My career as an employment lawyer included cases of discrimination and sexual harassment. Harassment cases were the most likely to have a kernel of truth. Whether or not it met the bar for legal harassment, usually some act had occurred. So my tendency is to give great credibility to a complaint.
Circulating on twitter, and in right wing media, is an allegation by a short term former Biden staffer, Tara Reade, that in 1993 she was digitally penetrated by the former Vice President. Even with my tendency to credit such claims, this appears spurious.
In 2019 she had a column published in Medium about her mistreatment as a staffer for then Senator Joe Biden. She claims that she was asked to be a cocktail server at a fundraiser, because Bidden though she had nice legs, but also noted she was cautioned not to dress sexy at the event. More importantly, she repeated the often made complaints of non sexual touching, in this case of her shoulder and neck.
Markedly missing is the much more sexually explicit claim. Certainly it is understandable and common for a woman to go many years before asserting a claim of harassment. But quite unusual is to mention shoulder touching and leave out sexual assault.
The article is also ambiguous about whether she quit or was fired. She vaguely implies that she complained, but is quite unclear whether she ever mentioned the touching.
In 2019 she remembered shoulder touching in 1993, but did not remember digital penetration until Joe Biden became the presumptive Democratic nominee in 2020.
Also curiously she recently deleted her string of tweets which passionately embraced Putin and Russia. Just a little suspicious.
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