Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden has been credibly accused of sexual assault by a former aide… and now, she’s giving all the details on what the former Vice President did to her.
Tara Reade, who worked as a staff assistant for Biden in 1993, recently gave a very detailed interview with The Hill.
Reade explained that her boss had tasked her with bringing a gym bag to Biden at the Capitol Building.
Biden met her on the side of the building.
Reade explained, “He just said, ‘Hey, come here, Tara.’ And then I handed him the thing and he greeted me, he remembered my name.”
“And then we were alone, and it was the strangest thing,” she added. “There was no exchange really. He just had me up against the wall… The gym bag, I don’t know where it went. I handed it to him, was gone. And then his hands were on me and underneath my clothes.”
“He went down my skirt, but then up inside it, and he penetrated me with his fingers,” she continued. “He was kissing me at the same time and he was saying something to me. He said several things, and I can’t remember everything. I remember a couple of things. I remember him saying first before, like, as he was doing it, ‘Do you want to go somewhere else?’”
“And then him saying to me when I pulled away, he got finished doing what he was doing, and I kind of was pulled back and he said, he said, ‘Come on, man. I heard you liked me,'” Read added. “And that phrase stayed with me because I kept thinking, what I might have said, and I can’t remember exactly if he said ‘I thought ‘or if ‘I heard’ but it’s like he implied like that I had done this like, I don’t know.”
Reade added that “everything shattered in that moment” for her, because of her prior respect for Biden.
“He was this champion of women’s rights in my eyes, and I couldn’t believe what was happening. It seemed surreal. I just felt sick because he, when he pulled back, he looked annoyed,” she said. She added that Biden then told her, “‘You’re nothing to me.'”
“I must have looked shocked, and he grabbed me by the shoulders,” she added. “I don’t know how I looked, but I must have looked something because he grabbed me by the shoulders and he said, ‘You’re okay, you’re fine. You’re okay, you’re fine. ‘ And then he walked away and he went on with his day.”
Biden had been a strong champion of women’s rights–including the #MeToo movement, where he has long said that women coming forward with allegations should be categorically believed.
Unlike the allegations made against Justice Brett Kavanaugh by Christine Blasey Ford, Reade’s account also has contemporary witnesses: both her brother and another close friend say that Reade told them about the assault immediately after it took place.
Even more shockingly, Reade’s account isn’t the first time she attempted to go public with her story.
According to Reade, she said she alerted the campaigns of two of Biden’s top rivals for the presidency, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) before they left the presidential race. Apparently, neither of their campaigns took the charges seriously.