Former staffer accuses Joe Biden of sexual assault

Politics & Elections
561

I can’t lay claim to “republican or Trump supporter” but this conservative does in fact believe that both cases should have their investigative processes and then dismissed out of hand if/when no evidence surfaces to garner a conviction.

What is shown by the partisans on both sides is that simply the accusation is sometimes enough to crater someone’s career, or image.

If it didn’t work, no one would try these things by “public opinion” and the reason the Kavanaugh hearings get brought up is that there are a lot of people, on this very board, that agree to his treatment, regardless of guilt or innocence.

562

There is no realistic way to keep these sorts of accusations out of the court of public opinion. No way to keep it from being partisan either. As someone recently and quite astutely pointed out in another thread, pointing out hypocrisy on either side is a useless argument as well.

So what’s the conclusion we can draw from this? That we’re already doing everything we can in these situations, given the circumstances? Perhaps that’s the uncomfortable answer everyone needs to accept. <shrug>

563

Which I agree with, but the #metoo folks won’t accept that answer.

564

I think #metoo is getting what they want to the extent that women are being heard and are being taken seriously. I don’t think that what #metoo is demanding that every allegation is an immediate guilty verdict for the accused. Though, in the court of public opinion and partisan juries, that is an impossible verdict to control.

What I think would be helpful is an official policy statement from the authoritative voice of the #metoo movement. Except there is no authoritative voice for such a social movement. Nobody speaks for everyone in #metoo.

565

I feel that threads like this one are a good litmus test for seeing whose critical thinking skills can overcome partisanship and whose cannot. They also provide ample evidence that intellectual dishonesty and hypocrisy aren’t exclusive to right-wingers by any means.

With that being said, John Stamos’s Left Ear wrote the best post in this thread yet. The knee-jerk “you’re a hypocrite if you don’t react to this like you reacted to Trump/Kavanaugh” and pious virtue-signalling that’s supposed to symbolize a commitment to progressive ideology that doesn’t respect party lines all betray an abject unwillingness to examine the facts from all sides.

The facts? Reade’s story has evolved wildly in the time she’s come forward about Biden’s conduct towards her. While it may be common for sexual assault victims to not be perfectly consistent in accounting the details of their assault, the extreme fluctuations in Reade’s multiple revisions cannot be explained away by trauma screwing with her memory. Victims may not always be able to remember the exact time, place, clothing worn, etc. but what they don’t forget is the severity of the assault. Someone who was pinned against a wall and penetrated against her will isn’t going to misremember that event to the point of conflating it with unwanted non-sexual touching. That just doesn’t happen.

Her effusive praise for a dictator who’s meddled in the US elections (and plans on doing so again) that she’s made sure to delete once she made public her new allegations against Biden. It’s very relevant.

All the people corroborating her story are either family members (which makes them too biased to be considered reliable sources) or friends only speaking on the condition of anonymity (gee, I wonder why?). The only non-relative willing to their name out there is her neighbour, who for some reason remembers the assault better than the actual victim. Hmm. And of course that neighbour is a self-proclaimed Biden supporter, would they be taken seriously at all if they claimed otherwise?

The Larry King Live phone call that is assumed to be her mother— like I said before, too vague, no mention of sexual misconduct of any kind.

Meanwhile, no other allegations of sexual assault against Biden have surfaced. Sure, the night is still young but he’s been called out for getting handsy with women since last year. Multiple women came forward all at once, video footage of him inappropriately hugging little girls went viral, and all of this happened in a post-MeToo world. There wasn’t a better time for a woman who’s been sexually assaulted by Biden to speak up. If no one seized on the opportunity to say something then, that says a lot on its own.

People and news sources who are usually sympathetic to sexual assault victims and believe in giving accusers the platform to be heard have for the most part refrained from supporting Reade due to her credibility issues, including Ronan Farrow. Yes, that Ronan Farrow. Again, it says a lot.

As an aside, it appears that her late dad (whom she’s also accused of sexual assault, interestingly enough) was a romance novelist who wrote a scene in one of his books that eerily mirrors the alleged assault his daughter describes.

566

Doesn’t “believe all women” come from “metoo”? The “metoo” message is absolutely essential. But, I can’t get behind “believe all women”. Hell, I can’t get behind “believe all” anything.

567

I remember #BelieveWomen, but not anything about “believe all women”. I’m unaware of any prominent #MeToo activist who has suggested that women never, ever lie or make inaccurate statements, about this or any other topic.

568

“Believe women” is a very different message than “believe all women”. And the latter was, and still is, absolutely used and it shouldn’t be.

Because a situation like this was inevitable and gives firepower to the opponents of an otherwise beneficial movement.

569

But that is how #MeToo advocates have behaved for the most part. They are the ones who’ve popularized the slogan “Believe women”, which unambiguously implies a presumption that an allegation is true. It’s been the reason why legitimate victims have received support and justice they otherwise would not have enjoyed, but it’s also been the reason erroneous accusations have taken off without scrutiny and falsely accused men were unfairly maligned (Amber Heard, Chloe Dykstra, the women with a weird grudge against Al Franken). Now that #MeToo finally understands you can’t blindly throw your support behind an accuser just because false accusations are statistical outliers, they’re showing a bit more prudence in whose credibility they’re willing to bolster, especially when people running for office are being accused. Of course, the reputation they’ve already set for themselves has created a “hoisted by their own petard” situation. Not countering one extreme (treating all accusers as liars by default) with another extreme (assuming there are no liars) would have avoided charges of hypocrisy.

This is the problem with a social movement that is largely an internet hashtag. No centralization means it can be easily hijacked and co-opted by bad actors. This isn’t helped by #MeToo’s original stance of treating all accusations as legitimate by default. It made it ripe for being weaponized against politicians.

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“Come on, man. I thought you liked me.”

I wouldn’t lend her story as much credence if it weren’t for the word “man”.

I can see Biden saying that. Not saying he did.

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Who is using “Believe all women”?

572

I’m not inventing the term. It has been used interchangeably for the past few years. And I cringe every time.

573

I think it’s used much more among critics than supporters of #MeToo.

574

I don’t think retrospectively editing old blog posts about Biden to match the present story is a clever thing to do on Ms Reade’s part.

575

Except that Come on, Man wasn’t a thing until a few years ago.

576

I didn’t know it was ever a thing.

577

#BlackLivesMatter was twisted by opponents to mean #OnlyBLM. Which of course was never the case any more than it’s true that #BelieveWomen was intended to mean believing ALL women ALL the time. I suspect it’s the same type of mentality at play in both cases and it behooves rational well meaning people to push back on that instead of lending it credibility.

578

That’s the thing that sticks, to me.

Reade made one of those complaints, didn’t she? So she already put herself out there; already made herself vulnerable to all the attacks that women who accuse men are liable to; and did it in the context of MeToo. If Biden not only used his usual sort of handsy-ness on her, but actually penetrated her: I can easily see why she might not have reported it at the time that she says it happened; and I can easily see how she might no longer remember the date, let alone the time. But why, when she was already accusing him in public of inappropriate behavior, wouldn’t she have accused him of actual sexual assault?

Al Franken was caught on video, and admitted the behavior. I don’t see how you can claim that was a false accusation.

– I don’t know whether “come on, man” is a “thing”. I’ve certainly heard people say it occasionally since, oh, probably at least the 70’s.

579

I don’t know which video you’re specifically talking about, but if it’s in reference the photo in which he pretends to grope his first accuser Leeann Tweeden in her sleep, it’s already been explained that it was a skit grossly taken out of context. In retrospect, the accusers greatly exaggerated the extent of how violated they were by him. Franken folded like a tent under pressure from his colleagues and resigned in disgrace rather than fight to clear his name. It set a god awful precedent that is now coming back to haunt the democrats. There’s an excellent article in the New Yorker that delves into this: The Case of Al Franken | The New Yorker

On that note, it’s rather funny that some people here and elsewhere are accusing the Democrats of being hypocrites for not prosecuting Biden the way they did Kavanaugh, completely ignoring that democrats were pretty hard on one of their own who was accused of misconduct a year before Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile I’ve yet to see Republicans be this willing to condemn a fellow party member who is credibly accused of sexual assault.

580

I’m skeptical of Reade’s account but this is pretty thin gruel. The bit given appears to be a description of (largely) consensual foreplay. If the scene was a woman being attacked like that or a boss doing it or something but this seems to be “Her dad once wrote a scene where a woman was penetrated with some guy’s fingers so she must be lying about being penetrated with some guy’s fingers…”