Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, on Friday addressed a sexual assault allegation from former staffer Tara Reade, saying: “This never happened.”
In a Medium post, Biden said: “I recognize my responsibility to be a voice, an advocate, and a leader for the change in culture that has begun but is nowhere near finished. So I want to address allegations by a former staffer that I engaged in misconduct 27 years ago. They aren’t true. This never happened.”
He added: “Responsible news organizations should examine and evaluate the full and growing record of inconsistencies in her story, which has changed repeatedly in both small and big ways. But this much bears emphasizing. She has said she raised some of these issues with her supervisor and senior staffers from my office at the time. They — both men and a woman — have said, unequivocally, that she never came to them and complained or raised issues.”
Biden also emphasized: “While the details of these allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault are complicated, two things are not complicated. One is that women deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, and when they step forward they should be heard, not silenced. The second is that their stories should be subject to appropriate inquiry and scrutiny.”
Beyond that, Biden noted that Reade said she filed a complaint in 1993 but does not have a record of the complaint. Biden called on the secretary of the Senate to “ask the [National] Archives to identify any record of the complaint she alleges she filed and make available to the press any such document.”
Despite suggestions that incriminating evidence could be included among the papers the former vice president donated to the University of Delaware and calls to make that material available to search, Biden insisted that those records do not include personnel files.
“There is only one place a complaint of this kind could be — the National Archives. The National Archives is where the records are kept at what was then called the Office of Fair Employment Practices,” Biden wrote. “If there was ever any such complaint, the record will be there.”
In his Medium post, Biden emphasized his work on anti-sexual assault initiatives, including the It’s On Us college sexual assault organization and the Violence Against Women Act, and indicated he would continue to fight for women’s rights.
