[I started reporting on Tara Reade’s story a year ago. Here’s
what I found, and where I’m stuck.] [[link removed]]

THE AGONIZING STORY OF TARA READE  
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Laura McGan
May 7, 2020
Vox
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_ I started reporting on Tara Reade’s story a year ago. Here’s
what I found, and where I’m stuck. _

,

 

In April 2019, a woman named Tara Reade reached out to me with a
clear, consistent story to tell about her experience as a staffer in
Joe Biden’s Senate office in 1993. I spent hours on the phone with
her, and many more tracking down possible witnesses and documents,
trying to confirm her account.

Reade told me that a senior aide told her Biden liked her legs and
that he wanted her to serve cocktails at a fundraiser for him, a
request she found demeaning and declined. When she later complained to
others in the office that Biden would put his hands on her shoulder,
neck, and hair during meetings in ways that made her uncomfortable,
she says she was blamed and told to dress more conservatively. Within
a few months, she said, her responsibilities had been stripped and she
felt she was being pushed out of the job. She went back home to
California deflated.

Reade told me that she wanted me to think of this story as being about
abuse of power, “but not sexual misconduct.” Her emphasis was on
how she was treated in Biden’s office by Senate aides, who she said
retaliated against her for complaining about how Biden touched her in
meetings. “I don’t know if [Biden] knew why I left,” she said.
“He barely knew us by name.”

She sent me an email that evening with an essay she’d written. Her
local paper in California, the Union, published a similar version a
few weeks later with a line she’d sent to me, too: “This is not a
story about sexual misconduct; it is a story about abuse of power. It
is a story about when a member of Congress allows staff to threaten or
belittle or bully on their behalf unchecked to maintain power rather
than modify the behavior.”

Last year, Reade encouraged me to speak with a friend of hers who
counseled her through her time in Biden’s office in 1992 and 1993.
The friend was clear about what had happened, and what hadn’t.

“On the scale of other things we heard, and I feel ashamed, but it
wasn’t that bad. [Biden] never tried to kiss her directly. He never
went for one of those touches. It was one of those, ‘sorry you took
it that way.’ I know that is very hard to explain,” the friend
told me. She went on: “What was creepy was that it was always in
front of people.”

I wanted to break this story. Badly. About half a dozen women had
stepped forward around the time I spoke with Reade to say they were
bothered by how Biden had touched them at events. I wrote
[[link removed]] a
column praising them for staring down the political media that had
given him a pass for all those years. Reade’s story took these
complaints further — showing how even lower-grade inappropriate
conduct can have real consequences for a woman’s career, an
important subject that we still don’t talk about nearly enough.

I knew I wasn’t the only reporter Reade was talking to. The New York
Times had three reporters on the story, she told me. On April 3, the
day after we first spoke, she texted me four times. She wanted to know
when I planned to publish, and she warned me that other outlets were
getting ready to do so.

That day, the Union
[[link removed]] published
an article with her story. This happens sometimes. It’s happened to
me, many times. You fight for a story that would be explosive if you
could prove it, but you can’t. I continued reporting on her story
for a few more weeks after the story broke, but I didn’t get enough.
Vox did not publish anything about Reade in 2019. Neither did the
major outlets that I know were pursuing the story, including the
Times, the Washington Post, and the Associated Press.

In March 2020, Reade resurfaced with a new allegation, which she told
on _The Katie Halper Show_
[[link removed]].
In addition to her account of her experience with office staff, Reade
said that in 1993, Biden forced an unwanted sexual encounter on her.
She said Biden pushed her against a wall on the Capitol grounds,
kissed her, and then digitally penetrated her — all against her
will.

Biden’s campaign did not respond publicly to Reade’s claims in
2019. On May 1, Biden answered questions about the allegations for the
first time on MSNBC’s _Morning Joe_. He denied all of Reade’s
claims and underscored his denial of the sexual assault allegation.
“I’m saying unequivocally, it never, never happened,” he told
[[link removed]] host
Mika Brzezinski.

Three aides whom Reade said she approached about her complaints in
1993 told
[[link removed]] the
New York Times that they also dispute her account. “I never once
witnessed, or heard of, or received, any reports of inappropriate
conduct, period — not from Ms. Reade, not from anyone,” said
Marianne Baker, Biden’s longtime executive assistant. “I have
absolutely no knowledge or memory of Ms. Reade’s accounting of
events, which would have left a searing impression on me as a woman
professional, and as a manager.”

When Reade’s story reemerged in a new form, I went through my
reporting notes and interview transcripts from a year ago. I spoke
with Reade last week for several hours over the course of multiple
interviews. Reade and I have had a good rapport. She’s optimistic
and idealistic, even, as one friend told me, to a fault. When she
tells her account, she becomes emotional. She seems sincere.

RELATED
The debate over what “believe women” means, explained
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If I were an old friend of Reade’s and she told me this same story
privately over the course of a year, I doubt I would question her
account. The brain processes traumatic experiences differently,
making it difficult for some survivors to share them as a linear
narrative. And the personal nature of a sexual assault can saddle
victims with feelings of shame and doubt. It’s not easy to talk
about. Many sexual assault survivors never speak of the experience at
all.

But I’m not an old friend. I’m a journalist. Reade came to me
because she wanted to share her story with the world, not just with
me. It was clear in our conversations that she understood the
difference. I listened to her, I interviewed relevant sources, and I
returned to her many times in an attempt to get more information to
help me find more corroboration.

Reade’s latest allegation is far more serious and comes in a far
more fraught political context. The story that both she and her
corroborating witnesses are telling has changed dramatically. This
leaves me — all of us — in an agonizing place. I’ve written many
articles through the Me Too era. It’s unrealistic to
demand “perfect” victims
[[link removed]].
And, like most who come forward with allegations of sexual misconduct
or assault, Reade has suffered for speaking out. In several exchanges
this year and last year, she’s shown me disturbing messages she’s
received online.

As my colleague Anna North writes
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there has long been an ambiguity in the Me Too movement. The rallying
cry has been to “believe women.” But the acts of journalism that
have driven the movement forward have been built on extraordinary
amounts of evidence: They usually include not just consistent
corroboration but oftentimes multiple stories, stacked on top of each
other. Taking on powerful men over these issues was unthinkable just a
few years ago. It’s required herculean effort.

Holding powerful men accountable takes a mountain of evidence

Reporters who’ve succeeded in forcing powerful men to be held to
account relied on an incredible amount of reporting to do it.

For example, Irin Carmon, who, along with Amy Brittain exposed Charlie
Rose for an alleged decades-long pattern of sexual harassment,
had pursued the story for years
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When their exposé appeared in the Washington Post
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it was built on accusations from eight women, three on the record.
Carmon and Brittain found consistency across the women’s stories and
strong corroboration of each account:

There are striking commonalities in the accounts of the women, each of
whom described their interactions with Rose in multiple interviews
with The Post. For all of the women, reporters interviewed friends,
colleagues or family members who said the women had confided in them
about aspects of the incidents.

Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein fell in 2017 after Jodi Kantor and
Megan Twohey of the New York Times published
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accounts of dozens of women who said Weinstein had assaulted or
harassed them over the previous 30 years. Ronan Farrow published
[[link removed]] another
story shortly after in the New Yorker, an account that included 13
accusations of sexual assault, three of them rape. All three reporters
have gone on to write
[[link removed]] books
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the incredible lengths they went to in order to get the story.

Eight women have now said they’ve been made uncomfortable by Biden
in public settings. Reade is the lone woman to accuse him of sexual
assault. This is a situation out of her control, but it means that
reporters can’t build a story about Biden around a pattern of
behavior, where multiple accusers boost one another’s story.
Instead, reporters are looking at Reade’s account in isolation —
and that account has changed.

When we spoke a year ago, Reade told me the only named sources she
could give me were her deceased mother and the friend I spoke to. A
recently uncovered tape of her mom on _Larry King Live _appears
to corroborate
[[link removed]] Reade’s claim that
she was struggling in Biden’s office in 1993, but does not include
an assault allegation. When I reconnected with the friend I spoke to
last year, who had previously told me Biden had not assaulted Reade,
she told me a version of the story that matched Reade’s latest
account.

This year, Reade said to Halper that she also told her brother about
the alleged assault and harassment. He later told the Washington Post
[[link removed]] in
an interview that he remembers his sister was upset in 1993 about
Biden touching her neck and shoulders. He followed up with a Post
reporter a few days later over text message to say Reade also said
Biden “put his hands under her clothes.”

Since then, a former neighbor of Reade’s, Lynda LaCasse, has come
forward in an interview
[[link removed]] with
Business Insider. She said Reade spoke about the harassment and
assault claims in 1995. I asked Reade why she hadn’t mentioned
LaCasse to me a year ago, or to Halper, or to the first few reporters
she told about her assault allegation, including the New York Times,
which was working on a deep dive into her story at the same time. She
said LaCasse hadn’t seemed like a relevant source because she’d
talked to her two years after the alleged incident took place. Reade
added that she told reporters about two other anonymous friends later
who hadn’t seemed relevant to her either. When asked a similar
question
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the Associated Press, which had been working on the story, too, Reade
didn’t respond.

If Reade had told a consistent story and shared all of her
corroborating sources with reporters, if those sources had told a
consistent story, if the Union piece had shaken loose other cases like
hers, or if there were “smoking gun” evidence in Biden’s papers,
her account might have been reported on differently in mainstream
media a year ago. It is not fair to an individual survivor that their
claims require an extraordinary level of confirmation, but it’s what
reporters have found is necessary for their stories to hold up to
public scrutiny and successfully hold powerful men accountable. So we
are here.

The media took Reade seriously. She wanted more.

When Halper asked Reade why she didn’t mention the assault
allegation originally, she responded
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blaming the media:

Well, I was going to tell the whole thing … the whole history with
Biden. … But the way I was being questioned, it made me so
uncomfortable that I didn’t trust it. And no offense to the
reporters out there, it’s just maybe that’s something that can be
learned, how to talk to somebody who got. … Because I just really
got shut down. … And the narrative [they] really wanted it to be was
that it wasn’t a sexual thing. Like don’t say it’s sexual. And
so I was like, okay, I guess I can’t really say the whole story. …

But that wasn’t the narrative I wanted. I wanted the truth. And I
certainly had no qualms about the accusations being of sexual
misconduct. Reporters at many outlets, including the reporters Reade
spoke to, have not shied away from reporting on detailed sexual
assault allegations. In the Me Too era, reporters have been aggressive
in uncovering stories of powerful men who, for far too long, have
abused and assaulted women with no consequences.

In the interview with Halper and in her most recent conversations with
me, Reade was critical of how major outlets treated her story. For
example, in the interview with Halper, Reade said she contacted
“someone at the Washington Post_ _and then they never really
followed up.”

Tara Reade in 1992.

 Courtesy of Tara Reade

The Washington Post says that it interviewed Reade
[[link removed]] “on
multiple occasions — both this year and last — as well as people
she says she told of the assault claim and more than a half-dozen
former staffers of Biden’s Senate office,” a fact Reade conceded
to me in an interview.

In a recent conversation, I asked Reade why she would say the media
was shutting her down when she was initially so adamant with me (and
other outlets) that this wasn’t a misconduct story. The only answer
she gave was that she was speaking about the response to her claims
“collectively.” And in her opinion, the added details still fit
her construct that “this is not a story about sexual misconduct,”
because, she told me, sexual assault itself is about power.

I spoke with Reade’s friend again this week. She said that Reade had
told her about the alleged assault the week it happened in 1993. I
asked the friend why, then, did she volunteer so explicitly that Biden
“never tried to kiss her” or touch her inappropriately. “It just
organically rolled out that way,” the friend said. “[Reade] and I
had many conversations a year ago about what her degree of comfort
was. She wanted to leave a layer there, and I did not want to betray
that. It just wasn’t my place.”

The missing complaint

Reade told me last year that she gave a supervisor a written statement
voicing her complaints about how she’d been treated in the office.
The complaint was limited to the harassment allegation, not the
misconduct allegation, she told me this year.

I helped Reade in 2019 request documents from a few offices to try to
find the record. (Personnel files wouldn’t be released to a third
party, like a reporter.) First, she put in a request with the Senate
secretary’s office
[[link removed]],
which maintains some employment records. That office provided a copy
of her payroll history, which confirmed her dates of employment and
salary.

We next tried the Office of Personnel Management
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which maintains federal records of employment, but the office was not
able to track down a file in its electronic system. I then checked
with a source who worked in a warehouse across the country where it
would most likely have ended up to see if there was a physical file
stashed there. He couldn’t find one.

One place the complaint could have landed is back in the Senate
office, though that wouldn’t be proper protocol. Biden is now under
pressure
[[link removed]] to
check files maintained by the University of Delaware. He gave the
university his Senate documents in 2012 under the condition they’d
remain sealed
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two years after his time in office. The time frame was extended when
he decided to run for president.

When asked on _Morning Joe_ if he would have the documents reviewed,
Biden said he would not
[[link removed]],
maintaining a personnel file wouldn’t be there and that the files
are about his policy decision-making, speechwriting, etc.

Biden says that if a complaint exists, it would be held by
the National Archives
[[link removed]] and
they should release any relevant documents. He also sent a letter to
the Senate secretary’s office asking for any relevant records, a
request the office declined because any records that might exist are
“strictly confidential
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Reade herself says the complaint didn’t include the assault
accusation, so finding the complaint — or failing to find it —
would neither corroborate nor debunk the most serious allegation.

The complaint could corroborate Reade’s claims of sexual harassment,
which Biden also denies. But it’s well established that Biden has
over the years touched women in a way that some have said made them
uncomfortable, and Biden has acknowledged this publicly. Whether or
not one finds his apology for that adequate, it’s the assault
accusation that has made Reade the center of attention. All parties
agree that a complaint wouldn’t speak to that.

Where this leaves us

All of this leaves me where no reporter wants to be: mired in the
miasma of uncertainty. I wanted to believe Reade when she first came
to me, and I worked hard to find the evidence to make certain others
would believe her, too. I couldn’t find it. None of that means Reade
is lying, but it leaves us in the limbo of Me Too: a story that may be
true but that we can’t prove.

There’s another issue at play, which Biden supporters and critics of
Reade have pointed to in response to her allegation. A year ago, Reade
went to mainstream, national outlets including the Times, the Post,
and the Associated Press. It was in the middle of a competitive
Democratic primary. She had no obvious connection to any candidate.
And if voters or the party pushed Biden out, it was unclear who would
benefit.

This year, Reade has emerged as an ardent Bernie Sanders supporter,
with a much more damaging story to tell about Biden, who is now the
presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. She went public with the
rape accusation on a podcast sympathetic to Sanders and followed up
with Ryan Grim of the Intercept
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an outlet that has been consistently critical of Biden.

A few weeks before Reade spoke to Halper, she replied to a tweet from
Grim seeming to tease that a story was coming. Reade declined to
elaborate on what she meant in the tweet, directing me to a
spokesperson. Grim said he hadn’t noticed the reply when she sent
it, and he didn’t speak with her for the first time until March 8,
almost a week later.

A head-to-head Biden v Sanders contest will force voters to take a
close look at Biden again. That went very badly for him last time.

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) March 4, 2020
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Reade’s supporters on the left see the Democratic establishment’s
response to her accusation as hypocritical, particularly when compared
to how party leaders rallied around Christine Blasey Ford when she
testified
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the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. In Ford’s case, there was
near-universal support for her. Critics on the left say that Democrats
should stand up for Reade, and that the “believe women” rallying
cry should apply even when it’s not politically convenient.

But Democrats have largely lined up behind Biden. Top Barack Obama
alumni have said that they vetted
[[link removed]] Biden
fully in 2008 and found no evidence of the kind of behavior Reade
describes. Rising Democratic star Stacey Abrams recently said
[[link removed]],
“I believe Joe Biden.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren penned
[[link removed]] an
op-ed with Biden. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, seen as a Me Too leader for
her push to oust Sen. Al Franken after he was accused of sexual
misconduct, headlined
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event for Biden this week.

Many liberals have said now and during the Franken saga that the
Democratic Party has held itself to a ridiculous standard. Donald
Trump has admitted on tape to what Reade accuses Biden of doing and
still denies the accounts of more than 20 women
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have accused him of sexual misconduct. And given that the goal of
beating Trump is paramount this fall, some see dwelling on an
accusation that has yet to be definitively proven as a damaging
distraction.

To Reade, though, none of this is that complicated.

“My story never changed. I just didn’t come forward with all the
details. It’s really simple,” she said to me. “I held back this
story because I was afraid of a powerful man.”

_Laura McGann is the editorial director of Vox.com. She ran Vox's
politics and policy coverage during the 2016 election. She previously
worked as an editor at Politico, where she oversaw a variety of
coverage, including money and politics, Congress and domestic policy._

* [email protected]
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