michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” Today: A former Senate aide to Joe Biden has accused him of assaulting her in 1993. My colleague Lisa Lerer examines the allegation. It’s Tuesday, April 14. Lisa, when did you begin reporting this story?

lisa lerer

So about a year ago, we were reporting on allegations from a number of women who came out and said that Joe Biden had touched them in ways that made them feel uncomfortable.

archived recording Tonight, Joe Biden is facing troubling accusations. Nevada Democrat Lucy Flores claims the former vice president inappropriately touched and kissed her head before a rally in 2014.

lisa lerer

Maybe it was a squeeze on the shoulder, maybe he smelled their hair —

archived recording (lucy flores) — out of nowhere, I feel Joe Biden put his hands on my shoulders, get up very close to me from behind, lean in, smell my hair and then plant a slow kiss on the top of my head.

lisa lerer

But this was all happening in public, at campaign rallies, at fund-raisers.

archived recording 1 He put his hands around my head and pulled me in. archived recording 2 Former congressional aide Amy Lappos told CBS News tonight that Joe Biden reached for her face and rubbed noses with her during a fundraiser in Greenwich, Connecticut in 2009.

lisa lerer

And we in the newsroom and in the media, we’re really grappling with how to think and talk about this behavior. This wasn’t anything like what had normally come up in a lot of these discussions around #MeToo, like Harvey Weinstein or any of that.

archived recording (lucy flores) And for the record, I don’t believe that it was a bad intention. I’m not in any way suggesting that I felt sexually assaulted or sexually harassed. I felt invaded. I felt that there was a violation of my personal space. There was no —

lisa lerer

The women talking about these allegations weren’t quite sure what to call it. Some of them said quite vehemently that they didn’t consider it sexual harassment. But they wanted the former vice president to be aware of his behavior and how it could make people feel. Others had a slightly different perspective. They thought it was something closer to sexual harassment. So this goes on for really a couple weeks. And in the end, Biden — he doesn’t quite apologize.

archived recording (joe biden) Today, I want to talk about gestures of support and encouragement that I’ve made to women and some men, and it made them uncomfortable.

lisa lerer

But he comes out and he makes an online video where he says that he has a very touchy feely kind of political style.

archived recording (joe biden) In my career, I’ve always tried to make a human connection. That’s my responsibility, I think. I shake hands, I hug people, I grab men and women by the shoulders and say, you can do this.

lisa lerer

But he recognizes that times have changed, and perhaps he needs to change with them and be more respectful of people’s space.

archived recording (joe biden) You know, social norms have begun to change, they’ve shifted, and the boundaries of protecting personal space have been reset. And I get it. I get it. I hear what they’re saying. I understand it. And I’ll be much more mindful. That’s my responsibility. My responsibility. And I’ll meet it.

lisa lerer

And then, I met Tara Reade. And she had called me with sort of similar kind of story. Joe Biden had touched her, he’d put his hands in her hair, he touched her shoulders, all in public, in ways that really made her feel uncomfortable. But her story had a little bit of a different twist. So she, at the time, had been working in his Senate office. And this was about — I think December 1992 to August 1993. She was a low-level staffer, a staff assistant. And she said that the touching had gone beyond just hands in the hair and squeezes of the shoulder. That there had been harassment.

michael barbaro

Hm.

lisa lerer

She says he had asked her to serve drinks at a cocktail party. He had commented on her looks in the office, in front of other people. And that she felt that he had cultivated a culture in his office that fostered and permitted this kind of sexual harassment.

michael barbaro

And what did you do with Reade’s story, with that reporting?

lisa lerer

Well, I talked to her. I talked to her friend, who corroborated a lot of what she was telling me. We did use her allegations to call a whole bunch of people who had worked in Joe Biden’s office in the 1990s — particularly the early 1990s, which was the period that Tara Reade was working there — to see if they remembered any kind of harassment, what the environment of the office was at the time. But we didn’t really come up with anything all that surprising or explosive. Nobody really confirmed her account at that time. So we actually didn’t end up reporting them in the paper. We had already reported on a number of allegations from these women who said that they were uncomfortable with Joe Biden’s touching. And we just sort of moved on. And the political world did too. Everyone moved on to the next battle. There was the Mueller report to contend with, and then a really competitive primary, presidential debates started. So this issue of the unwanted touching and Tara’s story just never came back up.

michael barbaro

Mm hmm. And Lisa, do you think that has something to do with the fact that Biden confronted this, talked about it and said he was learning from it?

lisa lerer

Oh, for sure. But he was really forced into confronting it. I mean, this was a period in March, in April, before Biden had formally announced his presidential bid, where he was going through the process of reconciling a lot of his record with the current mores of the Democratic Party. He was dealing with his criminal justice record, he was dealing with his positions on abortion and sort of moving to the left with the party. And so I think that quasi-apology video was part of that process. You have a Democratic Party that’s acutely aware of issues of racial and gender bias, and Biden had to eventually reconcile those criticisms — whether he felt they were fair or not — with where the party was. But ultimately, he didn’t pay much of a price for it. He announced his campaign a couple three or so weeks later. His opponents never made an issue of this and everything sort of moved on.

michael barbaro

OK, so what happens next?

lisa lerer

Well, you have the primary race. So Biden, as we all know, nosedives. Then he comes back up, he becomes the front-runner. And around that time —

archived recording (katie halper) Hello, and welcome to the Katie Halper Show.

lisa lerer

A woman goes on a podcast —

archived recording (katie halper) Where would you like to start? Where does the story start for you? archived recording (tara reade) Well, the story starts when I went to work for Joe Biden.

lisa lerer

And levels a really serious, serious accusation against Joe Biden, which is basically that he sexually assaulted her.

archived recording (tara reade) And my body — I was shaking everywhere, because it was cold all of a sudden, and I was — I don’t know, I feel like I was shaking, just everywhere. And I was trying to grasp what had just happened, and what I should do.

lisa lerer

And that woman, who tells her story in great detail on this podcast, is Tara Reade.

michael barbaro

So what are you thinking at this point? Because you had already talked to this woman, and she had not mentioned this kind of accusation, right?

lisa lerer

Well, I must admit, I’m a little confused, because it didn’t come up at all. And so the first thing I did was pull up my notes. And when I look over my notes and I read the story she had told me a year ago, there’s some holes in that story she told me. Things I remember thinking that her reaction was maybe a bit extreme for what she said she was experiencing in the office at the time. That maybe make a little more sense if this other thing had in fact happened — this sexual assault. So I wondered, first of all, had she been truthful the first time around? Was she being truthful now? And also, whether I had asked the right questions. Did I miss something because I hadn’t called back, because I got caught up with the dynamics of this primary?

michael barbaro

So at this point — after Tara Reade has gone on this podcast, she has made this claim, and you’re trying to figure out why she didn’t first tell you that same information — how are you now approaching this story, journalistically?

lisa lerer

So I think we all quickly agreed that it wasn’t a question of whether we would approach the story, but how. This was a woman who was making very serious allegations of sexual assault with her name attached, publicly, against the man who is more than likely to become the Democratic nominee for president. So we had to grapple with these claims. The question was, how? And I think the natural thing to do — really, the human thing to do — is to go into a story like this and say, do you believe or not believe the person who’s making the accusation? But that’s not the journalistic thing to do. We’re not judges, we’re not the jury, we’re not the police department. I was really focused on what we could show to be true and what we could show to not be true. What we had corroboration on, and what we didn’t have corroboration on. And what kind of facts we could give voters and the American public about this whole incident, that’s already out in the world and being passed around quite actively on social media. People knew about it.

michael barbaro

Mm-hmm.

lisa lerer

But they didn’t know the details, and they didn’t really know what was true or not.

michael barbaro

And so where do you begin as you’re trying to figure this all out?

lisa lerer

Well, so the main thing I needed to do was get Tara Reade back on the phone. So that’s where I began.

michael barbaro

We’ll be right back. So Lisa, tell me about this, I guess, second round of communications that you have with Tara Reade, after she claims that Joe Biden has assaulted her.

lisa lerer

So I call her, and we start talking every day. And the obvious first question I ask her is why she didn’t tell me about these allegations when we talked a year ago. And she tells me that even though they weren’t published in The New York Times, they were published in a local paper. And the feedback she got from that being out there, the kind of death threats and harassment online, made her reluctant to tell the rest of her story. So we talk through all that, and then eventually, I say to her that I need her to tell me the story that she told on that podcast in a way that we can use on the record. And I start recording her.

interposing voices Hello? Can you hear me? Yeah, I hear you. Yep, I got you.

michael barbaro

And what does she say?

lisa lerer So where do you want to start? tara reade OK. So let’s start with the assault.

lisa lerer

So the story that I’m about to tell you is all according to Tara Reade. So it’s 1993, in the spring some time, and she’s working as a staff assistant in Joe Biden’s Senate office. And one day, she’s at work, and her supervisor comes up to her and has this athletic bag — this gym bag — and asks her if she would find the senator and bring him his gym bag.

tara reade She just said, take him his gym bag, hurry! And she was like, he’ll meet you, he’s down towards the Capitol.

lisa lerer

So she heads down and finds him somewhere in the Capitol complex of offices.

tara reade And I ran into him, like I saw him, and I — he acknowledged me, he was talking to someone, they walked away. And then he said, come here, Tara. And then he smiled at me, greeted me.

lisa lerer

And she says, hello, Senator.

tara reade I called him “Senator.” I didn’t call him “Joe.” And I handed him the bag with my right hand, I remember that.

lisa lerer

And the next thing she remembers, he’s pinned her up against a wall, which she remembers as being very, very cold. And he’s kissing her.

tara reade It happened at once, and that’s what’s so hard about telling this story. Like he’s talking to me, and his hands are everywhere, and everything’s happening at once very quickly. This happened, like, in under two minutes.

lisa lerer

And according to Tara, he reaches his hand under her shirt — she remembers she was wearing a cream-colored blouse — grabs her left breast.

tara reade He used his knee to part my knees, because my legs went together. And he went kind of down my skirt, and then as he’s parting my legs with his knee, he like went up, and then just went under. And then, of course, yeah, he was able to do what he did, which was he took — it felt like one or two fingers, and inserted them in my vagina.

lisa lerer

And at that point, he’s kissing her and he says to her, she says, do you want to go somewhere else? And he tried — she said — to kiss her on the mouth, but she moves her head.

tara reade And then he pulled back, because I wasn’t responding to him, I wasn’t kissing him back. I completely froze up, and he had kind of lifted me up, so I was like up on my tippy toes almost. And then he looked back and he looked at me —

lisa lerer

And he looks at her, and he says, according to her —

tara reade Come on, man. I heard you liked me. Then he smiled, but then when I looked at his eyes, he was angry. Like there —

lisa lerer

And she said she remembers standing there, just kind of frozen, and she felt almost a little bad, like she had put him in a bad position. And she was wondering what she did to make him think that she would be interested in this. And according to Tara, he looked her and he said —

tara reade He pointed his finger at me and he just goes, you’re — you’re nothing to me. And then he looked at me, and he goes, nothing.

lisa lerer

You’re nothing to me. Nothing. And she thinks she must have looked a certain way or had a certain expression in her eye, because then he kind of took her by the shoulders and patted her shoulders, and said, you’re OK, you’re fine. And he kind of almost set her down, she said, and then he walked off and walked down the hall.

tara reade I know I went to the restroom, I know I did, to clean up. But I don’t remember which restroom I went to in the Russell Building or there — I don’t know. But I know I did. But my vivid memory next is sitting — I was trying to pull myself together in the back stairs at the Russell Building with those big windows. I remember just sitting on the stairs, and nobody was there. And just like my whole body was literally — I couldn’t control my shaking. I remember just being so cold. So cold.

lisa lerer

And then she headed home. She doesn’t remember how she got there. She doesn’t remember whether she went back into the office and got her bag or talked to anybody. But she made it home to her apartment.

tara reade The next thing I remember is being on the phone with my mom and crying and then arguing with her.

lisa lerer

And her mother tells her in fairly firm language that she needs to immediately file a police report.

tara reade You know, she even swore at me. She was not being gentle and supportive, and I understand, because she wanted me to have evidence. And now I understand what she was trying to do, and I didn’t then.

lisa lerer

But Tara doesn’t do that.

michael barbaro

And does she say why she did not go to the police?

lisa lerer

Well, what she says is that she basically just wanted the whole thing to go away, is what she told me. That after it happened, she took a shower. She says she threw out all her clothes that she was wearing at the time.

tara reade I threw everything out. Even the shoes. Everything. Like, I just — that’s how I felt about it. lisa lerer Really? What kind of —

lisa lerer

She tells me that she called in sick to work, that she was sobbing uncontrollably.

tara reade It’s like I just didn’t want it to have happened. It just didn’t happen.

michael barbaro

And what does she say happens in the days and maybe even weeks after this alleged incident?

lisa lerer

So she tells me eventually she does go back to work. And when she does, she says that she tells her immediate supervisor, who’s Biden’s personal secretary, as well as two top staffers in the office — the deputy chief of staff and the chief of staff — that she feels uncomfortable around Joe Biden. She never mentions the alleged assault, but she talks more about feeling uncomfortable with him touching her shoulders or tangling his hands in her hair. And in her telling, the staff don’t really do anything about that. In fact, she feels that they kind of penalize her for bringing that forward. She says they strip her of one of her duties, which is supervising the interns. She says they put her in a windowless office, far from the rest of the staff. So at some point, she says that she goes to a Senate personnel office and files a formal complaint.

michael barbaro

And what does she say was in this complaint?

lisa lerer

She said that complaint really detailed the harassment and what she saw as retaliation in the office. But she believes that that forum eventually was returned to Biden’s office, which would have been a flouting of what the official protocol was at that time. And once that complaint was returned to Biden’s office, she says, she was given a month to find a new job, and basically eased out of her position. And so she started looking for another position on Capitol Hill, she says, and never ended up getting hired or finding anything.

michael barbaro

So Lisa, once Tara Reade has given you this account of an alleged attack, what do you do next?

lisa lerer

So at this point, she’s told me a lot of information. And some really detailed information too. So I start thinking about what can be corroborated, what we can show to be true and what we can show to be not true. And one thing that Tara mentions to me is that at the time, she had called a friend and told her the whole story. So I tracked down the friend.

michael barbaro

Mm-hmm.

lisa lerer

And in large part, she corroborates the story that Tara had told me. Tara tells me she also told her mother. Her mother is deceased, so she can’t be called. And she told a version of her story to her brother, though not all the details. So I start trying to track down her brother. And she tells me she told a friend in 2008, after Joe Biden had been picked as Barack Obama’s vice president. She had told a version of this story to that friend, without all the details, but that something had happened to her. So I tracked down that friend, and she confirms that account and some of the things that Tara tells me.

michael barbaro

Where does that leave you?

lisa lerer

So it leaves us with something, but certainly not enough to corroborate this entire story. We really only have the one friend with the full story, and everyone else is just giving us bits and pieces. So that’s not the kind of full corroboration that you’re looking for as a journalist, when you’re trying to confirm really serious allegations and also really politically explosive allegations. But at this point, it’s time to turn to the Biden side of things. So along with my colleague Sydney Ember, we start looking at who we can talk to. And we start by calling the three top staffers in the office at the time that Tara had mentioned she had spoken with, and she had raised those complaints of harassment to. All three of them say that a woman named Tara Reade never approached them with these kind of allegations, and two of them said they didn’t remember her at all even working in the office.

michael barbaro

So just to be clear, the three people that Tara Reade said she went to and told of Biden’s behavior that made her uncomfortable, pretty senior people in his office, they say they have no recollection of that ever happening?

lisa lerer

Exactly. They have no recollection. And a lot of the former staffers are mystified by her account too. They don’t remember anything like this, or even the hint of anything like this. So they — when Sydney and I call them, they’re trying to reconcile themselves her story with what they remember from working in that office. A lot of them didn’t want to talk on the record. One who did said that at the time, you knew who the good guys and bad guys were on the Senate. The places where — offices where women would and would not want to work, and she described Biden as one of the good guys.

michael barbaro

Mm-hmm.

lisa lerer

So after that, we reached out to another group of people, which is the interns. And that’s because Tara had told me that she supervised the interns, and that she shared an office with these interns. So I reached two of them, and they both tell me that they’d never heard of anything, never saw anything like the kind of harassment and assault Tara had been alleging. But that they did remember midway through their internship, sometime in April, she had been suddenly removed as their boss. And they never knew why, and they never saw her again. So amid all this confusion, I remember that there’s one thing that really could cut through all this and clarify exactly what did or did not happen.

michael barbaro

Mm-hmm.

lisa lerer

And that’s this complaint that Tara had told me she filed in 1993 with the Senate office —

michael barbaro

Right.

lisa lerer

— and that someone had written down. So we start trying to track down that complaint. And we call the Federal Office of Personnel Management, and they tell us to file a Freedom of Information request, which would take months, if not years. And anyhow, we don’t really know exactly what we’re asking for, because she doesn’t remember the name of the office where she filed this complaint.

michael barbaro

Right.

lisa lerer

We call over to the Senate and we’re able to get some employment records, but not this complaint. So we basically look for this document and come up empty. It’s unfindable in the end.

michael barbaro

What about other aspects of Reade’s life that might feel relevant? I mean, possible political affiliations or motivations. How do you begin to think and report on those?

lisa lerer

Well, so one thing that we want to be really sure of is that she is who she says she is. And that this isn’t someone in the midst of a heated presidential campaign — that’s only, of course, going to get more heated by all expectations — that is trying to push an agenda, or possibly pull a fast one on the media to try to get claims that are untrue out there in the public. So I really talked to her a lot about her political affiliation. She describes herself as a third-generation Democrat, but walks me through the fact that she liked Marianne Williamson. She really liked Elizabeth Warren. and when California voted in the primary over Super Tuesday, she backed Bernie Sanders. But she insists that her motivation for this is not political, even though I had watched as supporters of Sanders and supporters of President Trump, really, are the ones pushing this allegation out there on social media, and really keeping the drumbeat up for people to investigate it. So that’s one concern. And there is this other unusual detail.

michael barbaro

Which is what?

lisa lerer

Well, she had written a fair amount in Medium posts and on Twitter about her support for Russia and her respect for Vladimir Putin. And so we read through all those Medium posts. Some of them had been pulled down off the internet, but we found them. We looked through those old Twitter posts, and we really tried to investigate whether there could be some kind of nefarious agenda there. And she says that she was misguided. Tara Reade says that she had been working on a novel — she’s not anymore — about Russia, and this was all part of her research. And she says that she doesn’t have any respect for Vladimir Putin now, has never been to Russia. So we decide that that’s not so disqualifying that it prevents us from putting a version of her story in the paper.

michael barbaro

So how are you thinking about everything that you have reported at this point? And I assume, in consultation with your editors, how are you planning to proceed?

lisa lerer

Well, one thing we know is that we can’t corroborate her story beyond the two friends and her brother.

michael barbaro

Mm-hmm.

lisa lerer

We know we can’t find any documents, and we know that everyone who worked for Joe Biden is denying that anything like this ever happened, or could have happened.

michael barbaro

Mm-hmm.

lisa lerer

And we also know one other thing. And this is really important. As far as we’ve learned in our reporting, there is no pattern of this kind of behavior from Joe Biden. What we had seen a year ago was a very different thing. It was touching in public, rubbing of shoulders, or maybe touching of hair that made some women feel uncomfortable. This is an allegation of a sexual assault. Those things are not at all similar. And in fact, what Tara Reade is alleging is a fairly singular act, as far as we know. But the Democratic Party, they’ve really set a very high standard for taking these cases seriously, for taking allegations of sexual abuse seriously. Even Joe Biden has taken a strong position on this, and it’s worth remembering the Kavanaugh hearings. And one thing that Joe Biden said when that was all going on was this, he said: “For a woman to come forward in the glaring lights of focus, nationally, you’ve got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real, whether or not she forgets facts, whether or not it’s been made worse or better over time. But nobody fails to understand that this is like jumping into a cauldron.

michael barbaro

So it’s Biden himself saying, essentially, believe women.

lisa lerer

That’s exactly right. Biden essentially saying, believe women. And I think that explains part of the approach to these allegations that you’ve seen from his campaign. Joe Biden himself has not spoken about them at all, and I don’t think he’s been asked directly, although I suppose that could come. But his campaign has been very careful in all their public statements to say that they believe women, that they think coming out like this is a credible thing to do. But in this case, they say the allegations are false. But they’re really walking a tightrope when they talk about this politically, with many in the base of the Democratic Party.

michael barbaro

Well, help me understand that. I mean, with all that history in mind that you just described, of the Democratic Party setting such a high standard for itself — and Biden himself, the presumptive Democratic nominee, saying, believe women — how is the Democratic establishment, how is the Democratic Party responding to what Tara Reade has alleged happened to her?

lisa lerer

They’re not responding. Nobody in the Democratic establishment, elected officials, party leaders, has discussed this at all.

michael barbaro

Why do you think that is? I mean, is that a function of the conflicting information here? Is that party loyalty to the de facto nominee? Is that about the fact that there is just one of these accusations, not a pattern, as you just said? How do you explain that?

lisa lerer

Well, honestly, I think it’s some of all of that. When I talk to people who are close to Joe Biden, and I’ve now talked to quite a lot of them, they say that this is something that’s just so completely out of character for him. They describe a man who’s fiercely devoted to his wife and his kids. That he would spend a lot of time focusing on when he could get the quickest train, the soonest train, home to Delaware so he could see them. And they just cannot reconcile these allegations that are out with the guy that they have known for all these decades. So they say they can’t believe it’s true. But when you look at the political calendar, we’re in the spring of an election year, Joe Biden is going to be the Democratic nominee. So you have to figure that many, many Democrats also just don’t want this to be true.

[music]

michael barbaro

Lisa, thank you very much.

lisa lerer

Thanks for having me.

archived recording (bernie sanders) So today, I am asking all Americans — I’m asking every Democrat, I’m asking every independent, I’m asking a lot of Republicans to come together in this campaign to support your candidacy, which I endorse.

michael barbaro

On Monday, Joe Biden was endorsed by his former rival, Senator Bernie Sanders.

archived recording (joe biden) Well, Bernie I want to thank you for that. It’s a big deal. I think that your endorsement means a great deal. It means a great deal to me.

michael barbaro

We’ll be right back. Here’s what else you need to know today.

archived recording (emmanuel macron) [SPEAKING FRENCH]

michael barbaro

On Monday, France said it would extend a nationwide lockdown until the middle of May. Britain was expected to extend its lockdown. And Russia’s president offered his darkest assessment yet of the virus’s impact there.

archived recording (vladimir putin) [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]

michael barbaro

During a meeting with his advisors, Vladimir Putin said, quote, “We see the situation changing daily. And unfortunately, not for the better.”

archived recording (andrew cuomo) Thank you very much. Good afternoon to everyone. Let me welcome my fellow governors, who are on the telephone, who you’ll hear from in a moment.

michael barbaro

In the U.S., two groups of governors — one on the east coast, the other on the west coast — said they would decide regionally when and how to reopen their state’s economies, and emphasized that they would not do so until experts and data showed that it would be safe.

archived recording (andrew cuomo) Again, we anticipate different facts, different circumstances for different states, different parts of states. But let’s be smart and let’s be cooperative. And let’s learn from one another.

michael barbaro

During a conference call, the governors, including Tom Wolfe of Pennsylvania, said that it was their role, not the federal government’s, to make that decision.

archived recording (tom wolfe) Well, seeing as how had the responsibility for closing the state down, I think we probably have the primary responsibility for opening it up.

michael barbaro

A few hours later, President Trump was asked about the governor’s announcement.

archived recording Just to clarify your understanding of your authority, vis-à-vis governors, if a governor issued a stay at home — archived recording (donald trump) You say my authority. The president’s authority. Not mine, because it’s not me. This is — when somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total. And that’s the way it’s got to be.

michael barbaro

The president insisted that the decision was his.

archived recording Your authority’s total? archived recording (donald trump) It’s total. It’s total. And the governors know that. archived recording So if a — archived recording (donald trump) The governors know that. You know, you have a couple of bands of — excuse me. Excuse me.

michael barbaro