Today, Explained - Tara Reade alleges, Joe Biden denies

Episode Date: May 4, 2020

Vox's Laura McGann explains the sexual assault allegation against former Vice President Joe Biden, and the implications for his campaign. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey there. While Friday's show was for kids, today's show is not. We're going to be talking about allegations of sexual misconduct, and we will begin after a quick message from a sponsor. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM.

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about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. It can be easy to forget, but there's still a presidential race happening somewhere in the background of this coronavirus crisis. But for the past few weeks, it's been a little more prominent than it has been in recent memory because of new allegations of sexual misconduct against former Vice President Joe Biden. And they come from a former Senate aide of his named Tara Reid, not the actress. Laura McGann has been following the story for Vox for a while now. The story of Tara Reid took off in the last six weeks, but it really started a year ago in April 2019. Reid came forward then to quite a number of reporters,

including me here at Vox, to tell a story about being sort of made uncomfortable in Joe Biden's office in the 90s when she was a Senate aide then. And the story she told at the time was Joe Biden would put his hands on her shoulders, touch her hair, touch her neck in meetings, and it made her feel uncomfortable. And she complained about being asked by the staff to serve cocktails at a fundraiser for Biden. Someone in the office told her Biden said he liked her legs. She said that when she complained, she was sort of blamed and told, don't dress how you're dressing, dress more conservatively. And so she complained about those issues to the staff. And she contends that once she complained, she had her responsibilities

stripped, that she was treated badly and essentially forced out of the office. And so she went home to California after being in Washington about nine months. There were quite a number of national reporters investigating her story. We know the Washington Post had reporters on it, the New York Times had reporters on it, and the Associated Press had reporters on it. I was reporting on it. At the same time, a local paper was looking into it as well. It's a paper out west near where Tara Reid lived a year ago, and they kind of ran with just what she had to say and her anonymous friend had to say, and they posted this story. And it was criticized very rapidly by Biden supporters who said, you know, you didn't even talk to the Biden campaign, you didn't talk to anybody who worked in Biden's

office at the time. And then simultaneously, the internet very quickly discovered that Tara Reid had written a series of blog posts about her affection for Vladimir Putin and her affection for Russia at the same time. So it wasn't great for her. So what happens between this initial story popping up in this local paper and being vetted by more national outlets and the story reappearing more recently. Fast forward a year later and Tara Reid comes forward again. And this time she appears on this podcast show called The Katie Helper Show. Well, the story starts when I went to work for Joe Biden. Her story on one level is the same. She talks about being made to feel uncomfortable in the office and to be pushed out.

And they were finding fault with my work all the time, like every little thing. And it was almost to the point where three or four times a day there would be something, something, something wrong. And my mother, I would call my mom one day in tears, you know, and she was like, you know, this is retaliation. They know that you want to file something. But she has a second allegation that's more serious. She accuses Joe Biden of rape. She says that he sexually assaulted her on the Capitol grounds in 1993. And this is new. It was like everything, everything shattered in that moment because I knew like we were alone. It was over, right? He wasn't trying to do anything more, but it's,

I looked up to him. He was like my father's age. He was this champion of women's rights in my eyes. And I couldn't believe it was happening. It didn't seem, it seems surreal. And I know this is difficult to talk about, but just to be clear here, you're using the term rape, and Tara Reid is accusing Joe Biden of, I guess, what's technically called digital penetration, and that counts legally as rape. Is that accurate? That's the way that I'm using the term rape. So, yes. And I think you can think of this as

she's described this attack on Capitol Hill where he catches her off guard in a hallway and he forces himself on her against her will. And that's how she's described it. Okay, got it. Thanks for clarifying. What happens after this revelation on Katie Halper's podcast? From there, the story is picked up by another kind of left-wing publication, The Intercept, and they report the story as well. They have some sources saying she told them at the time, including her brother and a few other sources. Then the story really takes off when Business Insider starts publishing incremental updates to her story. They had a real blockbuster interview with a former neighbor in the 90s who went on the record and said, yes, Tara Reid told me about this assault in 1995. Okay, so the first time Tara Reid comes forward with some claims about Joe Biden is about a year ago, and it's more in the sort of harassment arena, and it's hard to corroborate within Biden's staff. The second time, which is last month, it's about being raped, and she's got someone backing her story.

Is that right? Yes, that's exactly right. So one way to think about the Tara Reade story is to think of it as two stories. What's the Biden campaign saying? Joe Biden just did his first interview on the record on this subject last week on Morning Joe on MSNBC. Did you sexually assault Tara Reid?

No, it is not true. I'm saying unequivocally. It never, never happened. And it didn't. It never happened. Where does that leave us? I mean, Joe Biden has this reputation for being sort of like a touchy-feely guy, but this is obviously a vastly more severe allegation. You've spoken with Tara Reid recently, as well as a year ago. What do you think the truth is? We can't really know what happened between two people in a hallway in 1993. All we can do is assess claims and sort of assess credibility.

What is hard in a case like this is I went back to my notes and I looked. And a year ago, she was very clear that she wanted me to understand that this was not a story of sexual misconduct. We talked about it in our first conversation in early April 2019. After our conversation, she sent me an essay that laid out the same idea, that this was a story about an office retaliating against her and an office more willing to push out a 20-something aide than say to the senator, hey, can you stop putting your hand on her shoulder in a meeting? It makes her uncomfortable.

And that, to me, is an important story. But not only was it missing the allegation of sexual assault, it was brought to me and framed as not that. So a year later, when I talked to Tara and talked to her friend again and asked her about it, Tara was saying I wasn't ready to share my full story. And I can see how, from her point of view, she's frustrated. She's talked to me about trauma and how people process trauma and talk about it. And I'm very sympathetic to that. It's tough in the media to think about how to establish the best set of facts that we can go on. And when your main source

changes her account, it's very hard. More with Laura after a break. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com. Ramp.com. Ramp.com. Cards issued by Sutton Bank. Member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. Laura, I want to ask you some questions about how this has affected the Biden campaign. Let's start with the fact that in the last debate between Vice President Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders, the vice president made it clear that he will be selecting a woman to be his running mate

for the presidency. Does this complicate that picture of him clearly being sort of an advocate for women? I think that that's kind of what Democrats are asking themselves right now of which Biden is the Biden that he claims to be. He helped get the violence against women legislation passed. Huge. He was one of the few men, male public figures, during the Obama years to step forward when millennial college women were saying, hey, there's a sexual assault problem on campuses and we need to do something about it. And he supported that movement on the record and came forward and said, men need to step up and men need to be part of it. And so when you hear a story like this and you're somebody who cares about these issues, it's going to affect some number of voters. Politically, in terms of the VP,

it does put a woman in a tough spot about what is her role in defending Joe Biden. And unfortunately, female politicians are often put on the spot much more so than male politicians about, well, what do you think about this story as if it's women's responsibility to take on these issues? And we've seen that already, that disproportionately women have been asked about it. And Stacey Abrams came out and defended him. There's been other prominent women who have said, I believe Joe Biden. And it feels a little unfair that whoever his nominee, his VP pick is going to be as a woman is probably going to have to answer questions about this in a way that maybe a male politician wouldn't. I think his pick for a female VP is something that

matters to Democrats who were disappointed that Hillary Clinton didn't become the first woman president. So I think it makes sense for him to try to cater to that demographic, but I think that it will affect whoever the VP pick is. How is the party leadership handling this? Yeah, I mean, overall, they've stood with Biden. I think that they've been trying to be sensitive and saying, well, we have to suss this out. We have to, you know, she deserves a fair hearing. But the party is now pretty much coalescing around Biden. The team that vetted Joe Biden in 2008 said we didn't find anything like this. This was not a pattern of behavior that we uncovered when we dug into him. David Axelrod said the same. He was involved in

vetting Joe Biden. So when you see the Obama alumni coming forward to support him, it's really a sign that the party is saying we stand with Biden and we believe him. Has the president said anything about these allegations against Joe Biden? Of course. Right. Like, why would Donald Trump just say, you know what, I'm going to lay low on this? Instead, he rather snarkily kind of encouraged Joe Biden. You got to fight this, Joe, like sort of lumping the two of them together. And this is something Democrats have not wanted. Like they would like to run an upstanding character and like wanting to draw that clear contrast. Yeah.

They don't want any kind of murky moment here of, well, our guy was only accused once versus theirs multiple times. It's not where Democrats want to be. There's been a lot of talk about this, of, oh, God, I don't want to be in a position of having to vote for somebody that maybe is guilty of the type of thing that the other guy is. But any time that Donald Trump can move the conversation away from his failed response to the pandemic, away from the economic crisis, that's a good day for Donald Trump in this campaign. The question is, is it just preaching to the choir of people who are not going to vote for Joe Biden anyway? Or does it affect voters who maybe would have stayed home or maybe would have flipped. It's always hard with that sort of a question. But we are heading into the worst recession in modern history.

At this point, we are close to, if not surpassed, 100,000 Americans have died in a pandemic. And I suspect that those issues are going to be what really matters to people. I mean, you wrote this case for Biden for Vox.com. We had you on some months ago to talk about it and you thought when you wrote it before these allegations came out that he was the candidate who could best get things done for the presidency and for down-ballot races as well. Do you still stand by that? I do. I wrote that for Democrats to get anything done, they need the Senate and they need to hang on to the House. And the candidates who've won in Trump districts over the last couple of years in special elections and during the

midterms, some of them only had one national Democrat come stump for them, whether that was Doug Jones down in Alabama or some of the candidates who picked up seats in Pennsylvania. They only had Joe Biden come. They only wanted Joe Biden, and they've now endorsed Joe Biden. So if you're a Democrat who wants to have an effective presidency, the people who have won where Democrats are going to need to win, say Joe Biden is the best shot at that. At the same time, I did write a column a year ago, critical of Biden about how he treats women in public, the sort of handsiness and why that matters. And since then, we haven't seen examples from him. Obviously, in recent months, we've all been in quarantine, but he did give a sort of half-hearted apology

when women were coming forward, and we saw his behavior change, which did hearten me. But I would say it's going to matter how he continues to treat women and how he conducts himself. I think that will matter to a lot of voters. It will matter. So it is the question of how much is just unknowable at this point. But it's not helpful to him right now. This is not the conversation he wants to have right now. Laura McGann is Vox's editorial director of politics. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm, this is Today Explained.