After weeks in which the allegation remained largely below the surface, on Sunday, both the New York Times and the Washington Post published lengthy articles exploring former staffer Tara Reade’s assertion that Joe Biden sexually assaulted her in the early 1990s. Both articles included on-the-record denials from former Biden staffers and raised other doubts about the veracity of the Reade allegations.
Reade’s claims already seemed dubious, for reasons laid out in a tightly researched piece from columnist Cathy Young, published five days before the Times and Post exposés. The allegations, however, posed a problem unique to Biden among leading 2020 presidential candidates. For the past decade, contending that “this culture of ours is upside-down,” his rhetoric and policies have sought to make it far easier to prove sexual-assault allegations—even dubious ones like Reade’s—in a noncriminal context.
The highest-profile example, of course, was the Obama administration’s effort to use Title IX to weaken the rights of college students accused of sexual assault. Biden, the administration’s point man on the policy, oversaw a crusade that required schools to change their procedures to enhance the likelihood of guilty findings—generating hundreds of lawsuits from wrongly accused students as a result.
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