How Democrats blew up #MeToo – By Ryan Cooper (The Week) / April 27 2020
The #MeToo movement has brought to light a quiet epidemic of sexual harassment and assault going back generations. Movie moguls, famous celebrities, and politicians have seen their careers go up in flames after credible accusations of sexual misconduct. It has been a painful, long-overdue reckoning, and perhaps the dawning of a more just age.
Now Democrats are set to blow a hole in the movement with their probable nomination of former Vice President Joe Biden for president. Biden faces a credible accusation of serious sexual assault, but Democrats are plowing ahead regardless. If he actually is nominated, a tremendous amount of the work of #MeToo will be undone.
Let’s review the allegation. Alexandra Tara Reade was a Biden staffer in his office back in the 1990s, and as she detailed on the Katie Halper podcast, in 1993 she says Biden pushed her against a wall, kissed her, and penetrated her with his fingers against her will — that is, the crime of rape. No one else witnessed the incident, and she says she was forced out of Biden’s office some months later.
In 2019, Reade told the California newspaper The Union that Biden had sexually harassed her on several different occasions others had witnessed, but did not mention the rape. She later told The Intercept’s Ryan Grim that she left this part out because of the lack of corroboration. However, Reade did go to the legal aid nonprofit Time’s Up in January this year and told them the story, only for them to turn her down, supposedly because Biden was a presidential candidate. She also told Grim that she had told her mother, her brother, and a friend the whole story at the time. Grim spoke with the friend and brother, who confirmed that Reade told them back in 1993, and while her mother has since died, Reade told Grim that her mother had called into Larry King’s CNN show to ask for advice about the incident. Sure enough, multiple people later dug up an August 1993 episode of the show in which a woman from San Luis Obispo (a small city where Reade’s mother lived) called in. “I’m wondering what a staffer would do besides go to the press in Washington?” she asked. “My daughter has just left there, after working for a prominent senator, and could not get through with her problems at all, and the only thing she could have done was go to the press, and she chose not to do it out of respect for him.” Reade confirmed it was her mother’s voice on the call.
Continue to article: https://theweek.com/articles/911150/how-democrats-blew-metoo
