By her own admission, Tara Reade’s life has been complicated. Some of the details, like an abusive marriage that culminated in the court granting her a restraining order against her ex-husband and full custody of their daughter, are proven beyond most reasonable doubt. Others, like whether she actually finished her undergraduate degree program at Antioch University before getting her law degree, seem dubious at best. But the question of whether Joe Biden sexually assaulted her one spring day in 1993 is still that: a question, one not yet proven or disproved.
Yet the media hasn’t treated it as such. Rather than focus on the actual evidence surrounding the day and time in question, tens of thousands of words have been dedicated to digging up every aggrieved acquaintance in her past to smear her as a destitute trickster who can’t be trusted. And as of yesterday, they effectively forced her lawyer off her case.
Do the details of Reade’s past make her someone you’d want to offer a loan to? Maybe not. Do they reflect on the extant evidence that still backs her allegation? Definitely not.
Right now, Biden’s best defense has nothing to do with the evidence, the most compelling of which includes multiple, contemporaneously corroborating people whose accounts of what she told them include the specific details of her current allegation. They also include her husband’s response to a restraining order that revealed she suffered “traumatic” harassment while working for the current Democratic presidential nominee and an August 1993 clip from Larry King Live that evidently shows her mother claiming Reade had faced insurmountable “problems” while working for a prominent senator. It’s true that Reade’s allegation is unique and absolutely does not fit a pattern of behavior from Biden, who had never been accused of sexual assault in half a century of public life before this. But that simply reintroduces a reasonable element of doubt, rather than substantively negating those contemporaneous accounts.
It’s not as though a single contemporaneously corroborating witness, especially the most important one, ex-neighbor and Biden supporter Lynda LaCasse, has been found to be bought off or asked to lie. If Reade really did fabricate this story, it would mean she invented it in 1993 and repeated it to multiple different people who didn’t know each other in various years after. That, or she somehow got every single corroborator to lie.
The reasonable standard for an allegation like this is simply to let both its substance and accuser fade into the background if more evidence fails to materialize. Unlike Julie Swetnick, whose outlandish gang-rape claims against Brett Kavanaugh were actively discredited by the evidence and then referred to the FBI for investigation, that’s what Republican leadership hoped would happen with Christine Blasey Ford. No one of any real GOP power believed Ford to be intentionally lying, so, given that evidence was never found to back her claims, the fair conclusion of the confirmation of Kavanaugh would be to let both of them live their lives.
That’s not what’s happened here. Despite not one piece of evidence undermining the details of the allegation itself, Reade has been torn to shreds, with critics ripping apart perhaps the less palatable but still irrelevant aspects of her personality and past. The mob still feels the need to smear as a lie even her account of her abusive marriage, despite ample evidence, including the admission of her ex-husband, confirming it was violent.
Democrats, not just on the Biden campaign but also the dishonest actors cosplaying as journalists, could have simply gone with a somewhat neutral stance, such as: “Tara Reade’s allegation is horrifying, but the available, on-the-record, contemporaneously corroborating witness simply isn’t enough evidence to prove that Joe Biden, a man who has never faced a single previous allegation of sexual assault and has been publicly heralded for respecting women in the workplace, is likely to have done this thing. If more evidence comes forward, we can reevaluate, but until then, Reade should be allowed to leave the public in peace.”
Instead, the top news channels and papers of the media decided to ignore her allegation for a month, spent approximately five minutes actually interviewing her contemporaneously corroborating witnesses, and then spent the next month trying to dig up whether she missed rent and embellished her educational achievements (something Biden himself does) decades after the actual allegation.
The result: Now, defense attorneys are trying to reverse domestic violence convictions decided with the expert witness testimony of Reade, who served as a well-respected government witness in California domestic violence cases. Remember, Reade may have lied about getting a Bachelor of Arts, but it’s not in dispute that she got a law degree and was regarded as one of the premier expert witnesses of domestic violence in Monterey County. Putting every missed rent bill aside, there’s little question that Reade honestly contributed to putting behind bars some domestic abusers found guilty, beyond a reasonable doubt, in criminal court. In sum, she made women safer. Yet now, those abusers may go free because the media was determined to destroy Reade.
Oh, and by the way, her attorney dropped her. Maybe he lost faith in her case, which he denies, or maybe it’s because a professional sexual assault rights attorney spent the two weeks he was on Reade’s case getting smeared as a Russian agent.
Contrary to the Kavanaugh-era cries that the #MeToo movement required that we believe all women, it only granted accusers the right to be heard, taken seriously, and not shamed or blamed. Reade’s case seems to ensure that we don’t even have that anymore. Quite frankly, I wouldn’t come forward with a sexual assault allegation anymore, and I don’t know why anyone else would. Evidently, all you’d learn is how awful every malfeasance you committed years after your allegation was and, oh, by the way, your skirt really was too short.
Unless you’re accusing a Republican. In that case, you become a pawn, but at least you’ll be protected.
