Tara Reade, the woman who accused former Vice President Joe Biden of sexually assaulting and harassing her when she was his Senate aide in the 1990s, said headlines from the Associated Press are misleading.
The accusation is the latest twist in the controversy which prompted Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, to deny on Friday the allegations and call on the secretary of the Senate to search for a complaint allegedly lodged by his former aide almost three decades ago.
On Saturday, the Associated Press published parts of a year-old interview with Reade about the complaint she claims to have filed with a congressional personnel office. Soon after, Reade accused the outlet of inaccurately portraying her words.
“This is false,” Reade tweeted in response to the Associated Press’s tweet sharing the report.
At the time, the headline of the report read “AP Exclusive: Harassment, assault absent in Biden complaint.” And the description in the tweet, to which she responded, said, “Tara Reade says a Senate report she filed against Joe Biden didn’t refer to sexual harassment or assault.”
The Associated Press changed its headline to say “Reade: ‘I didn’t use sexual harassment’ in Biden complaint,” but according to Reade, that still isn’t right.
When asked for clarification on what was untrue about the outlet’s reporting, Reade told the Washington Examiner, “The headline and the amended headline.”
This is false. https://t.co/w4yXGI1DQm
— taratweets ( Alexandra Tara Reade) (@ReadeAlexandra) May 2, 2020
Reade further explained to Fox News that the “story itself is correct,” but demanded the headline be retracted.
“They’re standing by the fact … that I said I don’t think I used the term ‘sexual harassment.’ We didn’t use it as much back in 1993, so I don’t know, but that’s not to say that there isn’t a box that I didn’t check. Until we get that form, we don’t know,” she said.
The Washington Examiner reached out to the Associated Press for comment but did not receive a response for publication. The publication told Fox News that it “stands by its story.”
In the story, Reade is quoted as saying she was “too scared to write about the sexual assault” in the complaint. According to the Associated Press, “Reade said she described her issues with Biden but ‘the main word I used — and I know I didn’t use sexual harassment — I used ‘uncomfortable.’ And I remember ‘retaliation.’”
An editor’s note that now appears at the bottom of the report says, “The headline of this story was changed for clarity and to incorporate a direct quote from Reade.”
Reade reportedly canceled a tentative TV interview that was scheduled to be recorded on Friday and aired on Sunday because of a growing number of death threats she and her daughter are facing.
She has also voiced concerns about the potential of Republicans using her story to politicize the issue of sexual assault. “What I would say about Republicans using this story is please don’t politicize it,” Reade told the Washington Examiner in an interview Monday. “There are many people who identify with Republican politics that have that are also survivors and have also been silenced.”
“If they want to talk about sexual assault, sexual harassment in a general way, then this would be the time to have a general conversation. That has nothing to do with being Democrat or Republican, but just to empower women to be safer in their workplaces and safer in general,” Reade added.
Reade, who was a lifelong Democrat, says she has never been a supporter of President Trump, but that she is no longer a Democrat.
