Tara Reade described her allegations against Joe Biden and questions about her story and background, in the most graphic and comprehensive terms yet in an interview with Megyn Kelly released Friday.
Kelly, a former Fox News host, conducted Reade’s first on-camera interview since Biden personally denied her claims in an interview last week. Rich McHugh, an investigative reporter who broke major developments in Reade’s claims, produced the interview.
Reade, 56, alleges that Biden sexually harassed and sexually assaulted her in 1993 when she worked in his Senate office. He uncomfortably touched her neck, she says. One day, Reade said she was told to bring him a gym bag and that Biden penetrated her with his fingers and forcibly kissed her.
“It happened very quickly. I remember being pushed up against the wall,” Reade said. “It happened all at once … He went down my skirt and then went up … He was talking to me at the same time … And I pulled this way, away from his head, and so he was kissing my neck area, and he whispered, did I want to go somewhere else, in a low voice. He said some other things, I can’t remember everything he said, but he said something vulgar.”
“May I ask what?” Kelly said.
“He said, ‘I want to f— you,'” Reade said.
At the end of the exchange, Reade said Biden told her, “You’re nothing to me.”
“I think that’s the hardest thing. And I know people talk about the assault, but his words, those words, stayed with me my whole life,” she said. She had trouble describing the incident to her mom, she said, because “I was embarrassed about the underwear I was wearing.”
Top Biden aides, whom Reade says she complained to about feeling uncomfortable, have denied in multiple news reports that she made the complaint.
“Their job was to cover what he did,” Reade said.
Reade later addressed skepticism about her claims revolving around her claims.
In response to the point that she publicly praised Biden on Twitter as recently as 2017, Reade said: “I’m an expert witness on domestic violence issues, as you know. So that was an account that was part of awareness of domestic violence … I’ve always been conflicted about Joe Biden. I didn’t want to talk badly about him, and I wasn’t ready to tell my history with Joe Biden at that point at all.”
Explaining blog posts she made that praised Russian president Vladimir Putin, Reade said: “If you read a lot of the posts, they’re a lot about Russia and the anti-Russian sentiment that we have, and I don’t like xenophobia. I was writing a Russian novel, I was part of a writing group, as I mentioned earlier. And we were doing creative writing, creative posts. And I was in the middle of studying about Russia, kind of immersing myself in that. The truth of the matter is, I’ve never been to Russia. I don’t know what it’s like to live there or the human rights violations that, you know, he’s accused of. And what I would say now is I don’t appreciate his views about, for instance, domestic violence.”
Reade also told Kelly that she thought Biden should drop out of the presidential race. On Thursday, the law firm Wigdor LLP announced that it was representing Reade.
