The woman accusing Joe Biden of sexual assault blasted key members of his Senate staff for enabling what she describes as inappropriate behavior toward women.
Tara Reade alleges Biden, the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee, forcibly kissed and penetrated her with his fingers in 1993 when she worked for him as a staff assistant on Capitol Hill. She was 28, and he was the much older senator from Delaware.
Reade, now 56, claims she complained to three of her colleagues at the time that Biden sexually harassed her, though not that he assaulted her. Marianne Baker, Biden’s former executive assistant, Ted Kaufman, his then-chief of staff who’s now helping the two-term former vice president put together a transition team, and Dennis Toner, Biden’s ex-deputy chief of staff, each deny Reade’s story.
“Well, you have to look at the source, I mean, they’re still working with Biden,” she told Megyn Kelly, with the exception of Baker, who has retired.
Reade added, “Their job was to cover what he did. There are people that have enabled and allowed his behavior to continue, and they know who they are. And in a way, they’re complicit.”
Reade is facing a torrent of scrutiny for allegedly shifting details of her story and statements she’s made in the past praising Biden. Biden, for his part, insists her account “never happened.” While she didn’t make a copy of a paper complaint to the Senate regarding her harassment charge, several confidantes say she relayed the incident to them at various points during the last three decades.
Most Democrats, some of who advocated for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, have fallen in line behind the party’s presumptive standard-bearer.
Reade said the reaction made her “angry because those are people that I respected.”
Kelly, a former Fox News and NBC News host turned freelancer, pressed Reade on whether the timing of her decision to come forward was politically motivated.
“Everything’s political, right? But this is deeper than that. This is about watching the person that assaulted me be elevated to the highest office in the land. He’s running on a platform of character, and I just found that gross,” Reade replied.
