Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said she’s “frankly disgusted” by presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s political shift when it comes to women who claim to have been the victims of sexual misconduct.
In a Friday interview, DeVos told me she thought Biden was a “total hypocrite” for demanding more due process in vetting accusations than he wants to provide to others.
DeVos recently announced a new and highly consequential rule change regarding sexual harassment in public schools. It came as the former vice president was defending himself from an accusation by Tara Reade, who in the early 1990s worked in Biden’s Senate office and who has alleged that at the time, Biden once pushed her against the wall and penetrated her with his fingers.
Biden has denied the accusation, though multiple people have corroborated that Reade told them her story, including a former neighbor of Reade, who said she nonetheless still planned to vote for Biden in November.
Following Reade’s claim, Biden has been asked about previous public statements wherein he clearly said that women who say they’ve been sexually abused are to be believed by default. “Look, from the very beginning, I’ve said believing women means taking the claims seriously when she steps forward and then vet it,” Biden said in a TV interview on May 1. “Look into it. That’s true in this case as well.”
But that’s not what Biden has said in the past. What he said in 2018 about Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, was, “You’ve got to start out with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real.”
Just a few days after that TV interview, DeVos announced the new rule, which for the first time gave a definition to “sexual harassment” and put formal procedures in place that give the accuser every chance to be heard and the accused the right to defend themselves with evidence and witnesses. (Once upon a time, this was called “due process.”)
In response to the new rule, Biden in a statement called it an attempt to “shame and silence” sexual abuse survivors and promised a “quick end” to it should he be elected.
“Reading the statement, I thought he could not have possibly have written that himself because he can’t possibly believe what he actually released given where he was in that moment in time,” DeVos told me. “A total hypocrite. Right?”
She said that Biden, given the claim from Reade, should hope that others receive the same presumption of innocence that he was asking for.
“I mean, he was asking for what the rule has actually guaranteed for everyone, the presumption of innocence, at a time when he wanted something totally different for a 19- or 20-year-old college student,” she told me. “So it’s a total hypocritical position for him to take, and I was frankly disgusted.”
