Tara Reade worked for Joe Biden as a staff assistant in 1993. She said she’s been trying to get her story out since then that Biden, she alleges, digitally raped her.

According to Reade, Biden pressed her up against a wall and digitally penetrated her without her consent. “It happened all at once, and then… his hands were on me and underneath my clothes,” she says. She also remembers him asking “do you want to go somewhere else?” and then, when she had pulled away, “Come on, man, I heard you liked me.” Reade says that “everything shattered” in that moment and his claim that he thought she liked him made her feel like she had “done this” somehow. “I looked up to him, he was my father’s age. He was this champion of women’s rights in my eyes,” she says. “I wanted to be a senator; I didn’t want to sleep with one.” Joe Biden Faces Sexual Assault Allegations From A Former Staffer, Yahoo News, March 26, 2020

Furthermore, Reade’s tale includes how organizations rooted in the #MeToo movement like the National Women’s Law Center reportedly suppressed her claims with some fairly flimsy excuses.

“As a nonprofit 501(c)(3) charitable organization, the National Women’s Law Center is restricted in how it can spend its funds, including restrictions that pertain to candidates running for election,” NWLC spokesperson, Maria Patrick, told The Intercept. It was also revealed in the same story that “the public relations firm that works on behalf of the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund is SKDKnickerbocker, whose managing director, Anita Dunn, is the top adviser to Biden’s presidential campaign.”

This story is in large part uncorroborated. It may be completely true, and it may be overhyped, even debunked. But what I’m seeing is, simmering under the Coronavirus stories that are consuming all the media space right now (and rightly so), there’s a rising tide that Joe Biden should not be the nominee for the Democratic Party.

Here and there I see rumors, some of which may be planted stories, mind you, that the DNC is mulling its options, mentioning names like Andrew Cuomo (who I doubt would want to run against Trump). Even the dreaded Hillary Clinton’s name has surfaced (seriously!?).

I think stories like this one, a longtime accusation of rape, might get legs if the power brokers decide Biden is just too old and out to pasture to be a viable candidate in the general election. Personally, I agree with my colleague Peter Heck: this is elder abuse.