‘Survivors deserve more than being used as a political football by disinterested parties…’
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) The founder of #MeToo, Tarana Burke, said Tara Reade’s allegation of sexual assault by Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is an “inconvenient truth.”
But she clarified that it hasn’t changed Biden’s electability in a significant manner.
There are no perfect survivors. And no one, especially a presidential candidate, is beyond reproach. So where does that leave us?
4/14— Tarana (@TaranaBurke) April 28, 2020
Burke helped found the #MeToo movement in 2006 as a social-media campaign to raise rape awareness.
However, it was only in 2017, after the election of President Donald Trump, that it merged with other activist movements and began to mobilize as a partisan political weapon.
Burke vocally opposed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination in 2018 because of unsubstantiated accusations made against him.
She said Reade, just like any other survivor, has the “right to speak” and to be “given the space to heal.”
She also blamed the system for forcing Democrats to choose between “accountability” and “healing.”
“What we have now is a zero-sum game where absolutely no one wins,” she said, accusing those interested in Reade’s allegation against Biden of being “entertained by the trauma of others.”
Biden deserves to be heard not because he’s a “good guy” or “our only hope,” Burke added, but because he’s “demonstrated [a] learning curve around boundaries with women.”
Survivors deserve more than being used as a political football by disinterested parties. And a culture of acknowledging harm can’t exist if we continue to view sexual violence as a catastrophic outlier rather than an embedded toxic element of our culture.
14/14— Tarana (@TaranaBurke) April 28, 2020
Reade alleged that Biden assaulted her when she was a staffer in his congressional office.
Her account has been corroborated by at least four independent sources, and contemporaneously by a 1993 video of Larry King Live, in which a caller believed to be Reade’s now-deceased mother outlined a sexual assault by a prominent political figure.
Biden’s campaign has denied the allegations, calling them “untrue,” but the presumptive Democrat nominee has yet to personally address them.