Almost a month ago, Tara Reade went public with her claim that, when she worked on Joe Biden’s staff in 1993, Biden sexually assaulted her by pushing her against a wall, putting his hand up her skirt, and thrusting his finger inside of her. Reade also said that, when this event happened, she told her mother, her brother, and a friend, and that she complained to her superiors, but without success. While her brother and her friend corroborate her story, her mother passed away in 2016.

For more than two weeks, the mainstream media assiduously ignored Reade’s allegations. Then, in mid-April, the New York Times deigned to address Reade’s assertions. It did so, though, not to inform its readership that Biden, famous for publicly groping little girls and grown women, was the subject of a #MeToo sexual assault claim. Instead, the New York Times assured its readers that they were not to worry because Reade’s story simply wasn’t credible.

One of the points the Times made was that Reade hadn’t introduced reliable contemporaneous evidence. The fact that her brother and her friend said that they’ve known about the assault since 1993 was inconsequential. (Astute readers will note that the Times applied a different standard to Christine Blasey-Ford, who not only had no contemporaneous evidence against Kavanaugh but also claimed as a witness someone who rejected her story.)

The Times and its media brethren may soon have a harder time with that “contemporaneous evidence” argument. It turns out that, when Reade gave an interview to Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept, she mentioned that, back when Biden first assaulted her, her mother, a San Luis Obispo resident, had called The Larry King Show to talk about what happened to Reade:

Reade told The Intercept that her mother called in asking for advice after Reade, then in her 20s, left Biden’s office. “I remember it being an anonymous call and her saying my daughter was sexually harassed and retaliated against and fired, where can she go for help? I was mortified,” Reade told me.

Unfortunately, Reade had no idea when her mother had phoned or who Larry King’s guests were. Enter the miracle of crowd-sourcing.

Ryan Grim, to whom Reade told the story about her Mom’s embarrassing call to Larry King, repeated the story to Katie Halper, who had first broadcast Reade’s allegations. One of Halper’s listeners managed to find a Larry King show from August 1993 during which a woman identified as “a caller from San Luis Obispo,” asked for advice about help for her daughter, who had been victimized by a “prominent senator,” but had been unable to get anyone to act on her complaint. Reade has since confirmed that the voice belongs to her mother:

KING: San Luis Obispo, California, hello. CALLER: Yes, hello. I’m wondering what a staffer would do besides go to the press in Washington? My daughter has just left there, after working for a prominent senator, and could not get through with her problems at all, and the only thing she could have done was go to the press, and she chose not to do it out of respect for him. KING: In other words, she had a story to tell but, out of respect for the person she worked for, she didn’t tell it? CALLER: That’s true.

Of course, we all know that #MeToo and “Believe all women” were merely vehicles to attack Kavanaugh and Trump. Even if someone were to unearth security footage of Biden attacking Reade (or anyone else for that matter), the drive-by media would dismiss it as meaningless. Or at least, they would dismiss it as unimportant until they could figure out a way to dump the increasingly incoherent Biden and substitute a potentially winning candidate in his place. (There are many loud voices currently raised to draft Michelle Obama. That’s unnerving because, for reasons that are not clear to me, that endlessly angry woman is popular.) Still, people outside the media might be less inclined to dismiss a story that's increasingly looking unassailable.