Tara Reade says former Vice President Joe Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993 while she was working for him in the Senate.
Nearly three decades later, in March 2020, Reade made her allegation public, as IJR reported. Biden has vehemently denied her accusation.
In an interview with Fox News over the weekend, Reade explained why she did not come forward with her story sooner.
She said that watching Biden’s handling of Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas during his 1991 confirmation hearing led her to stay silent.
“I really believed Anita Hill, and I thought she was treated badly,” Reade said, adding, “I think a lot of women felt the same way. They were watching that — that were professionals, you know, I was a young professional at the time.”
“And I didn’t like the way Joe Biden dealt with her, but I also didn’t like how she was dealt with in general, right? And what it did was that it made us more silent. What it did was show us was, ‘Okay when you try to go up against this, this is basically what you’re gonna face. So it was an example of… a deterrent,” she said.
Reade said that she felt lawmakers were “immune from a lot of crime” and that filing a sexual assault complaint would not have made any progress in “any kind of substantive way.”
“There was a silencing,” Reade said of the aftermath of Hill’s testimony. “There was like a ‘let’s go back to square one’ in how we’re going to deal with this and the whole thing about what’s considered vulgar, what’s considered sexual harassment. All of the definitions were still fluid, and they were still deciding.”
She continued:
“And even now, here we are in 2020, you have major reporters that consider themselves liberal feminists, they’re neo-liberal feminists and they’re saying that the hugging, touching, massaging, kissing, unwanted is that… It’s not sexual harassment. It is sexual harassment. If you look up the definition, that’s the very definition of sexual harassment. So it’s just interesting how, like, even the definitions are being massaged to suit the perpetrator. That’s how I view it.”
Biden has been criticized for how he handled Hill’s allegations against Thomas and last year he said he felt she “did not get a fair hearing. She did not get treated well.”
He added, “As the committee chairman, I take responsibility that she did not get treated well. I take responsibility for that.”