‘If we again want to have integrity, you can’t say, you know—both believe women, support all of this, until it inconveniences you…’
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) Rep. Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez, D-N.Y., said it is “legitimate to talk about” the sexual-assault allegation made against presidential candidate Joe Biden, especially since Biden is now the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Tara Reade, a former congressional staffer who worked in congressional office accused the then-Delaware senator of sexually assaulting her in 1993.
At least two of Reade’s friends have confirmed she told them about the incident at the time it happened, but very few Democrats have been willing to acknowledge the serious allegation.
When asked if it was something the Democratic Party should address, Ocasio–Cortez agreed that it was necessary, even if inconvenient.
“I think it’s legitimate to talk about these things,” Ocasio–Cortez said during an online forum hosted by The Wing, a leftist women’s network.
“And if we want, if we again want to have integrity, you can’t say, you know—both believe women, support all of this, until it inconveniences you, until it inconveniences us.”
An investigative journalist who covered entertainment mogul Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assault case also investigated Reade’s accusation against Biden, and found it to be much more substantive than other accusations the media has covered.
The two friends Reade allegedly spoke to after the incident were “incredibly credible people,” said journalist Rich McHugh.
“These were not short conversations. I drilled down on the details of the story and they matched up with her story,” McHugh told The Hill.
In a story for Business Insider, McHugh said he spoke with another former Biden intern who was not told about the alleged assault, but who did remember Reade being abruptly removed from her post in April 1993, which is when Reade said the assault occurred.
There were several other corroborating accounts, McHugh explained to The Hill, which gave him “a bedrock of information from which to proceed comfortably.”
Despite this corroborative evidence, many mainstream outlets have refused to report Reade’s accusation against Biden.
Even though they gladly ran with Christine Blasey Ford’s unconfirmed story during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing and have accepted without scrutiny several baseless accusations against President Donald Trump, outlets like the New York Times claimed Reade’s account did not rise to the same level.
Times executive editor Dean Baquet, an unapologetic Trump-basher, defended the paper’s two-week delay in reporting on Reade’s accusation by claiming, paradoxically, that Ford’s claim against Kavanaugh was much more public—and thus more newsworthy.
By contrast, Baquet said few in his circle of Manhattan elites had shown interest enough to elevate Reade into the national zeitgeist, assuming they had even heard about her alleged rape by the presidential hopeful.
“If you ask the average person in America, they didn’t know about the Tara Reade case,” Baquet said after the Times faced heavy criticism for making stealth-edits and omissions in their reporting at the behest of the Biden campaign.
“Kavanaugh was in a very different situation,” Baquet insisted. “It was a live, ongoing story that had become the biggest political story in the country.”
Blasey Ford’s hazy allegations of a drunken high-school assault would have occurred roughly eight years before Reade’s alleged assault.
Kavanaugh’s accuser, a California psychology professor and left-wing pro-abortion activist, also claimed to have suppressed the memory of it, only revisiting it two decades later, after the conservative federal judge’s name was circulated as a possible Supreme Court pick.
Ocasio–Cortez admitted the double-standard was unfair. Despite having put forward the “most diverse field that we’ve ever seen” during the primaries, Democrats were once again “kind of replaying old movies in a way,” she complained.
“I think a lot of us are just in this moment where it’s like, how did we get here?” she asked. “You know, it almost felt like we started this cycle where we had kind of moved on from, you know, from all of this. And now it feels like we’re kind of back in it.”