Alexandra Tara Reade accused Biden of sexual assault. Salon untangles fact from fiction in the politicized fall-out

AMANDA MARCOTTE / MARCH 31, 2020 4:00PM (UTC)

Last week, podcaster Katie Halper, an avid fan of presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, released an episode of her podcast containing a shocking accusation: In an interview, Alexandra Tara Reade, who briefly worked for former Vice President Joe Biden when he was in the U.S. Senate, said that Biden had sexually assaulted her in 1993, pinning her up against a wall and digitally penetrating her during an encounter on Capitol Hill. At the same time, Ryan Grim of The Intercept — a publication which has been strongly supportive of Sanders and critical of Biden — published a story insinuating that the Time's Up Legal Defense Fund had rejected Reade's case out of political loyalty to Biden.

These twin stories are currently tearing up social media, with competing conspiracy theories flying from both pro-Biden and pro-Sanders camps in response. Biden supporters are accusing Reade of being a Russian agent, or at least a kook with suspicious intentions who's in love with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Sanders supporters are accusing the mainstream media and Time's Up of covering up Reade's accusations to protect Biden. (To be clear: Neither candidate's campaign has engaged with these conspiracy theories in any way.)

Reade says there were no witnesses to the alleged 1993 assault, which is of course extremely common in such cases. She said in her interview with Halper that she told her brother and a friend about the assault at the time, which Halper says she confirmed. That's the most common method of establishing credibility when reporting on allegations of sexual harassment or assault. The audio of the interview is compelling, as Reade speaks with a lot of emotion about the alleged assault. The same was true in her interviews with Salon.

Yet it is also true that outside of a handful of aggregated stories, there has been almost no high-profile media coverage of a story as explosive as this — an accusation that a former vice president and near-certain Democratic presidential nominee committed an act of sexual violence against a woman who worked for him. Why?