(See April 25 and April 27 updates at the bottom.)

A week ago, Tara Reade’s sexual assault accusation against presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden finally got noticed by the major national media — more than two weeks after she first made the shocking claim in a podcast interview. The tenor of the coverage, however, has been distinctly skeptical. This has prompted many to charge double standards compared to the treatment of sexual abuse allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in the fall of 2018.

At least one commentator, Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus — who has written a book about the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings and concluded that his main two accusers, Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah Ramirez, were telling the truth — has grappled with the hypocrisy charge. Marcus candidly acknowledges that “we all suffer from the inclination, whether knowing or unknowing, to assess evidence through the lens of preexisting biases,” and that her political biases favor Biden but not Kavanaugh. She also makes an earnest attempt to assess Reade’s charges and the way they compare to Ford’s, and concludes that Ford (whom she interviewed for her book) is the more credible of the two.

On the other hand, Mollie Hemingway, Federalist editor and author of a pro-Kavanaugh book, writes: “It’s a low bar, but the charge against Biden is the stronger of the two.”

To be clear, I am not putting Marcus and Hemingway on the same level in terms of integrity, partisanship, or intelligent and nuanced analysis. But I think both have blind spots.

For instance, Marcus writes:

One fundamental difference involves the matter of motive. Ford came forward only reluctantly, and without evident ideological motivation; she told me that she worried, actually, that if Kavanaugh were forced to withdraw, a more conservative nominee might take his place. Reade supported Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I) presidential bid, and the fact that she went public with her allegations just as Biden was on the verge of cementing the Democratic nomination raises the possibility of political motivation, although Reade denies this.

But in an end note to her book Supreme Ambition, pushed last December, Marcus acknowledges a statement that seems to contradict this view, made by Ford’s attorney Deborah Katz at the University of Baltimore’s Feminist Legal Theory Conference in April 2019:

[Kavanaugh] will always have an asterisk next to his name. When he takes a scalpel to Roe v. Wade, we will know who he is, we know his character, and we know what motivates him. And that is important; it is important that we know, and that is part of what motivated Christine.

Marcus writes that the audio of Katz’s speech used by the conservative writer who first publicized it was of poor quality and faded out for a moment after those words; a better-quality audiotape apparently shows that what she really said was, “That is part of what motivated Christine in discharging her civic duty (italics added).” Marcus believes that this is makes Katz’s meaning appear “less conclusive.” Finally, she adds:

In any event, I found no indication, in extensive interviewing, that Ford was motivated by a desire to protect Roe [v. Wade] or to undermine Kavanaugh’s credibility in a future ruling on the case.

But this is precisely the kind of subjective evaluation where biases come into play. Marcus found Ford compelling; others find Reade compelling.

Meanwhile, Hemingway argues that Reade has a stronger case because, for one, it is at least definitively known that she met Biden (she worked in his office in 1992–1993), whereas no evidence exists that Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh ever met as teenagers. (True enough, though it’s a fact that they traveled in the same social circles.) She also writes:

Also unlike the Kavanaugh situation, Reade has evidence she told multiple people about the alleged assault at the time she claimed it happened and shortly thereafter. Blasey Ford never tied Kavanaugh to any claim until three decades after the 1980s, and only when he was a nationally known figure being talked about as a potential Supreme Court nominee. Blasey Ford couldn’t get any of her claimed witnesses to back up her story. That includes her lifelong friend, Leland Keyser, who was pressured by mutual acquaintances to change her story when she said she could not corroborate Blasey Ford’s account.

Marcus believes Blasey Ford has stronger corroboration because four known witnesses filed sworn affidavits attesting that she told them, between 2012 and 2017, about being sexually assaulted as a teenager and revealed that the assailant was now a federal judge. One of those witnesses was Blasey Ford’s husband. But even taking him out of the equation, three people were willing to put their name to testimony confirming that she told them about the alleged assault prior to Kavanaugh’s nomination. Two of them said the disclosures occurred in 2013 and in the summer of 2016, when a Supreme Court seat for Kavanaugh did not seem to be in the cards. (In the summer of 2016, few expected the next president to be a Republican.)

On the other hand, two of Reade’s three corroborating witnesses are anonymous. According to the New York Times:

A friend said that Ms. Reade told her about the alleged assault at the time, in 1993. A second friend recalled Ms. Reade telling her in 2008 that Mr. Biden had touched her inappropriately and that she’d had a traumatic experience while working in his office. Both friends agreed to speak to The Times on the condition of anonymity to protect the privacy of their families and their self-owned businesses.

One of those two witnesses attests only to being told about inappropriate touching and a “traumatic experience” and recalls being told about it in 2008 — not “shortly after” the alleged incident, but 15 years later.

The only named witness, Reade’s brother Collin Moulton, has changed his story. According to the Washington Post:

Reade’s younger brother, Moulton, said she had told him parts of her experience with Biden but not the alleged sexual assault. “I heard that there was a gym bag incident . . . and that he was inappropriate,” Moulton said. “I remember her telling me he said she was nothing to him.” A few days after that interview, Moulton sent the text saying he wanted to clarify his remarks. He wrote that he recalled Reade telling him in the early 1990s that Biden had cornered her and put his hands under her clothes.

In a subsequent Twitter thread, Nathan J. Robinson, editor of the far-left magazine Current Affairs and one of Reade’s strongest advocates, claimed that the Post’s presentation of this incident is highly misleading:

According to Robinson, the reporter, infuriated because she could no longer twist Moulton’s words, falsely presented Moulton’s follow-up email as changing his story.

But if that’s the case, where are, as they say, the receipts? Robinson could easily post the email correspondence and the text messages. Or better yet, Moulton (a Georgia-based comedian) could post them: Why does he need Robinson as an intermediary? It’s also telling that the offending journalist isn’t even named. (Three of the four bylines on the Post story are female, so referring to the reporter as “she” doesn’t reveal who it is.) I’m quite willing to believe that the Post reporters were biased in Biden’s favor, but this narrative is very shady.

So, up to now, the corroboration points are in Blasey Ford’s favor. But then there’s the curious matter of Leland Keyser, which Marcus glosses over far too easily.

Keyser was Blasey Ford’s high school friend — a friend who Blasey Ford says was also at the party where she was assaulted by Kavanaugh and his pal Mark Judge. In 2018, during the confirmation hearings, Keyser said that she believed Ford’s story but was unable to corroborate it. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean it didn’t happen, as Ford detractors often claim: Blasey Ford doesn’t claim that Keyser knew anything of the assault. Keyser also didn’t remember the party described by Blasey Ford (i.e., a small party in a Maryland suburb in the summer of 1982 where they were both present along with Kavanaugh, Judge, and two other boys). Ford’s supporters have said that Keyser didn’t have any reason to remember a party 30 years ago that would have been entirely unremarkable to her.

It is also worth nothing that by the fall of 2019, Keyser came to believe (as reported in the book The Education of Brett Kavanaugh by New York Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, who take the pro-Ford side) that the assault on Blasey Ford didn’t happen. She also confirmed reports in the conservative press in 2018 that during the hearings, she was under heavy pressure from Team Ford to be more publicly supportive. (It should be noted that Keyser, an athlete and coach who is now retired for health reasons, is a Democrat.)

All this might be especially significant because of a detail reported by Marcus in Supreme Ambition: Blasey Ford, who has no clear memory of how she got home on the night of the alleged assault, “believes it was with Leland, in her mom’s blue station wagon with wood-grain panels.” She also says that she came home early, “way before her curfew” — so early that she was worried her father would notice something amiss.

Under these circumstances, it seems especially odd that Keyser (then Leland Ingham) would have no memory of the incident. Presumably, Christine would have had to ask Leland to call her mother to pick them up. Blasey Ford also says she was so shaken that she had to get past her father quickly when she came home because she didn’t want him to notice anything unusual. Yet Leland didn’t notice that she was distraught and didn’t think it was strange that she wanted to leave the party early? In her book, Marcus concedes that Keyser’s lack of recollection is a point in Kavanaugh’s favor, but also says that “her history of substance abuse might call into question the accuracy of her memory.”

I don’t know how significantly Keyser’s health issues might have affected her memory. (She has struggled with painkiller dependency due to physical injuries and chronic pain.) It is also worth noting that some on Team Ford have used Keyser’s history against her in ways that progressives should normally abhor, especially with regard to women: Keyser told Pogrebin and Kelly that she was threatened with public disclosure of her addiction issues unless she was more cooperative, and text messages quoted in their book show that such discussions were going on.

So all in all, I would say the corroboration issue is a tie. Reade has witnesses who claim more contemporaneous disclosure, but they are either anonymous or not necessarily reliable and with a close personal connection to Reade; Ford has named witnesses claiming disclosure after 30+ years, and while Keyser’s statements do not disprove her account, they certainly complicate things.

Here are a few other areas in which the two can be compared.

Plausibility of the alleged offense. Here, I think the Kavanaugh allegation is much more credible. Two very drunk teenage boys jumping a girl at a party in an isolated upstairs room? Quite possible, though not necessarily with the intent Ford has claimed (more on that later). A U.S. Senator sexually assaulting an aide — pushing her against the wall, putting his hand under her skirt, and pushing his fingers inside her vagina — in a supposedly secluded area of a public hallway in the Senate office building, steps away from where (according to Reade’s account) she had just seen him talking to another person? And all this at a time of heightened attention to sexual harassment, when another Senator, Robert Packwood (R-Oregon) was embroiled in a sexual misconduct scandal involving staffers and lobbyists? Much more unlikely.

Accuser’s conduct toward the accused, post-alleged incident. Reade has, on at least two occasions, written warmly about Biden (in a 2009 article about being a victim of domestic abuse and in a 2017 tweet) and has retweeted many more favorable tweets about him. This is not a situation in which she may have had to humor an abuser to protect her career or livelihood. Ford, who has never had any personal connection to Kavanaugh after high school, obviously has no such issues. This is not dispositive (while Reade claims that her high opinion of Biden was shattered after the assault, it may be that she struggled to hold on to her prior idealized image of Biden as a champion of women’s rights). But it does detract from the plausibility of Reade’s account.

Personal record of the accused. Interestingly, both Kavanaugh and Biden have had a very pro-woman image in their public lives. Biden has been a major advocate for laws and policies to protect women from domestic violence and sexual assault (whether those laws and policies were always good is another matter). Kavanaugh is a man with a long reputation of championing women in the legal profession and has often talked about his mother, pioneering female judge Martha Kavanaugh, as his role model. During his confirmation hearing he pledged to hire all-female law clerks (and made good on that pledge, making women the majority of Supreme Court clerks for the first time in history).

Unfortunately, as we know from past experience, advocacy for women’s rights is not incompatible with sexual predation. Packwood, a socially progressive Republican, was also known as a supporter of feminist causes.

What about personal background? It seems fairly clear that young Kavanaugh was sometimes a rowdy drunk. However, there is nothing in his known history to suggest a propensity for attempted rape. A former Yale classmate, Deborah Ramirez, has claimed that he exposed himself and encouraged her to touch his penis at a drunken dorm-room party at Yale, letting her believe that she was touching a fake penis. Ramirez’s story is an extremely murky one. She came forward in 2018, as The New Yorker reported, after “six days of carefully assessing her memories” until she felt confident enough to name Kavanaugh. Some other classmates vaguely recall hearing about such an incident but not about Kavanaugh as the culprit. Kavanaugh’s former roommate Kenneth Appold has said that he distinctly remembers hearing the story from an eyewitness with a mention of Kavanaugh’s name; but attempts to get further corroboration have failed, and Appold’s story seems to have shifted over time. Ultimately, the Ramirez story has to be judged inconclusive.

Biden has a notorious history of being “handsy”: squeezing women’s (and girls’) shoulders, arms or hands, hugging, kissing foreheads, cheeks and hair, and so on — captured in dozens of “Creepy Uncle Joe” memes. Last year, eight women, including Reade, came forward to say that he had touched them in ways that made them uncomfortable. None of these incidents were alleged to have a sexual component. (Indeed, some have pointed out that Biden’s caught-on-camera handsiness extends to males.) Some of the accusers have explicitly acknowledged that Biden’s intent was to make a warm, supportive gesture.

The debate about norms governing physical expressions of affection — would “no hugging or touching without explicit consent” rules promote respect or take all the warmth and spontaneity out of human interaction? — are beyond the scope of this article. But I think most of us can agree this from Nathan Robinson is absurd:

And, let’s be honest, the fact that seven other women have accused Biden of inappropriate touching should affect our judgment about the likelihood Biden would have done this. Biden has proved that he does not respect women’s boundaries, and, rather than adhering to a narrow pattern of inappropriate behavior, sexual predators frequently do as much as they think they can get away with. If Biden kissed Lucy Flores, a prominent Democratic politician, against her will in public, is it implausible that he would have done worse to a low-level staffer in private?

Actually, no — the fact that a man has squeezed a woman’s shoulders for “a beat too long,” or held a woman’s hands and pressed his forehead to hers in a gesture of comfort when she talks about a sexual assault victim’s suicide, does not increase (or decrease) the likelihood that he might corner a woman and forcibly put his fingers in her vagina while soliciting a sexual tryst. Flores’s account involved Biden putting his hands on her shoulders and planting a kiss on the back of her head (and for what it’s worth, she also said it took place in a secluded spot of a generally public area). I suppose “kissed against her will” is a technically accurate description, but it is profoundly misleading.

In Kavanaugh’s case, it was just as inappropriate to use the nominee’s less-than-angelic teenage behavior — crude jokes about drinking and sex, an in-joke between a group of male friends about having dated and presumably slept with the same girl — as evidence of propensity to sexual assault.

Despite intense publicity about alleged sexual misconduct, no other remotely credible accusations have surfaced against either man. Once again, this is not dispositive; but it’s a point in both Kavanaugh’s and Biden’s favor.

That said, the accusation against Biden is less plausible because it involves extremely out-of-character behavior — a criminal assault on one of his own staffers — as an adult and in a sober state. Kavanaugh was 17 at the time of the alleged assault on Ford and 18 or 19 at the time of the alleged incident with Ramirez, and is said to have been heavily intoxicated during both. Pogrebin and Kelly, who believe that Ford’s and Ramirez’s accounts are true and have no ideological sympathy for Kavanaugh, see him as someone who did bad things as a teen but later matured into a decent man.

Personal credibility of the accuser(s). Here, Reade seems to fare worse than either Ford or Ramirez. I detailed the discrepancies in Reade’s various accounts in my April 7 article about her allegations. The fact that she initially accused Biden only of touching her neck and shoulders at the office in a way that made her uncomfortable (and of wanting her to serve drinks at a fundraiser because he found her attractive and though she had great-looking legs) is salient as well. Reade has claimed that she felt “shut down” by a reporter who wanted to frame her allegations as nonsexual. But she also told her own story at the time and made no mention of sexual assault.

Further doubts about Reade’s credibility are raised by her bizarre posts about Vladimir Putin, hailing not only his leadership but his “sensuous image,” “combination of strength with gentleness” and “reverence for women.” The issue is not that Reade is a Russian agent; it’s that she seems to be, to put it politely, an oddball.

Neither Ford nor Ramirez have such obvious credibility issues (though Katz’s statement certainly raises questions about Ford’s possible political motivation). But in their case, there is a different problem: the question of reliability of memory.

Ramirez had an alcohol-addled memory of a traumatic event at a dorm party. Ford, assuming her account is fully truthful, was a traumatized 15-year-old. Is it possible — given our current knowledge of how memory works — that her recollection was “edited” over time? Could her conviction that Kavanaugh was her attacker have been a case of mistaken identity? Could her memory have magnified the attack from a drunken prank into an attempted rape, perhaps adding details like the attempt to rip off her clothes? Katie Herzog suggested in 2018 that both Kavanaugh and Ford might be telling the truth: it’s entirely possible that Kavanaugh and Judge jumped Ford in that room with the intent of “fucking around” (or, to put it in more family-paper terms, some nasty horseplay) and then forgot all about it when they sobered up, while she perceived it as a sexual assault and was deeply affected. I found it baffling that so few commentators raised the possibility at the time. In this case, it was actually possible that “he said” and “she said” were both correct.

(In Supreme Ambition, Marcus allows for the possibility that Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh were both telling the truth as they knew it and that Kavanaugh simply forgot about the incident; but she does not allow for the possibility that Blasey Ford “edited” the memory.)

Ultimately, I believe the conclusion should be the same in both cases. The accusations may, disturbingly, be true — but also leave so much room for doubt that any fair and reasonable fact-finder would have to find in favor of the accused not only under the stringent “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard, but under the very accuser-friendly “preponderance of the evidence” standard (which means that it’s at least slightly more likely than not that the accused committed the offense). Perhaps one lesson to learn here is that accusations from decades ago are almost impossible to handle fairly.

However, there is no question that most of the media treated the accusations very differently. Biden was properly accorded the presumption of innocence. Kavanaugh, not so much. What’s more, in 2018, a number of mainstream pundits noted the hypocrisy of Kavanaugh taking umbrage at broad inquiries into his personal life despite the fact that in 1998, as part of Kenneth Starr’s prosecutorial team, he advocated extremely intrusive questioning of Bill Clinton about his sexual activities with Monica Lewinsky. Today, the issue of hypocrisy in Biden’s apparent “Believe women… except for my accuser” position has received little attention outside the conservative press.

The best-case scenario is that we will come out of this scandal with a new respect for the presumption of innocence and a new understanding that taking accusations seriously does not require automatically “believing” anyone, as opposed to examining the evidence and weighing the facts.

Unfortunately, a far more likely scenario is that we will continue to muddle down the road of partisan double standards.

Update, April 25:

The latest twist in the Tara Reade story is that, apparently, her claim that her late mother called the Larry King Show in 1993 to talk about her situation checks out. Someone dug up a Larry King segment, from a show discussing the cutthroat nature of Washington, DC politics and media, in which the following exchange took place with a caller from San Luis Obispo, California (where Reade’s mother, Jeanette Altimus, lived at the time).

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.

Reade says she recognizes the voice as her mother’s, and at least for now I’m happy to concede the point. (And, as someone who lost a parent 10 years ago, I can only imagine what a painful moment hearing her voice must have been.)

That said, I think the phone call — assuming it was Altimus — does not prove anything other than the fact that Reade had “problems” in Biden’s office and could not obtain any recourse for them. This confirms Reade’s story that she was bothered by Biden’s behavior and tried to raise the issue with superiors. (It does not confirm that there was a formal complaint.) But I would say that it actually weighs against the sexual assault claim, for two reasons:

The caller says that “the only thing she could have done was go to the press.” Yet Reade has said that when she told her mother about the assault, her mother insisted that she go the police. And indeed she could have. The caller says her daughter chose not to go to the press “out of respect” for the senator. That would be consistent with Reade’s initial account of inappropriate behavior that consisted of touching her neck and shoulders at the office and asking for her to serve drinks at a fundraiser for reasons apparently related to her physical attractiveness. It’s even consistent with The Washington Post’s report that in her interviews with Post reporters last year, Reade blamed Biden’s staff more than she did Biden himself. It does not seem consistent with the story of sexual assault.

Indeed, the caller doesn’t even mention sexual harassment, and it is worth noting that Reade has claimed that some of her issues at Biden’s office were unrelated to harassment — for instance, that she “pushed back” on diversity in the intern pool after being directed to hire only children of Dupont employees. (Bizarrely, she says she wanted to hire “more women,” as if Dupont employees had mainly sons.) But let’s assume that the call was about perceived sexual harassment. Why would Altimus leave out the worst part of her daughter’s experience, use as mild a term as “problems” in reference to sexual assault, and claim that her daughter was staying silent out of “respect” for a rapist — a rapist masquerading as an advocate for rape victims, no less?

Update, April 27:

In a new development, a former next-door neighbor of Reade’s, Lynda LaCasse, had told Business Insider that Reade tearfully told her about being sexually assaulted by Biden, in detail, in 1995 or 1996. LaCasse, a retired former medical staff coordinator and emergency-room clerk for San Luis Obispo General Hospital, is a self-identified “strong Democrat” who says she still plans to vote for Biden and whose Twitter presence apparently indicates a strong dislike of Trump. According to BI:

LaCasse told Insider that in 1995 or 1996, Reade told her she had been assaulted by Biden. “I remember her saying, here was this person that she was working for and she idolized him,” LaCasse said. “And he kind of put her up against a wall. And he put his hand up her skirt and he put his fingers inside her. She felt like she was assaulted, and she really didn’t feel there was anything she could do.” … LaCasse told Insider that she and Reade fell out of touch after Reade moved out of their apartment complex in the late ’90s. But the two reconnected in 2016, she said, when Reade reached out to her on Facebook. In April 2019, Reade told a Nevada City, California, newspaper that Biden had inappropriately touched her and made her uncomfortable, though she did not accuse him of assaulting her. It was after that story, LaCasse said, that she and Reade first revisited the conversation they’d had about Biden in the mid-’90s. “She mentioned that she had come forward,” LaCasse said, “and so I said, ‘Oh my gosh. Yeah. I do remember that.’”

What to make of this? Well, it’s certainly far stronger than any of the other evidence in Reade’s favor — or in favor of Kavanaugh’s accusers. That said, it’s not unheard-of for people to construct false memories and influence each other, especially in a case that has become the focus on intense publicity. Is it possible, for instance, that Reade originally told LaCasse about what she perceived as sexual harassment by Biden — the neck- and shoulder-touching, the request for her to serve drinks at a fundraiser (and the comment from another aide that the request was due to her attractiveness and “nice legs”) — and recently “jogged her memory” into recalling an account of forcible penetration with fingers? Yes. Yes, it is.

(Oddly, while LaCasse says the disclosure occurred while they were trading “violent stories,” she makes no mention of the fact that at the time Reade was, by her own account, in an extremely abusive marriage.)

I think it’s clearly established at this point that Reade felt she was subjected to a “hostile environment” at Biden’s office. But obviously, sexual assault is a whole other level of offense.

And in that regard, I stand by my view that Reade’s story is extremely implausible, for three reasons:

The alleged assault happened in a public hallway in the Russell Senate Office Building, in what Reade has called a “side area.” No one has yet produced any visual evidence of an area in the hallways of that building secluded enough to afford privacy. (Note that Reade says the assault happened moments after she saw Biden talking to someone when coming up with his gym bag.)

The timing — spring or early summer of 1993 — places this incident in a moment of heightened attention to sexual harassment, both in the culture at large and specifically in Washington, DC. One U.S. Senator (Brock Adams, a Democrat) had just resigned over sexual assault allegations. Another (Bob Packwood, a socially moderate, pro-women’s rights Republican) was embroiled in a massive sexual harassment scandal splattered all over the front pages. This was not a moment when a powerful politician would have felt safe manhandling a female staffer. (I should note that even Packwood was never accused of molesting anyone in a public hallway.)

The actions Reade describes are, frankly, those of a psychopathic sexual predator (e.g. Harvey Weinstein). It absolutely beggars credulity that such a person in a position of power would not leave a long trail of victims. The claims that Biden’s famous “handsiness” and invasions of personal space are indicative of such a pattern are ludicrous. (It’s like saying that a habit of mooching off friends lends credibility to an accusation of armed robbery.)

The last point brings me to the Arc Digital article defending Reade’s credibility by my respected colleague Ben Burgis, who takes issue with some of my assertions. I won’t go over Burgis’s arguments point by point, but this passage in particular is relevant:

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.

As it happens, a Google search can in fact produce at least one photo of Biden with his hand on the thigh or at least the leg of a man — New Castle, Delaware police chief Kevin McDerby, at a memorial ceremony in 2010. The chief looks like he’s not thrilled.

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. How do we know that? I don’t think Flores is lying, but it’s entirely possible that her account of the incident is exaggerated in her recall (especially since she perceived Biden’s behavior as demeaning).

The other allegations against Biden — forehead-to-forehead touching, hand-squeezing, etc. — all do, in fact, have counterparts involving men. See (again) the “equal opportunity creep” photo gallery. Or see this account from Washington Post opinion writer Jonathan Capehart:

On Nov. 20, 2017, before a sold-out crowd at Proctors Theatre in Schenectady, N.Y., I conducted a one-on-one conversation with Joe Biden about his new book, “Promise Me, Dad.” You could feel the “Run, Joe! Run!” energy in the theater. Then, as now, many in the audience wanted President Barack Obama’s constitutional wingman to make a run for the Oval Office himself in 2020. Thrilled with how the event went, I asked Biden what he thought after we went backstage. It was there that our close-talking former vice president stepped deep into my personal space, rested his hands on my shoulders, touched his head to mine and said, “You got it, man! You got it, man!” Was I uncomfortable? Sure. Not many people get in my personal space or do so with such gusto. Did I mind? Truth be told, no.

Capehart concludes that women’s experiences are different and that it’s a good thing the stories of women like Flores are now taken seriously because of #MeToo. Maybe. But there are also dangers both in fetishizing female vulnerability and in giving absolute credence to highly subjective personal accounts.

One final point. My position on the Christine Blasey Ford/Brett Kavanaugh story has long been that it’s entirely possible they’re both telling the truth: Ford has retroactively magnified an act of drunken teenage horseplay into an assault with intent to rape, while Kavanaugh simply doesn’t remember it. Is it possible that Reade is telling “her truth,” but Biden did not do what she claims he did? Maybe an “incident with the gym bag” did happen: for instance, she brought the gym bag, and Biden kissed her on the cheek and squeezed her waist. Maybe as time went on, her memory “edited” this into a sexual assault — perhaps magnified by the abuse she apparently suffered in her marriage.

The simple fact is that, with the passage of nearly 30 years — or more than 30 in Kavanaugh’s case — the truth is unknowable barring the emergence of contemporaneous evidence.

And that’s the problem with “Believe Women.”