matter.

Would I be surprised if an old white boomer really did what Tara Reade has said? Not in the slightest. Especially not with someone with a history of uncomfortable/inappropriate touching like "Creepy Uncle" Joe.

Regardless of whether or not he did it though, nothing will happen to Joe Biden. Things in recent years have gotten slightly better, but there's still far too much work to be done to think that the majority of cases will be handled well. It'd be naive to think that a major player in the establishment of American politics will be brought down so easily. The same goes for Trump.

 

[Hermione Granger]

For most cases the accused seem to always deny accusations, though I don't know a bunch about Biden since I never heard of him until Obama became president. Though if he has inappropriately touched a woman before, he could be doing his best to try to cover up the truth and doesn't want it out there. Though I don't support neither Presidential candidate as Biden seems to be getting the nom, or the President Trump.

 

[gimmepie]

If a truckload of testimony and evidence wasn't enough to bring down Trump, the claims of one woman are not going to bring down Biden.

It's as Nah said, cases like this are pretty much impossible because there's no way to prove what did or didn't happen. The most anyone can maybe do is to prove that she reported an incident in 1993, which still doesn't prove the incident actually occurred. Personally, I'm usually inclined to believe the victim in these cases but I'm also often reluctant to commit to anything where no actual evidence can be brought to the table.

For me it comes down to, I 100% believe that Biden would do something like that. But if I were in a position to decide if he should be punished or not, I couldn't justify any repercussions for an event that nobody can prove happened, regardless of what I personally believe.

 

[Corrin]

1993 is a long time ago, if more people come forward than you may have something? But it is hard to prove since it was so long ago. I could believe she didn't come forward then because a lot of women who are assaulted are never believed, told they wanted it, and are often more alienated and punished than the assaulter.

 

[VisionofMilotic]

Some interesting old documents have recently emerged from an unexpected place that corroborate some of what Tara Reade said. Tara went through a divorce in 1996. During the legal proceedings her then husband wrote in a declaration that she was sensitive and clearly traumatized, and had confided in him that she suffered sexual harassment in the workplace while working in Joe Biden's office. This is documentation from 24 years ago supporting that Reade at least said she had been harassed.

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article242527331.html

I think this strengthens her credibility, and makes it a little less plausible that this is a false allegation. She definitely said something about this back in the 90s, there's documentation of it. The time span sharply decreases the likelihood that she said this for publicity, because it was many years before she went to the general public with the story, telling only those near to her. Nor is there an apparent monetary incentive because she's been saying she was harassed for all this time, but never attempted to profit financially in any way over the decades. She never sold this story to the tabloids. There was no civil suit. She didn't write books. She didn't try to blackmail Biden. It's fairly safe I think to say that this isn't about money. Almost 25 years is a ridiculously long time to plant false evidence and wait to profit.

Another detail that makes me believe Tara Reade is the Larry King live tape. Reade said that her mother Jeanette was the one who encouraged her to file a harassment claim, and that her mother also called into the Larry King show on her behalf years ago, seeking legal advice from expert guests about what to do. A voice recording was found among the archival footage from the show in 1993 just as Tara Reade said it would be. It was the audio of an anonymous woman calling from where Reade's family lived San Luis Obispo, California, saying that she had a daughter who was a victim of harassment working in D.C for a prominent senator. She says she could find no solutions except going to the news, but was reluctant to come forward, and wanted to know what her rights were.

The mom wasn't the only witness Tara Reade had. Her brother, friends, neighbors testify that she told them she was assaulted shortly after the time it allegedly happened. Witness testimony isn't always truthful, but hearing that phone conversation was a very specific additional detail Reade mentioned that convinced me personally that she did go to her mother in 93 and tell her that Biden was harassing her, but was scared to go public like she claims. The phone interview is a specific detail Reade mentioned that appeared to give the story she is telling some contemporary corroboration.

Here is more about the context here. https://theintercept.com/2020/04/24/new-evidence-tara-reade-joe-biden/

This is the actual video that the transcript was taken from. This clip originally aired on CNN, but the network has since deleted this video from their Google play archives. However, thankfully some listener downloaded and re-uploaded it, so people can hear it for themselves are draw their own conclusions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gsvpXc0pH0

You can never prove 100℅ that this happened outside of a video tape of
Biden doing this, and even when Biden has been caught on camera touching
women and girls in an inappropriate way it's not enough like with Lucy Flores. We're told not to believe our lying eyes, believe creepy uncle Joe--it was no big deal. He didn't mean anything by it. The women are just overreacting.

I asked previously if these accusation might be credible, then what should be done next? Since I feel they are credible, I'm trying to think of something constructive that can come out of this discussion. What I would like to see is for Tara Reade or anyone else who is possibly a victim of assault able to at least have a platform to speak openly about what they allege and get resources to enforce their rights and receive support to heal. Organizations like that are supposed to be one of the gains of the #Metoo movement, but there's still work to do.

Tara Reade says that she's been getting badly smeared on social media-- I have seen some of it, there's a lot misinformation being circulated about her, calling her everything from an ambulance chaser to a Russian plant. She says she and her family are being called and harassed, threatened. Legally sealed information that was supposed to protect her identity has been published like a name she changed because she is a survivor of domestic violence. She has called for something like a cease and desist order, and has sought out help getting some legal representation from foundations for victims of sexual harassment like the Time's Up legal defense counsel, the organization that was founded in response to Harvey Weinstein. They are a legal defense counsel, but Reade had trouble getting protection from Time's Up. They say they believe her, but can't help her because Biden is a political figure, and they don't want to touch that because they could lose their tax-exempt status as a charity if their actions are interpreted in apolitical light.

That's a problem.

So where do you turn when the typical channels that help sexual assault victims aren't open to you because the accuser is a political figure?

 

[colours]

starting to think about this vox article quite a bit, more specifically this part:

All of this leaves me where no reporter wants to be: mired in the miasma of uncertainty. I wanted to believe Reade when she first came to me, and I worked hard to find the evidence to make certain others would believe her, too. I couldn't find it. None of that means Reade is lying, but it leaves us in the limbo of Me Too: a story that may be true but that we can't prove.

it's interesting that in order to take down powerful figures, there needs to be a pattern of cases. while one can make the argument that multiple women already complained about biden invading their personal space and being creepy, most people don't think a whole lot of it because he already acknowledge the such with the whole "i'll respect people's personal space from now on" etc thing. with reade being the only woman (that we know of) that has actually accused biden of sexual assault. whether or not one believe that's just is past the point, that's just how it is in today's world. it was exactly how it was in blasey-ford's situation also, except she had a hell of a lot more named witnesses that apparently weren't interviewed by the FBI which could very well be a fault of the FBI itself. the point being however, that one accusation, especially an accusation which has been perceived as terribly inconsistent because reade wasn't forthcoming with all of the details the first time around, is going to be nowhere close to be enough to do remotely anything to biden.

i mean, we can take a look at articles like this and this and her wapo/nyt interviews and other media outlet interviews which don't even provide much clarity to the issue. the point being is that there's so many unknowns that, as far as most people are concerned, they're back where they're started. yes, she has the corroboration of her former neighbour (who apparently isn't a reliable source) a friend and a brother and her mother, but i mean, that's also up against the 20 or so people that have been interviewed by the press who used to work for biden who were floored that this was even a thing to begin with. reade's own supervisors don't remember her nor the allegations that she brought up to them. it's really all such a mess. the only way to know for certain is have biden's name on something with reade's own name on it, as well. a hard piece of evidence. but that hard piece of evidence may or may not exist, and if it does, it's confidential, and no one can access it until two years after biden leaves public office.

this leaves the public in muddy waters during a rough enough time as it is. reade publicly wanting biden to withdraw from the race doesn't really help things any, because without solid proof, and with reade already in the hot seat for only telling bits and pieces and not actually the whole thing to begin with, some may be lead to believe that this is nothing but a smear job. and i mean... when you have headlines like this popping up, what with her lawyers having strong ties to trump, it really doesn't help reade's standing with the public in the slightest.

the issue as it stands, is that without strong, physical evidence linking biden to reade in the sense that we have clear proof that biden did the things that reade accuses him of (or at the very least, more than one person accusing biden of sexual assault), this is pretty much left to the court of public opinion. unfortunately for reade though, public opinion (or social media, at the very least) hasn't been very kind to her mostly because, again, there's so many unknowns and the public is already in the dark during times when people really can't afford the mental space to be detectives because of how COVID is turning their lives upside down.

we'll see in the coming months as it goes closer to the election if any new updates arise, but... and perhaps i'm wrong, but i feel like this is as far as it goes. reade has very shaky memory of things, and while yes, the 1996 court document might shed some light, again, without naming biden explicitly (even if it's implied), it might as well hold barely any weight at all in people's minds. and here we have the issue as it stands in the world of sexual assault: it's not enough to have a few pieces of maybes here and there, you need absolutes and a truckload of it and/or the testimony of an army or you might as well not bother saying anything. those who believe in the rights of the accused as well as the accuser will feel this is just, however, given the hefty weight of sexual assault as an allegation to begin with.

 

[gimmepie]

I don't envy her, that's for sure. There's very little she can do now really. Her options are to get out of the public eye as much as she can, or use the position she's in to push back against assaults and cover-ups like that everywhere. I wouldn't blame her for taking either road. I hope she's getting some good therapy though, she's going to need it after this.

Where things really get dicey though is... we can't pretend that there's not a political discussion to be had here. Does anyone really want to hurt Biden in an election against Trump? In the end, you have to choose between two abusers and one of them is significantly worse for the country as a whole.

 

[colours]

some extra things, now that i've done some digging and found some interesting polling about what american think on the matter. feel free to draw your own conclusions, though.

 

[Her]

rape doesn't matter if it's the rapist ya want in charge

 

[gimmepie]

rape doesn't matter if it's the rapist ya want in charge

It's a little more complicated when it's a game of "pick the rapist you want to run your country".
Nobody should get away with that shit, but here we are.

 

[VisionofMilotic]

It's a little more complicated when it's a game of "pick the rapist you want to run your country".
Nobody should get away with that shit, but here we are.

"One is the wolf, the other is a fox. No matter what, they'll both eat you." -Malcom X

 

[Her]

It's a little more complicated when it's a game of "pick the rapist you want to run your country".
Nobody should get away with that shit, but here we are.

maybe i just have a bit more respect for my own placement in the cynicism vs idealism political alignment, but you wouldn't catch me telling people one rapist is less bad than another rapist for the sake of pushing a harm reduction myth about joe biden

so i dunno what to tell you

 

[gimmepie]

maybe i just have a bit more respect for my own placement in the cynicism vs idealism political alignment, but you wouldn't catch me telling people one rapist is less bad than another rapist for the sake of pushing a harm reduction myth about joe biden

so i dunno what to tell you

It's hardly a myth. Biden's shit but objectively better than Trump. In an ideal world, this wouldn't be a discussion that people had to have at all because someone who was both competent and not a sex offender would be the nominee but we clearly don't live in an ideal world and Biden is neither of those things, so this really is a conversation people need to have.

 

[Her]

props to you for being able to live with that i guess lol

 

[Venia Silente]

The cynic and outsider in me says, if this happened in 199x and you've waited some good quarter of a century to know, you can afford to wait say at most four more years to deal with it. No one says to put all the cats in a bag before the Election - you can still aim for the scenario that Biden wins, somehow saves us and the rest of the world, and then when he's done and out of office he can he tried in the same capacity as you can trial a non-President. And if he couldn't deliver before the end of the four years or he couldn't get elected? Well then toss him to the wolves in advance as he deserves, hey who knows what more juicy stuff comes up in the next few years to add up to the evidences.

After all, honestly? In the world of public figures no one's clean. Dig deep enough and you can find anything to crucify anyone (and not necessarily because they did something objectively bad). And in my view if you all don't seem to mind enough that the person currently running the country is all of a rapist, racist, nazi and deluded megalomaniac, then IMO it should matter even less to elect a person who is, so far, only one of all those things. You made that bed with the political system you created, now you get to sleep in it.

That Simpsons episode about the aliens who get elected into the White House very precisely comes to mind.

 

[Her]

good thing joe biden isn't a well-known racist white supremacist with decades of policy and rhetoric to back that up then, imagine if that was in the equation
i guess we can just stick to people asking others to consider how much rape bothers them

 

[Corrin]

Neither Trump nor Biden should lead, really. Rumors pushed that Bernie dropped out when really he just said he wouldn't campaign anymore due to the scare of COVID. I also don't think rapists should be able to even be in elections. Why? It says that rape is ok in that country, that you can commit vile acts, and still be a leader and a person in power. It's disgusting how politics and money are seemingly worth more than human lives.

 

[gimmepie]

Neither Trump nor Biden should lead, really. Rumors pushed that Bernie dropped out when really he just said he wouldn't campaign anymore due to the scare of COVID. I also don't think rapists should be able to even be in elections. Why? It says that rape is ok in that country, that you can commit vile acts, and still be a leader and a person in power. It's disgusting how politics and money are seemingly worth more than human lives.

I would be amazed if someone actually disagreed with this sentiment. It is all kinds of messed up that these are the US' options at this point. I cannot stress enough, since some people seem to be misinterpreting things, that I in no way think that this situation is at all okay. The sad truth though, is that people need to be practical about this because, regardless of how wrong it is, this is the situation Americans have to deal with now.

Thanks to the American political system, there are two choices here, both of them are racist sex-offenders. One of them may actually walk back some of the damage done to the US over the last four years, one will continue to make things progressively worse. When both your options, your only options, are creeps, then the fact they are creeps stops mattering as far as the election goes. All that matters is which one is better for the country, in this case, that's Biden. It doesn't matter how not okay anyone is with this being the options available, these are the options the USA has.

Maybe, although I highly doubt it, this will be the push the USA needs to finally start overhauling their outdated and broken political system so they don't get left with another case of "which of these two rapists is going to do less damage to the country over four years" scenario.

 

[Nah]

Maybe, although I highly doubt it, this will be the push the USA needs to finally start overhauling their outdated and broken political system so they don't get left with another case of "which of these two rapists is going to do less damage to the country over four years" scenario.

nah there's no chance at all that'll happen anytime soon in this country, if ever