www.vox.com/...
I’ve been open to at least the possibility that Tara Reade was telling the truth. I know how hard it is to know what is true with these kinds of allegations. I have worked both with sexual trauma survivors and victims of false allegations. It is mighty tricky territory.
The “smoking gun” has been the contemporaneous accounts. Yes, she seemed to tell different people different things at different times. Yes, her mother's call to the Larry King show didn’t sound like a mother concerned about a sexual assault endured by her daughter. Yes, well, other contemporaneous accounts from Biden staff contradict her story. Yes, well—fill in the blank on other inconsistencies.
I believe Laura McGann of Vox has revealed the real smoking gun, a contemporaneous witness that, like Reade, has given two different versions of events when questioned by McGann:
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.”
That is what she told McGann a year ago. the friend is now confirming the current version:
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.
That about does it for me. These contemporaneous accounts cannot be trusted and that has been the bulk of Reade’s evidence.
I’m off the fence. I think she is lying and it would be hard to convince me otherwise.