‘I don’t know this person at all who has made the allegations. She came out of nowhere. Where has she been all these years?’
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) A new court document obtained on Thursday shows that rape victim Tara Reade told her ex-husband years ago about the alleged 1993 harassment by then-Deleware Sen. Joe Biden, her boss at the time.
The document reveals that Reade’s husband at the time, Theodore Dronen, told the court during a divorce filing that Reade had confided in him “a problem she was having at work regarding sexual harassment, in U.S. Senator Joe Biden’s office.”
Biden, who continues to deny the allegations, currently stands poised to secure the Democratic presidential nomination.
However, Reade’s credible account has been corroborated by at least four independent, living sources in addition—now—to at least two pieces of contemporaneous documentary evidence.
Reade has joined many others in calling for Biden to release his archives, currently being housed at the University of Delaware, in case there are any additional records of the assault.
On Thursday, she called for Biden to drop out of the presidential race.
“I wish he would … but he won’t,” she said in her first major media interview since the story broke nationally. “But I wish he would,” she added. “That’s how I feel emotionally.”
The latest evidence, the divorce document first obtained by the San Luis Obispo Tribune, was filed in the California Superior Court on March 25, 1996.
It does not specifically say who in Biden’s office was responsible for harassing Reade, and it does not mention Reade’s more specific allegation of assault.
But it does say that Reade struck a deal with Biden’s chief of staff at the time and “left her position.”
Biden’s chief of staff at the time, Ted Kaufman, told the Tribune that he does not remember Reade.
“I do not remember her, and had she come to me in any of these circumstances, I would remember her. But I do not, because she did not,” Kaufman said.
The experience had a “very traumatic effect” on Reade, Dronen told the court, according to the document.
MK EXCLUSIVE: #TaraReade responds to #JoeBiden; calls for him to drop out pic.twitter.com/jxHAUYaWVU
— Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) May 7, 2020
The case has continued to draw parallels with the 2018 accusations made against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh by a former high-school acquaintance of his, Christine Blasey Ford.
The only witnesses to Ford’s alleged drunken assault were unable to confirm her tale, and the only witness to support her later recanted. An FBI probe concluded there was no evidence to substantiate the claim.
At the time, however, powerful Democrats, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, who first advanced Ford’s claim, insisted that any scrutiny of her narrative could do harm by forcing her to relive the 30-plus-year-old trauma.
Ford claimed to have blocked out the memory of the assault until 2012, when Kavanaugh first entered into the spotlight as a potential conservative court pick.
Kavanaugh’s 2018 nomination then prompted Ford to relay an anonymous letter to Feinstein, which the partisan Senate Judiciary Committee member used in a last-minute effort to derail the confirmation.
Shamefully, Feinstein attacked Reade on Thursday, tossing out all of her past rhetoric about victims’ trauma and the need for unconditional credibility.
Instead, she insisted, Ford’s case was a special exception to the rule.
“Kavanaugh was under the harshest inspection that we give people over a substantial period of time,” Feinstein told CNN, rejecting questions of a Democrat double-standard.
“And I don’t know this person at all [Reade] who has made the allegations [against Biden]. She came out of nowhere. Where has she been all these years? He was vice president.”
“Why didn’t she say something — you know when he was Chairman of the Judiciary Committee or after that?” Feinstein rejected the notion of a Dem double standard and argued the situation isn’t “comparable” to Kavanaugh
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) May 7, 2020
Liberty Headlines’ Ben Sellers contributed to this report.