Tara Reade Biden allegation megathread

[GeneralMacArthur]

I worded it badly, my mistake. Is there a reason she's not taking it to court other than the allegations being rather shoddily put together?

She's not taking it to court because it's a fake allegation.

She went to Time's Up but didn't even want a lawyer to help her put together a case.  All she wanted a lawyer for was to defend her from mean tweets.. And this was a nobody who rarely got a single like on her tweets.

She is insane and her allegation is fake.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Alright, let me stop you right there Averroes.

First of all, this quote:

Also just noticed this falsehood, which deserves to be called out:

Amanda Marcotte from Salon made two simple phone calls (one to Reade herself, the other to Times Up) and that was all it took to demonstrate that the thrust of the story was false.

This is not an accurate description of Marcotte's actual conclusion, which is as harsh on people in General MacArthur's corner of the alt-media (like the Krassensteins) as it is on the lefties who insist that we instantly condemn Biden as a rapist

Thanks for leaving out half of the context of my original quote, to make it look like I was claiming Marcotte said the entire story was a lie.  Here's my actual quote, with the part you cut out in bold:

Amanda Marcotte from Salon made two simple phone calls (one to Reade herself, the other to Times Up) and that was all it took to demonstrate that the thrust of the story was false.  Tara didn't contact Times Up to report rape.  She contacted them ask them to defend her from meanies on Twitter.  Ryan Grim lied.

So we're talking here about the Ryan Grim story.  Is it true or false that A) this is what Amanda Marcotte discovered, and B) Marcotte's conclusion was that this makes the Ryan Grim story false?  Let's look at the original article.

It's important to understand here that Time's Up Legal Defense Fund only provides support beyond these referrals — such as PR assistance — if a client obtains a lawyer and moves to take legal action on workplace harassment. But Reade told Salon she wasn't interested in suing Biden. Instead, she was angry "about the smears about being a Russian agent" from Biden supporters and was hoping a lawyer could find a way to stop them.

One law firm Reade spoke with confirmed that they would not take a case with the ambiguous goal of trying to shut down people on social media who were speculating about an accuser being a "Russian agent."

Carrie Goldberg runs a firm dedicated to defending women against sexual abuse. Time's Up helped Reade set up a meeting with her. Goldberg told Salon that she would not "comment on who reaches out to our firm for help" but said that "our firm never hesitates to take on powerful adversaries." She said her firm is not, however, in the business of threatening "to sue conspiracy theorists for potentially protected speech."

There we go, three separate instances of Marcotte documenting that Tara Reade's legal outreach was to protect her from people on social media accusing her of being a Russian agent.

But I went a step further and said this proved Ryan Grim's story, which started this whole thing, was a lie.  Once again, let's look at the article:

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.

...

2. Did Time's Up refuse to help Reade as a political favor to Biden? Almost certainly not.

...

But considering the reasons that Time's Up had to decline to fund Reade's media assistance before involving the PR firm — she hadn't secured legal representation, and even if she did, the whole story could potentially be interpreted as electioneering — there's no reason to believe that Dunn ran interference to quell Reade's story.

There you have it.  Marcotte doesn't directly write the words "Grim is lying" (that wouldn't be very classy), but she writes "Grim claimed X.  Is X true?  Almost certainly not.  There is no reason to believe X is true."

Therefore I stand by the assertion I made in my actual quote, that the Marcotte piece proved the Ryan Grim angle was false and that Tara Reade went to Time's Up looking for social media help, not legal help for rape.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Second, let's look at this comment:

• Instead of a highly-respected academic, Ford is a crazy cat lady using a fake name who has $500,000 in debt

This is exactly the sentiment that made Me Too necessary and quite possibly the most cringeworthy comment made by anyone in thirteen pages of discussion, regardless of the truth of Reade's claims.

Want to explain what's cringeworthy about this comment or just lob bombs from the peanut gallery?

Of course Reade's loony, deranged behavior on social media matters.  Of course her racking up $500,000 in debt matters.  It directly impacts her credibility by showing a long pattern of irrational behavior.

If she were someone like Blasey Ford, with a long track record of high-integrity behavior and rational thinking, then launching a false rape allegation against a major public figure would be very out of character.  It would be a complete 180 to do something so irrational and wild.

But instead of that, she has a long track record of dishonest, low-integrity behavior.  Her social media feed is full of wild stories, contradictions, and flat out lies.  She's a conspiracy theories who believes all sorts of crazy stuff about Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.  She's been relentlessly self-promoting this story in bizarre responses to year-old celebrity tweets and obviously changed the story over time.  She's been very clear about her desire to promote Bernie Sanders' candidacy with this story.  Her efforts to promote it betray a complete lack of seriousness or interest in actually pursuing justice.  Racking up $500,000 in debt as an unemployed Russian fan-fiction writer implies even more history of poor decision-making, irrational behavior, and most likely dishonesty (how did she get these loans in the first place).

Let me put it this way.  If YE were to make a post on this board claiming without any evidence to have been assaulted by Joe Biden, most of us would believe him.  Why?  Because he has a long history of high-integrity behavior and telling such an incredible lie would be totally out of character.  On the other hand, if banned poster SN2903 made the same post, we'd probably be a lot more skeptical, because the guy has a history of low-integrity behavior.

[GeneralMacArthur]

McArthur, only an idiot would take Reade's claims at face value, but what you are doing in this thread is very wrong. I stand by the claim that you are misrepresenting the Slate article. In fact, you don't even seem to understand what you're lying about.

The Salon article adds two new pieces to the puzzle:

1) Tara Reade didn't go to Time's Up seeking legal aid in a rape case against Joe Biden.  She was seeking a lawyer to protect her from mean people calling her a Russian agent on Twitter.

2) Ryan Grim lied in his original Intercept piece to make it appear that Time's Up was running a cover-up operation to protect Joe Biden.

This is all I am claiming about the Salon article.  Any other claims you've attributed to me are false.

My inferences, based on this new information, once added to the trove of other information I've dug up, were as follows:

1) Reade going to Time's Up to ask for lawyers to help her push back at mean people on Twitter, when she never got any Twitter engagement anyway, fits in with her consistent pattern of totally bizarre behavior and only gives further evidence that the Biden accusation is the latest step in a long trail of bizarre, irrational political behavior.

2) Reade's obsession with the "Russian agent" smear, to the extent that she wanted lawyers to sue people saying it, fits in with what I saw on her social media, which was over a year of posts attacking the Biden campaign for calling her a "Russian agent" (which they never even did!) and getting more and more hateful of the Biden campaign over this imagined slight that she just obsessed over.  It gives further evidence to the idea that the reason she hates Biden isn't because he raped her, it's because she's furious about this whole Russian agent thing, which she pins on Biden.

3) Grim lying in his The Intercept piece is evidence that this entire thing was a hit job.  If this was a real story, Grim wouldn't have to lie.  If Grim was an objective journalist, he wouldn't lie.  But neither are true.  Grim, like most folks at The Intercept, is an extremist hack who wants to destroy Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.  And he is using poor, crazy Tara Reade as a weapon to accomplish that goal.  That's what this is about.

[GeneralMacArthur]

the bottom line is that everyone credible ignored the allegation ultimately, assumably because they looked into it and realized it was likely false. so that should be the end of this.

It's only logical for the media to be cautious after the sh**t these conservatives jokers tried to pull with Chuck Schumer and Robert Mueller.

Don't forget about the time they tried to accuse Elizabeth Warren of abusing a veteran in a BDSM session.

And the fake Roy Moore allegation.

[GeneralMacArthur]

the bottom line is that everyone credible ignored the allegation ultimately, assumably because they looked into it and realized it was likely false. so that should be the end of this.

It's only logical for the media to be cautious after the sh**t these conservatives jokers tried to pull with Chuck Schumer and Robert Mueller.

Don't forget about the time they tried to accuse Elizabeth Warren of abusing a veteran in a BDSM session.

And the fake Roy Moore allegation.

What?

https://www.vox.com/2017/11/27/16707410/conservative-group-fake-roy-moore-allegation-washington-post

[GeneralMacArthur]

My first instinct was to dismiss this story based on the people purveying it. The alt-media-sphere has made plenty of dumb attacks on Joe Biden over the past year. Their agenda was easy to see, and, frankly, the intended audience wasn't all that smart.

However, the prominence of the Russia angle in the push-back against Reade made me pause. That detail has nothing to do with Reade's allegations. Her unstable personal history and esoteric political beliefs are emphasized purely to discredit her, and would be equally effective whether her allegations were actually true or false.

This Salon piece, written by Amanda Marcotte of all people, is somehow more on the mark than anything else that I've read on the subject: (1) We don't know very much about Reade's accusations at this point; (2) Most of what has been published on them is speculative garbage; and (3) the best response is neither to dismiss the claims nor to amplify them, but instead to demand sober investigative journalism from mainstream sources.

In the meantime, please don't use this as a political cudgel against either Joe Biden or Me Too.

I agree with this entirely, and I haven't followed this story at all because there's been such a dearth of quality investigation.

The problem with waiting for this to ride out in an investigation is the people who are most invested in seeing the allegations proven true (Trump supporters and, apparently, Sanders supporters) are the people who are most likely to dismiss a serious investigation which is exonerating. Both of these campaigns are centered around distrust of authority and ultimately dismiss anything a qualified person would put out that contradicts their views as evidence of media/elite corruption. I am sure once a serious investigation is done (fingers crossed), if these allegations are not credible, it will just be used as confirmation that person/organization X is covering up for Biden.

It's a fascinating example of a general dynamic that's been animating the last ten years of politics on the right and the last five years of politics on the far left.

The thing is that there isn't going to be an investigation.  This story is about as credible as if General MacArthur on Atlas forum said that Donald Trump molested me.  What's there to investigate?  I have zero evidence supporting my claim.  You can go try and build the case that it's false by doxxing me and finding out that I'm a crazy person who lives in a van by the river with "DEATH TO TRUMP" graffitied on it, but if every journalist put in the effort to pursue every inflammatory claim made by random people on social media, we'd never get any real journalism done.

In the year since the original "Biden touched my shoulder" piece, Tara Reade tweeted about Biden hundreds of times and most of those tweets got zero engagement.  She was just a nobody on social media.  The only reason this has gotten as far as it has is that Katie Halper, Ryan Grim and Krystal Ball saw an opportunity to launch a random person into the spotlight as a last-ditch anti-Biden effort.  Their story (about a Time's Up cover-up) was a lie, but the damage was done.  Other than the malicious willpower of Halper/Grim/Ball, there's nothing that makes this story, on its own, any more credible or newsworthy than if one of us were to make a similar claim.

Of course, this story isn't just a random person on Twitter, because it has gotten a lot of traction in far-left circles, and the usual suspects have made a lot of memes about Joe Biden being a rapist.  Does that in and of itself make the story newsworthy and worth pursuing?  I would argue no.  Serious journalistic outlets can't be held captive to the whims and wishes of extremists on social media.  If they turn around tomorrow and start propagating a story about Joe Biden running a pizza parlor pedophile ring, is that story then newsworthy purely by virtue of its getting traction with extremists?  Should NYT go investigate the pizza parlor?  No.  If it's covered seriously at all, it should only be from the angle of "here's what those lying sociopaths are saying now."

[GeneralMacArthur]

Yep.  Attack your opponent whether they're strong.  Thanks Karl Rove.

[GeneralMacArthur]

NYT article is frustrating.  It reports, uncritically, many of Tara Reade's statements that are demonstrably false.

For instance,

She said office staff took away most of her duties, including supervising the interns; assigned her a windowless office; and made the work environment uncomfortable for her.

She said Mr. Kaufman later told her she was not a good fit in the office, giving her a month to look for a job. Ms. Reade never secured another position in Washington.

This whole section reports, as fact, Reade's January 2020 description of her exit from Biden's office.  But she's told four different stories.  NYT abstains from reporting on the inconsistencies in her different stories.  In fact, what's printed here isn't even Reade's current story.  Her current story is that Biden personally fired her as retaliation after she filed a Senate complaint against him for raping her.  NYT just refuses to report any of this even though it's one of the main pieces of evidence that Reade is lying.

Ms. Reade said she faced a wave of criticism and death threats, as well as accusations that she was a Russian agent because of Medium posts and tweets, several of which are now deleted, she had written praising President Vladimir Putin.

Ms. Reade said that she was not working for Russia and did not support Mr. Putin, and that her comments were pulled out of context from a novel she was writing at the time.

“It was trying to smear me and distract from what happened, but it won’t change the facts of what happened in 1993,” she said.

She called her praise for Mr. Putin “misguided.”

This is the most Reade-favorable way you could possibly report this.  The comments were not "pulled out-of-context from a novel she was writing at the time."  That's just a complete lie.  And the posts weren't just "praising Vladimir Putin."  That makes them sound benign; in actuality, they were crazy.

As it has for thousands of people who have contacted the group, the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, which does not represent clients, gave her a list of lawyers with expertise in such cases. She said she contacted every single one but none took her case. Two lawyers confirmed speaking to Ms. Reade but declined to comment on the record about her or the allegation.

NYT declines to include that the lawyers also said that Reade didn't come to them for help with a rape allegation, she came to them asking them to defend her on social media on the Russia subject.  IMO this is an important detail because it shows her lack of interest in pursuing this case in any non-political venue.  It's similar to the start of the article which reveals she just filed a police report... without Biden's name!  What could this pattern mean?


Also, Lucy Flores is absolutely not helping with her "maybe it did happen, maybe it didn't" song-and-dance.  Wtf.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Biden has been in politics for decades. He’s ran for president three times and was Vice President. Both the Democrats and Republicans must’ve spent hundreds of hours vetting and screening him. Shouldn’t there be more sexual assault claims of this nature? Also, the fact that she waited until now to tell her “story” is extremely fishy.

Yeah.  It's fishy in the first place because we're supposed to believe that Biden, one of the most thoroughly-investigated men in politics, has exactly one person claiming he tried to rape her.  Never in his fifty-year career did he ever try it again with anyone else.  This despite tremendous motivation for anyone else to come forward.

We are supposed to believe that there was a huge conspiracy among his staff, and the Senate investigators, to cover up both rape and retaliation.  Tara Reade claims she went to 3?  2?  1?  staffer(s) (her story has changed) and also that she filed a Senate complaint that is in the "national archives."  For this story to be true we must believe that the Senate covered up for Biden, that his staff are all lying to cover it up, and that the complaint was taken off-record and destroyed.  All to protect Biden.

And who is asking us to believe this incredible, unlikely story?  A woman who

• is clearly hoping to use the story to boost Bernie Sanders
• is completely uninterested in any non-political consequences for Biden
• has changed all sorts of details about her story numerous times
• has a demonstrable history of doing and saying unhinged, irrational things
• has absolutely no evidence, and only her brother and close friends corroborating
• loved Joe Biden up until 2018-19, when she became obsessed with Russia and started hating him
• appears to mainly be upset at being labeled a "Russian agent" which she blames on Biden

Any sensible person would see that this story is false.  But most sensible people won't see these details.  They're just going to see one of the hundreds of image macros that Bernie Bros like @DavidAgStone are spamming in the replies to the NYT article tweet and all over Twitter:

https://twitter.com/DavidAgStone/status/1249394824442085377

[GeneralMacArthur]

Do you think that these two friends lied to NyT (Bernie Bros?) or that she lied to them in 1993 (and 2008)?

Her friends and brother are lying because they are her friends/family and they support her.  It's possible they believe her as well even though she didn't tell them about it in 1993 so the only lie from their perspective is to say she told them about it at the time.

Nobody wants to go out and say "my sister is lying."

What's even the point of this?  If I want to accuse Bernie Sanders of molesting me as a child, will you believe it as long as I get my brother to say "yeah MacArthur is telling the truth"?

[GeneralMacArthur]

OK so if I say Russian Bear raped me and say "ask my friend, I told her", and then the papers go to my friend and she says "don't print my name, but yeah MacArthur's right", then that's all the evidence we need that the allegation is true?

So all I have to do is get a friend who's willing to not call me a liar to the press?  And that not only makes it true but also overrides all the evidence that it's false?

In that case, I'd like to say right here and now that Russian Bear molested me as a child.  And I have lots of friends who will corroborate this, or at least not say that I'm lying.  And I think he should be banned from this forum because we can't have child molesters on Atlas.

[GeneralMacArthur]

OK so if I say Russian Bear raped me and say "ask my friend, I told her", and then the papers go to my friend and she says "don't print my name, but yeah MacArthur's right", then that's all the evidence we need that the allegation is true?

So all I have to do is get a friend who's willing to not call me a liar to the press?  And that not only makes it true but also overrides all the evidence that it's false?

In that case, I'd like to say right here and now that Russian Bear molested me as a child.  And I have lots of friends who will corroborate this, or at least not say that I'm lying.  And I think he should be banned from this forum because we can't have child molesters on Atlas.

You do realize that, going by your standards, most sexual assault victims wouldn't have sufficient proof. SA isn't a crime like property theft or murder; the layers of stigma attached to it, the entrenched traditions of victim blaming, and a criminal justice system completely unfit to address a crime that somewhat does demand a "guilty until proven innocent" approach. False accusations of SA are no more common than other false crime reports, but underreporting is a very serious issue. Nearly 1/5 women in the US have been r*ped; that's about 30,000,000 American women who are victims - so imagine how many r*pists there are among us.

And you believe that a victim's story isn't going to consist of inconsistencies? That somebody who has experienced such a trauma wouldn't be more likely to engage in questionable actions? All of the existing psychology research says otherwise.

None of that is to say Tara Reade is telling the truth in any definitive way; I simply don't know. But, as a victim whose partner is also a victim (with cPTSD, fibromyalgia, and psychogenic non-epileptic events as a result), neither of us having pushed for legal action against the culprits, I can attest that trying to evaluate the testimony of an alleged victim without extensive training and experience is pointless.

If you are sexually assaulted, at the time, there are plenty of ways to gather evidence and build a case.

For instance, she claims she was assaulted in a Senate hallway.  But all of those have CCTV cameras.  She claims she filed a complaint with the Senate.  No such complaint exists.  She says she complained to supervisors.  All of them say she's lying and there was no complaint.

Sexual assault seems to be treated as unique in the media in that you can file an allegation 30 years after the crime, with zero actual evidence, and expect us to determine whether it's true or false.  There is no other crime for which this is true.  If random Twitter person Tara Reade said Joe Biden burglarized her home 30 years ago, or killed her dog 30 years ago, or cheated on his taxes 30 years ago, we wouldn't believe it unless there was some proof.

But with this allegation, even though it happened 30 years ago and there's absolutely no real evidence that it's true, we still have everyone insisting that we have to believe it no matter what.  The best case scenario is for Biden to get a trial in the "court of public opinion", where luckily for Biden there's a mountain of circumstantial evidence to indicate that Reade is lying.  But even that is asking a lot of people like Averroes who want to shame me for even doing an investigation.

And before you all jump down my throat with well did you believe Christine Blasey Ford?, Ford had plenty of evidence to suggest that her story was true.  She had e-mails from way before Kavanaugh was nominated naming Kavanaugh as her rapist.  She had told her therapist about the incident years earlier.  She took a lie detector test and swore to her claims under penalty of perjury.  She made claims about Kavanuagh's drinking/partying habits in high school, his activities, his friends, and so on, that were not public knowledge.  Kavanuagh's insistence that she was lying about this was directly contradicted by testimony from many people who knew him at the time.  If she hadn't been prevented by the statute of limitations, she could have taken Kavanuagh to court for sexual assault and had a good chance of winning her case.

None of this is true for Reade.  If Reade were to try to sue Biden, she wouldn't even make it to a courtroom because her case is frivolous.  On top of that, she has refused on two separate occasions to swear to her story under penalty of perjury.  First, she refused to pursue a case against Biden when Time's Up linked her to lawyers.  Second, she refused to name Biden in the police report.  Both of those would have put her at risk of felony conviction for a false allegation.  Funny how she wants to "Burn Biden to the f***ing ground" (her own words on Twitter) but isn't willing to risk a perjury lawsuit to do so.

[GeneralMacArthur]

It’s really sad that this story is being pushed almost solely by the worst parts of rose twitter and for the most cynical reasons

I used to think this is what was going on, which is why I refrained from commenting on it until the last couple days. Changed my mind after listening to an interview with Reade, who clearly and vividly recalls specific details of the assault. It's difficult for me to listen to her and believe that she is lying to advance a political agenda — much less some sort of Kremlin agent, as a handful of freaks in this thread have implied.

It's funny that she can recall all these very specific details and exact quotes when she's talking to Krystal Ball, but she's not able to recall very basic details such as the date, time of day, or location of the assault (details that could be used to assess its veracity) when asked by the NYT.

Also very convenient that the record of her complaint mysteriously disappeared even though she said on Twitter it was in the national archives (which makes no sense in the first place, further illustrating how she's making all this up as she goes along)

[GeneralMacArthur]

It’s really sad that this story is being pushed almost solely by the worst parts of rose twitter and for the most cynical reasons

I used to think this is what was going on, which is why I refrained from commenting on it until the last couple days. Changed my mind after listening to an interview with Reade, who clearly and vividly recalls specific details of the assault. It's difficult for me to listen to her and believe that she is lying to advance a political agenda — much less some sort of Kremlin agent, as a handful of freaks in this thread have implied.

It's funny that she can recall all these very specific details and exact quotes when she's talking to Krystal Ball, but she's not able to recall very basic details such as the date, time of day, or location of the assault (details that could be used to assess its veracity) when asked by the NYT.

The interview is with Katie Halper, not Krystal Ball. Anyway, that sort of inconsistent recall is characteristic of trauma victims, so it's certainly not something I'd use to dismiss her story.

People always say stuff like this, but where do you draw the line?  It seems like every possible detail that casts doubt on the veracity of her allegation gets explained away with "sometimes rape victims are like that."  You've made it physically impossible for Biden to clear his name yet Reade can wait 30 years, lie over and over, change detail after detail about the story, have an obvious ulterior motive, and not even know basic stuff like the day or the place, and you just hand wave it all away.

The day and place are useful because we can actually use them to check the allegation.  We could find archived security camera footage, or Biden's old schedules, or go to the place and determine whether it would actually be physically possible for Biden to rape her there without getting caught.  But Reade won't give us that opportunity.  Every time we have been given the opportunity to cross-check something, the results have come up in Biden's favor.

Also the interview where she actually went through the assault in detail was on Ball's show.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Funny how literally every new piece of evidence that comes out about this, from even the bare minimum of MSM investigations, ends up making Reade look like a liar.

NBC News has spoken with Reade multiple times since she came forward with the assault allegation on March 25 and has also spoken with five people with whom Reade said she shared varying degrees of detail over time. Three of those people said on the record that they do not recall any such conversation with Reade.

A fourth person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Reade told her about the alleged assault at the time. That person, who asked that her name be withheld by NBC News for fear of negatively affecting her business, said she remembers Reade's telling her that she spoke with superiors in Biden's office about harassment but not the assault. She also recalled that Reade told her she filed a formal written complaint with a Senate personnel office at the time.

A fifth person, who also spoke with NBC News anonymously, recalled that Reade told her in the mid-2000s that Biden had been inappropriate and touched her when she worked in his office but that she didn't detail the alleged assault. Reade said that she also told her mother, who has since died, and her brother, who has told The Intercept that he remembers having been told about an incident at the time.

So of 5 friends Reade claimed as witnesses:
3 say Reade is lying (not about the assault, but about telling them about it)
1 says Reade told her about the shoulder touching, 15 years later (not at the time)
and 1 says Reade told her about the assault and filed a complaint with the Senate office.  But NYT investigated the mythical "Senate complaint" and determined that it doesn't exist, despite Reade claiming it can be found in the "national archives."

So either Reade is lying, OR there was a huge conspiracy among Senate staff to cover-up the complaint and erase it from the records, and nobody wants to come forward 30 years later.  I mean, what do you think happens when a member of Senatorial staff files an official complaint against a sitting Senator?  There's an investigation and it's all documented.  Plenty of people are involved and/or know about it.  This isn't something that could have just been deleted from an inbox.  Yet Reade is implicitly claiming that everyone involved is covering it up, along with everyone in Biden's office.

Federal law at the time set forth procedures for allegations of harassment or discrimination in employment on the basis of gender, which would have included a hearing by a board of independent officers. No such process was initiated by Reade's complaint.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Some other interesting tidbits from this article:

Reade is now claiming she told Baker, Kaufman, and Toner (all three say she's lying).  Previously she had said she only told two people.  She has dozens of tweets where she claims to have gone to two superiors.

Reade has also filed a police report claiming the assault happened sometime between March and May 1993, an entire three month period.  But Reade left Biden's office in August 1993.  Even if we say the assault happened May 31 and she left August 1, that's still two months after the alleged rape where she was working for Biden.  However, she also has claimed on Twitter that Biden personally fired her and she was terrified of him.  So Biden waited a whole 2-6 months to fire her?

EDIT apparently she was "abruptly removed" from overseeing interns in April, so if it happened as she said it would have been early April, meaning she and Biden worked together for 4 months after he raped her, then one day he decided to fire her over it.

The article does, finally, discuss the numerous conflicting stories she's given in the past about why she left DC.

Reade worked in Biden's Senate office briefly, from December 1992 through August 1993, according to a Senate employment history transcript she provided. Reade recalled leaving the office before that, after her duties were diminished and she was told she wasn't a good fit for the office. She appears to have offered different explanations for having left Washington in the past, including to pursue an acting career.

The Krassenstein article also catches the detail that she claims in the 2009 article linked here to have flown into DC (which she remembers vividly) yet as of 2019 she's now claiming she drove across the country to get there.  I suppose this is also the kind of "inconsistency typical of rape victims"?

[GeneralMacArthur]

She said political considerations played no role in her decision to raise the sexual assault allegation.

https://twitter.com/ReadeAlexandra/status/1237604118018945031

https://twitter.com/ReadeAlexandra/status/1235045691073761280

https://twitter.com/ReadeAlexandra/status/1234556389734797313

Sure, Jan

[GeneralMacArthur]

In another recent interview, Reade’s brother, Collin Moulton, said she told him in 1993 that Biden had behaved inappropriately by touching her neck and shoulders. Their mother urged Reade to contact the police, Moulton said, adding that he felt “ashamed now for not being a better advocate” for his sister. Several days after that interview, he said in a text message that he recalled her telling him that Biden had put his hand “under her clothes.”

Even her own brother originally just said she had only told him about the shoulder touching.  It took him several days to get the memo that he was also supposed to say Reade had told him Biden raped her.

Or maybe it just slipped his mind?

Also:

Reade said she told a therapist earlier this year about the alleged assault. The Post asked Reade for the therapist’s notes of that conversation, but she has not produced them.

So to summarize...

• Friend 1:  Reade never told me about any rape
• Friend 2:  Reade never told me about any rape
• Friend 3:  Reade never told me about any rape
• Supervisor 1:  Reade is lying
• Supervisor 2:  Reade is lying
• Supervisor 3:  Reade is lying
• Therapist:  Reade refuses to produce any notes
• Senate complaint:  Doesn't exist
• People who would have seen the Senate complaint:  Don't exist
• Camera footage:  Reade refuses to name a time/place
• Time's Up lawyers:  Reade didn't want our help with any rape case
• Brother:  Reade only told me about shoulder touching.... (several days later) oh I forgot, she did also say Biden raped her

[GeneralMacArthur]

In the course of reporting on Reade’s allegations, the AP also contacted 21 former Biden staffers from the time and spoke to several of them. While some remembered Reade, none recalled any instances of inappropriate touching or behavior on Biden’s behalf, or any complaints made by Reade.

Oh gotta update this:

• Friend 1:  Reade never told me about any rape
• Friend 2:  Reade never told me about any rape
• Friend 3:  Reade never told me about any rape
• Supervisor 1:  Reade is lying
• Supervisor 2:  Reade is lying
• Supervisor 3:  Reade is lying
• 21 Biden staffers who worked with Reade:  Reade is lying
• Therapist:  Reade refuses to produce any notes
• Senate complaint:  Doesn't exist
• People who would have seen the Senate complaint:  Don't exist
• Camera footage:  Reade refuses to name a time/place
• Time's Up lawyers:  Reade didn't want our help with any rape case
• Brother:  Reade only told me about shoulder touching.... (several days later) oh I forgot, she did also say Biden raped her

[GeneralMacArthur]

Regardless of whether it is true of not it is 100% fair to say that some Biden supporters will support rapists if that furthers his political agenda.

This is the same personal attack launched @ Ford. She didn't remember the date & so on. Shocking to see the left resort to this. Guess this shows rape & rape allegations are a political tool & no1 really cares about sexual violence other than to get votes.

I have no idea about this Tara Reade thing but Mcaurthur has used analogies throughout this which are basically used by sympathizers of rapists.

I've brought the Ford comparison up a half-dozen times in this thread but you didn't read those, or anything I actually wrote.

You are just copy+pasting the "whatabout Ford" talking point that anti-Biden arsonists have been using for a month now to score points off this Reade lie.

You are just a predictable poster who regurgitates talking points from the depths of Bernie Bro hell and most people have you blocked.

[GeneralMacArthur]

It’s now being suggested that Tara Reade was the woman who appeared on Dr. Phil claiming to be in a romantic online relationship with Vladimir Putin. She believes that Putin speaks to her through his ties and that any day now he’s going to come take her home to Mother Russia. She also tried to drive to Alaska to attempt to catch a boat across the Bering Sea. She made it as far as North Dakota but was refused entry by Canadian customs officials. Put simply, she is capital-c Crazy.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=0XnTMS6oMIU

This isn't Tara Reade.  People need to stop saying this because even if 99 criticisms of Reade are true and 1 is a lie, people will zoom in on the 1% that's a lie and say "see they are lying" and it'll work.

That said, Reade really did write this:

When the anti-Russia, anti-Putin propaganda starts up, personally, I shut down. I love Russia, I love my Russian relatives and friends. And like most women across the world, I like President Putin… a lot, his shirt on or shirt off.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190404044831/https://medium.com/@shewrites94/who-let-the-cats-out-461cdf4dfcaf

[GeneralMacArthur]

I can tell you that this has already done serious damage. The whole point was to sew discord among the party over that stupid MeToo movement. Not only is there a faction among the #MeToo crowd that believes her outright lies and no evidence to the contrary will change them, but it’s also allowing the GOP to make us out as hypocrites comparing Blasey Ford to Tara Reade. We’re completely f***ed.

Didn't Jacob Wohl already accomplish that with his rape allegation against Robert Mueller?

If the MeToo movement were really as fragile as you're saying, literally any false rape allegation would tear it asunder.  We've had several of those just in the last few years, not including this one.

The issue isn't with #MeToo, it's with people mis-representing #MeToo and "Believe Women" as something more insidious and stupid than what it actually is.

[GeneralMacArthur]

https://web.archive.org/web/20200414001931/https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/business/media/joe-biden-tara-reade-new-york-times.html

Have you guys seen this stuff about the NYT and their reporting on the Biden allegations? It's absurd really. It took them 19 days to release anything about Reade, but they released an article about Kavanaugh the day his allegations broke. They say that they didn't think reporting about Tara Reade was worth it because nobody knew about her yet. Really makes you think about the credibility of the media...

You're lying.  That's not why they took so long.  They took so long because they wanted to do a thorough investigation.  With the Blasey Ford thing, there was already investigative work being done behind the scenes.  The investigation took several else because all the information is sketchy and fake and there's nothing to actually report on except "we looked into this and found nothing.  We looked into that and found nothing.  All we have is the word of some BSer on Twitter."

This is seriously the dumbest scandal and I can't believe we have an 18-page thread with half of Atlas grasping for the flimsiest of straws to find some sort of "middle ground" or "it's still bad for Biden" position.

[GeneralMacArthur]

You're lying.  That's not why they took so long.  They took so long because they wanted to do a thorough investigation.  With the Blasey Ford thing, there was already investigative work being done behind the scenes.  The investigation took several else because all the information is sketchy and fake and there's nothing to actually report on except "we looked into this and found nothing.  We looked into that and found nothing.  All we have is the word of some BSer on Twitter."

This is seriously the dumbest scandal and I can't believe we have an 18-page thread with half of Atlas grasping for the flimsiest of straws to find some sort of "middle ground" or "it's still bad for Biden" position.

Because slightly less than half this country considers it something of merit, ala Trump’s sexual harassment claims. That being said I agree with you, this is something absurd. The real knock out blow when opposition research done by the republicans will uncover Biden’s shady links with the Chinese. Add in Hunter Biden’s shady dealings, Biden is going to be painted as a more crooked and incompetent version of Trump.

Half of this country would think Hillary Clinton is a member of the American Nazi Party if you asked them it in a poll.  Doesn't mean the media should cover it.