Joe Biden denies sexually assaulting staff assistant

DELAWARE: US presidential candidate Joe Biden has denied sexually assaulting a former staff assistant, saying the alleged incident nearly three decades years ago “never happened.”

The former vice president broke a month of silence on the most potentially damaging claims he has confronted since launching his White House bid a year ago. “They aren’t true. This never happened,” Biden said in a statement addressing the accusations made by Tara Reade, a former staffer in his Senate office.

The campaign of the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee had forcefully denied the allegations but Biden himself had yet to address them publicly until now.

Biden said Reade’s then-supervisor and former senior staffers in his office “have said that she never came to them and complained or raised issues.” He asked for a search of the Senate archives for any record of a complaint Reade allegedly filed at the time. Reade made a criminal complaint to police last month.

She said she was a victim of sexual assault without naming Biden. The police complaint, she said, was filed “for safety reasons only” as the statute of limitations for her claim had expired.

In early 2019, when Biden was preparing his presidential bid, she was among multiple women who accused Biden of touching them inappropriately or in ways that made them feel uncomfortable.

She has since presented a more serious claim of assault to media outlets, and filed an incident report with the Washington police in early April in which she did not name Biden.

Biden went on a morning news show to publicly refute the claims. “It is not true. I’m saying unequivocally it never, never happened, and it didn’t,” Biden said. “I don’t know why after 27 years all of this gets raised,” Biden added. “But I’m not going to question her motive. I’m not going to attack her.”

Trump, who faces Biden in a presidential election that has been turned on its head by the coronavirus pandemic, himself faced more than a dozen accusations of sexual harassment and assault before he became president. He came out on the side of Biden, telling a right-wing radio host: “I would just say to Joe Biden: Just go out and fight it. It’s, you know, it’s one of those things.”

Reade has not produced a copy of the complaint that she allegedly filed in 1993. Biden called for transparency and said he has asked officials to search the National Archives, where he says any such document would now be stored.

Biden, who has pledged to pick a woman to be his vice president, stressed that he has always worked to improve conditions for women. Several women seen as candidates to be Biden’s running mate, including Senator Kamala Harris and former Georgia state lawmaker Stacey Abrams, have expressed support for Biden regarding the allegations.

The top Democrat in Congress, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, endorsed Biden for president this week and said that she remains satisfied with his response to the allegations. Biden is carrying on with online events during the coronavirus pandemic and is locked down at his Delaware home.