Mainstream media’s dismissal of Tara Reade’s claims she was sexually assaulted by then-Senator Joe Biden just got harder, as a video emerged of her mother’s 1993 call into a CNN show hosted by Larry King, bringing up the incident.
The minute-long clip that surfaced on Friday shows a female called from San Luis Obispo, California, calling into “Larry King Live” on August 11, 1993 seeking advice about her daughter who just left Washington after having “problems” with “a prominent senator.”
“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,” says the transcript of the segment, published by Ryan Grim of The Intercept on Friday.
Grim noted that when he interviewed Reade, she mentioned her mother’s call to CNN, but could not remember the exact content of it or the date of the show. Reade’s mother, who passed away in 2016, lived in San Luis Obispo in August 1993. Presented with the recording on Friday, Reade told reporters that the voice in it was in fact her mother’s.
Reade worked as a staffer for then-Senator Joe Biden in the early 1990s, but left Washington abruptly after filing a complaint about sexual harassment. Biden’s documents from that time have been sealed until two years after he retires from public life, but the 77-year-old is currently seeking to challenge President Donald Trump in November as the Democratic presidential nominee.
Speaking with journalist Katie Halper last month, Reade described in graphic detail how Senator Biden sexually assaulted her in the hallway of the Russell Senate Office Building sometime in the spring of 1993, as she was bringing him a gym bag.
Mainstream US media outlets have largely ignored Reade’s allegations. When it finally got around to addressing them in mid-April, The New York Times ran a feature-length article dismissing them out of hand. This has been in marked contrast with the attention the Times and other mainstream outlets gave the far more vague and uncorroborated claims by Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford last year, during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
