(See April 30 update at the bottom)

Some of my friends and comrades on the left think that the differences between Joe Biden and Donald Trump aren’t important. This isn’t a straw man. I don’t know how widespread these sentiments are but I’ve seen several instances of Twitter users of the Rose Emoji variety claiming that a vote for Biden “isn’t even harm reduction” or that there’s no way of knowing which man would do more damage as president.

I’ve argued in multiple venues that this is wrong. Biden is no friend to the left but not all enemies are created equal. Biden isn’t likely to appoint anyone to the National Labor Relations Board or the courts who’s going to aggressively work to destroy what’s left of collective bargaining in American workplaces. That matters to me. So does the status of DACA recipients. So does the Iran Deal. Everything that Jeremy Scahill says in this Intercept article makes sense to me.

I mention this because it would be easier for me to make the case that it’s a good idea for swing state voters to hold their noses and vote for Biden if I believed that Tara Reade’s allegation that Biden cornered her and digitally penetrated her against her will was implausible. As Scahill says, those who refuse to vote for Biden because they believe Reade have “an understandable and morally principled position.” While I don’t claim that we can know for sure whether or not she’s telling the truth without more evidence, my honest assessment is that her allegation is disturbingly credible and that Democratic partisans in the media have dismissed it for reasons that don’t stand up to serious scrutiny.

What Cathy Young Gets Right

My Arc Digital colleague Cathy Young disagrees. We’ll take a look at her reasoning in a moment. Meanwhile I should say several things up front.

First, while I do believe that well-placed Reade critics like Amanda Marcotte, Michelle Goldberg, Ruth Marcus, and Joan Walsh are engaged in motivated reasoning to avoid having to take seriously an assault accusation against the Democratic nominee, everything I’ve seen from Young leads me to believe that this is not what she’s up to. Marcotte, Goldberg, Marcus, and Walsh all make a performative show of uncertainty and even-handedness even as they load the deck by assigning great weight to even the flimsiest reasons to dismiss Reade’s allegation.

Walsh in particular is infuriating on this issue. Even though the obvious thrust of her piece is to argue that Reade is lying, she pretends to show concern about “Reade’s obvious pain over whatever happened.” I see no sign of any such hypocrisy from Young. We disagree about how to weigh the evidence, but I do believe that she’s making a sincere effort to call balls and strikes.

I also agree with Young about some larger issues that deserve to be flagged. First, we agree that many Democratic partisans are being obviously inconsistent on this issue — they clearly apply a higher standard of evidence to Reade than they applied to Dr. Ford’s allegations about Supreme Court nominee (now Justice) Brett Kavanaugh. I think the case against Kavanaugh was stronger than she acknowledges. For example, as my friend Nathan J. Robinson pointed out here, it’s striking that the old calendars that Kavanaugh himself brought up as exculpatory evidence are actually inconsistent with his defense, while fitting Dr. Ford’s recollection of what happened.

That said, I agree with Young that assessing the comparative plausibility of the two allegations is tricky. Many Democratic partisans have suggested that the fact that Reade came out with her accusation just before Biden clinched the nomination undermines her credibility, but it’s hard to see why that’s relevantly different from Dr. Ford revealing her accusation against Kavanaugh shortly after he was nominated to the Supreme Court.

Kavanaugh’s calendars seem to show that he’s lying about at least some of what happened that summer. Nothing similar is true of Biden. On the other hand, there are at least three ways in which Reade’s allegation about Biden is better supported than Dr. Ford’s allegation about Kavanaugh. First, Dr. Ford told no one about what she says happened to her until years later. Reade has witnesses who attest that she told them shortly after it happened. Second, Reade also filed a criminal complaint against Biden this year, which could open her up to prosecution if decisive evidence emerged showing that she’d made a false accusation. Dr. Ford hasn’t done that. Finally, a video clip of a call to Larry King that Reade’s mother seems to have made in 1993 fits Reade’s story. As I acknowledge here, it’s not strictly decisive, but it does lend some extra credence to her account. It should be noted that this evidence emerged after the articles I’ll be critiquing were written.

One final point on which Young and I agree: At the end of the second of Young’s two Arc pieces about Reade’s allegation, she correctly frames the issue as about whether it is more likely than not that Reade is telling the truth rather than about whether existing evidence shows Biden to be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Since many people argue that the latter standard is the one we should apply when deciding what we believe about such matters, it’s worth spelling out why this is not only wrong but incoherent.

Public Opinion is Not a Criminal Trial

The moral calculation underlying the “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt” standard for criminal trials is “Blackstone’s Ratio.” It’s better for ten guilty people to go free than for one innocent person to be imprisoned or executed. This isn’t even the standard for civil trials, and it not only shouldn’t but can’t be the standard used by private citizens trying to muddle through the epistemic morass and decide what we think of Kavanaugh or Biden.

To see why not, notice first that, as Nicholas Grossman argued in Arc, there is a large disanalogy between criminal trials and a Senator’s decision about whether to confirm Kavanaugh or a voter’s decision about whether to help make Biden president. We all have a default right to freedom. We can forfeit that right by committing serious crimes, but imprisoning someone who hasn’t forfeited that right is a grave injustice. No one has a right to the presidency or a seat on the Supreme Court.

During the culture war standoff over Kavanaugh’s nomination, I saw some of his defenders talking about his “career” being “ruined” if Senators believed Dr. Ford and failed to confirm him, but this suggestion is so absurd as to be an insult to the listener’s intelligence. Judges who almost but not quite make it onto the Supreme Court, like politicians who almost but not quite make it to the presidency, remain rock stars. If a few Senators’ votes had gone the other way and Judge Kavanaugh hadn’t become Justice Kavanaugh, he’d likely be “sentenced” to a lucrative book deal, a cushy posting at an elite law school, and a lifetime of adulation in conservative legal circles.

Second, the idea of applying the “presumption of innocence” standard to deciding whether we think that someone is guilty of a crime (as opposed to whether they should be imprisoned or executed for committing that crime) is incoherent. Starting from the presumption that Biden and Kavanaugh are innocent means starting from the presumption that Reade and Dr. Ford are liars. This problem doesn’t arise in jury deliberations for the simple reason that in criminal trials, unlike the “court of public opinion,” only one person is on trial at a time.

I don’t claim that the probability that Reade is telling the truth is too overwhelming for there to be any room for disagreement. I do, however, believe that Biden’s long history of failing to respect women’s boundaries adds at least some additional credibility to the suggestion that he might have done what Reade says he did.

Young speaks of Biden “squeezing women’s (and girls’) shoulders, arms or hands, hugging, kissing foreheads, cheeks and hair, and so on” but claims that there was no sexual component to these incidents and even links to a series of images of Biden being “handsy” with men. Her list is importantly incomplete, and her claim that women involved in these incidents did not allege a sexual component is somewhat misleading, as is the series of images supposedly showing that Biden is “equal opportunity” in his handsiness. Caitlyn Caruso claims that Biden put his hand on her thigh at an event at the University of Nevada in 2016. To the best of my knowledge, no one has produced any images of Biden putting his hands on men’s thighs. Or slowly kissing them as they tried to decide whether to ruin their meeting with this powerful and important person by saying anything. Or sniffing their hair.

There’s obviously a considerable gap between this kind of behavior and the assault reported by Reade. Biden might well be a bit of a creep without being a rapist and I do think that reasonable people can disagree about how much plausibility the rest of these accusations give Reade’s claim. Even so, it’s a bit misleading to say that because Caitlyn Caruso never said in just so many words that she thought there was a “sexual component” to Biden putting his hand on her thigh that therefore she thought it was platonic.

In what follows, though, I’ll put aside the issue of the reasons to believe Reade and focus on the question of whether good reasons have been produced to disbelieve her. My primary interest isn’t in showing that Reade must be telling the truth — though I find it disturbingly plausible she may be — but in showing that Young and other critics haven’t established that it’s more likely than not that she’s lying.

Alleged Inconsistencies

Most of the critics lean heavily on the claim that Reade’s statements over the years have been “inconsistent” or that she “changed her story.” It should be noted that Young never quite makes this claim, although she quotes without comment a passage in which Marcus makes it.

In any case, the premise that Reade changed her story is just false. She told the part of her story most likely to be believed before telling the most painful and explosive part but that’s not an inconsistency and it’s not a change.

One supposed inconsistency is that Reade previously gave other reasons for leaving Biden’s office, but this in itself tells us nothing. She may well have had more than one reason for doing so. If she’s telling the truth, emphasizing other reasons in the past shouldn’t be surprising. Of course a sexual assault victim who wasn’t prepared to come forward about what happened to her would emphasize other reasons. It would be bizarre if she hadn’t done that.

Young claims that Reade referring to Biden in a vaguely positive way after the alleged assault is an example of her behavior “contradicting” her story, but this sort of dissonance is far too common among abuse victims to count as a contradiction. Young similarly sees a “contradiction” in the fact that Reade says Biden behaved in inappropriate and objectifying ways toward her before the assault, but that she also said she was shocked by the assault itself because she’d previously viewed him as a champion of women’s rights. Again, this is very far from being any sort of contradiction.

Remember that Young herself sees the sort of objectifying behavior reported by Caitlyn Caruso and Lucy Flores as being distant enough from sexual assault that it does not increase the plausibility of Reade’s story. If that’s true, why should it be surprising that Reade would be shocked at the severe hypocrisy of a rapist who claimed to be a champion of women’s rights, even knowing that Biden exhibited a far milder degree of hypocrisy?

Is it Plausible to Think Reade is Lying for Sanders?

Young refers to Reade as a “strong supporter of Bernie Sanders.” Marcotte, Goldberg, Walsh, and Marcus all hit this same point hard. While it’s technically true that Reade was a Sanders supporter, bringing this up to suggest she had a political motivation to try to end Biden’s campaign is deeply misleading.

Reade isn’t some hardcore Bernie Bro. (Full disclosure: I am.) At various points in the fight for the 2020 Democratic nomination, Reade expressed support for several other candidates. She switched her support to Bernie Sanders only after all the other candidates had dropped out, and the race had narrowed to a binary choice between Senator Sanders and the man who she says assaulted her.

Putin and Other Ephemera

Some of the more unhinged Democratic partisans on Twitter have taken to accusing Tara Reade of being a Russian asset. Neither Young nor any of the other mainstream writers I’ve critiqued here have done that. They have all, however, brought up Reade’s statements about Vladimir Putin and U.S.-Russian relations, a subject with no possible relevance to the matter at hand.

I was shocked when I read Amanda Marcotte’s anti-Reade hit piece and saw her bring up this issue. Are we really going to start doubting sexual assault allegations based on the foreign policy views of the alleged victim? The idea struck me as incredible — and deeply offensive.

By the time I’d read Goldberg, Walsh, and Marcus I was numb to the suggestion that this was somehow relevant. Since Cathy Young brings it up again in her more thoughtful (if in my view still unpersuasive) analysis of Reade’s allegations, I’ll put aside my instinct to contemptuously dismiss the idea that this issue should even be part of the discussion.

I regard Putin as a deeply unappealing figure — a right-wing nationalist and a bit of a gangster in his assertion of Russian interests abroad. But it’s worth remembering that, as late as the 2012 debates between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, most Democrats and liberals found the claim that Russia was a particularly sinister or dangerous country absurd. Romney was roundly mocked for saying that Russia was America’s “number one geopolitical foe.” Since then, and especially since 2016, many Democrats have become Russia hawks. Reade, meanwhile, went in the opposite direction. While she’s since moderated her positions on U.S.-Russian relations, and now says she’s disturbed by some of Putin’s policies, at one time Reade openly admired him.

It’s far from unusual for westerners — even westerners far more culturally significant than a former staffer from Biden’s Senate office — to be taken in by Putin’s charisma. More than a few straight American women and gay American men have swooned over pictures of a shirtless Putin fishing or riding horseback. Writing years ago in the Literary Hub, Russian-American writer Lara Vapnyar — no friend of Russia’s government — admitted to finding Putin very sexy and explored the ways that “the Russian propaganda machine” had “carefully cultivated” the image of “Putin’s ‘sexiness’ and the idea of his ‘sexual prowess.’” Oliver Stone’s Putin Interviews gave more than one reviewer the sense that President Putin had wrapped the great film-maker around his little finger. Jack Nicholson looks downright starstruck in Putin’s presence in this picture. And George W. Bush once made a hushed statement — at least as cringe-worthy as anything Tara Reade has ever been quoted as saying—about how he’d looked into Putin’s eyes and gotten a “sense of his soul” that led him to think the Russian strongman was a good and “trustworthy” person.

I seriously doubt that Cathy Young would call President Bush “not very mentally stable” for saying this and I’m disappointed that she made this ugly and baseless claim about Tara Reade. That said, Young deserves credit for openly spelling out the point. Joan Walsh devoted a paragraph to quoting Reade’s since-repudiated statements on Russia’s geopolitical rivalry with the United States, and the alleged personal virtues of the Russian president, before unconvincingly claiming that she wasn’t suggesting that this was a reason to dismiss Reade. “Respecting Putin does not discredit her; again, her changing stories here hurt her credibility.”

Walsh’s claim that Reade “changed her story” hinges on Reade allegedly saying that she “insisted she was merely writing a novel about Putin” despite the fact that a Medium post Walsh quotes, entitled “Why a Liberal Democrat Supports Vladimir Putin,” was clearly non-fiction. But this accusation hinges on what — at least assuming the accuracy of NPR’s report on the matter — would seem to be a sloppy misreading of Reade’s claim. According to NPR, Reade didn’t say that the Medium post was an extract from a novel. She said that she developed her (subsequently renounced) pro-Putin views “while writing a novel about Putin.” Once again, even a cursory investigation into an apparent inconsistency reveals that it was nothing of the kind.

More importantly, Walsh’s pretense that she was bringing up Reade’s stance on Putin because Reade “changed her story,” rather than as a transparent attempt to discredit Reade by bringing up her past “crazy” views, doesn’t pass the smell test. Are we supposed to believe that Walsh would have been equally interested in every other instance of Reade “changing her story” on any subject whatsoever at any time in her life? Please. Of course Walsh devoted a paragraph to this to make Reade look crazy.

Bringing up irrelevant dirt on someone making a sexual assault allegation and then — once the “she’s crazy” narrative is firmly implanted in the reader’s mind — backing away and admitting its irrelevance is the kind of thing you do when you know you don’t have a good reason to doubt the allegation.

Again, I don’t claim to know whether Reade is telling the truth. Anyone who thinks our default should be to #BelieveWomen should certainly take her at her word in the absence of much better reasons to doubt her than the ones discussed above. On the other hand, I’ve never been entirely comfortable with that hashtag. False rape accusations exist just as false murder accusations exist.

I do find Reade’s allegation plausible. But if you believe (as I do) that these things need to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, you might accept that the evidential situation leaves room for those arguing in good faith to come to different conclusions. Even so, anyone who wants to argue that it’s more likely than not that Reade is lying is going to have to do much better than what we’ve seen so far.

Update, April 30:

The original article by my colleague Cathy Young included a link to a list of images purporting to show Vice President Biden’s “equal opportunity” handsiness. In these images, we see Biden putting his hands around men’s shoulders, leaning in to talk to them with foreheads touching, and so on. Part of my response was to point out that neither the images assembled in this link nor anything else I’d seen showed Biden “putting his hands on men’s thighs. Or slowly kissing them as they tried to decide whether to ruin their meeting with this powerful and important person by saying anything. Or sniffing their hair.”

Young has responded to this point in two ways. First, she tracked down a picture of Biden putting his hand on the thigh of a police chief from Delaware, who, as Young says, doesn’t “look thrilled” by the interaction. (It’s possible the picture was taken at exactly the wrong time, but judging by the expression we see on the police chief’s face, he’s Very Not Thrilled.) Second, she says this:

The rest of Burgis’s passage refers to Lucy Flores’s allegation, and I think in a highly hyperbolic way. “Slowly kissing them,” for instance, refers to a kiss on the back of Flores’s head while she was preparing to go onstage and speak. Flores also says Biden sniffed her hair after putting his hands on her shoulders.

She goes on to speculate that this may not have happened to Flores at all. Perhaps she exaggerated the incident in her memory as the years went by so that her account was sincere but inaccurate. Young similarly speculates that Reade and Dr. Ford may have inaccurate memories of being sexually assaulted.

Let’s take these points one at a time. I certainly stand corrected on the hand-on-thigh question, but if anything, Joe Biden’s apparent indifference to how a man with a front row seat at an official function reacts to his physical interactions even when cameras are snapping makes it far more plausible that he’d be recklessly indifferent to the reactions of someone who (a) he was sexually attracted to, (b) was a powerless subordinate, and when (c) no one else was around. If Biden was fully capable of either not registering or not caring about the discomfort of a police chief given a guest of honor seat next to the president of the United States, this makes it that much more psychologically plausible that this person could tell himself that an anonymous staffer “really wanted it” or was just playing hard to get.

As for Lucy Flores, I’m not sure what Reade thinks is “hyperbole.” Flores described it as a “slow kiss.” Perhaps Flores was exaggerating — although I don’t know what basis we would have for thinking so — but I certainly added no hyperbole by repeating the exact words she used to describe her experience. And it’s just a fact that she and other women have described their thoughts as Biden interacted with them in ways they found unacceptable in much the way I’ve described. Finally, while it can’t be absolutely ruled out that she was confabulating the detail about hair-sniffing in her memory, this is — once again — exactly what she says happened, so I’m a bit mystified by the accusation of “hyperbole.”

This brings us to the final point about memory. False memories certainly exist. The relevant question is whether we have any good reason to think this is the best explanation of Flores’s claim. To see why I don’t think it is, try doing a quick Google Image search for “Joe Biden sniffs women’s hair.” Some of the images are almost certainly just the vice president dipping his head a bit at the wrong time, but even if we make extremely generous assumptions about how many fall into this category, it’s hard to avoid the impression that Biden is a habitual sniffer of women and girl’s hair.

What about Reade? Could she be telling what she believes to be the truth about an exaggerated or confabulated memory? This, I think, is very unlikely. Reade’s brother, her Biden-supporting neighbor, and at least one other friend have come forward to say that she told them about the alleged assault years ago. Perhaps all of these people are lying or mistaken now. But if not, then either Reade has been telling a consistent lie for a long time or the assault happened.

Notice that I don’t say that either Reade is lying or Biden is. The reason is that, while the Biden campaign has made sweeping denials on his behalf, the former vice president himself hasn’t been made to deny the allegation on camera or deal with obvious followup questions like why he refuses to unseal the relevant records. It’s hard to see this as anything other than journalistic malpractice.