Democrats’ Dilemma: Endorsing Joe Biden Despite Tara Reade’s Sexual Assault Allegations
Democrats continued to fall into Party line on Monday morning when Nancy Pelosi announced her endorsement for Joe Biden to be the Democratic nominee for president. The Speaker of the House’s announcement breathed new life into the lingering dilemma of how Democrats can reconcile supporting a candidate accused of the same types of sexual assault allegations that they’ve readily condemned when leveled against Republicans.
Pelosi called Biden “a leader who is the personification of hope and courage, values, authenticity and integrity,” but her support for the presumptive nominee was absent of any mention of the sexual assault accusation made against him by Tara Reade, his former senatorial aide decades ago. Pelosi was the latest Democrat to voice support for Biden without openly acknowledging what’s emerging as the elephant in the room — no partisan pun — as Republicans work to bring attention to a topic that Democrats have previously, and readily, condemned when they were made against people like Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh.
In fact, there seems to be growing outrage on social media over mainstream media’s apparent collective decision to either gloss over or completely ignore Reade’s accusations, which recently got an extra boost of credibility with a new report from Reade’s mother last week. That treatment stood in stark contrast to how Democrats reacted to Kavanaugh, who was accused of a decades-old sexual assault by Christine Blasey Ford. At the time in 2018, Pelosi emerged as the Democrats’ voice of moral authority as it pertained to sexual assault allegations.
“Survivors should be supported when they come forward without the fear of threats or further trauma. There must be an acknowledgement of the life-long impact of this episode, the cost to the family of coming forward and the gravity of a lifetime Supreme Court nomination,” Pelosi said at the time before she insisted that failing to thoroughly investigate “these serious and credible allegations would be a dereliction of Congress’ duty to demand zero tolerance of sexual harassment and abuse.”
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A Washington Post report from last summer found that the Me Too movement to support sexual assault and end sexual violence is not the same priority for Democratic voters this year as it was 12 months earlier when Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax was being pressured to step down after facing his own accusations of rape. Fairfax, still in office and now running for governor in 2021, has been recently tweeting about this disparity in reactions from his Party in an effort to bring attention to what he says is the damage such allegations can do to the accused without any semblance of due process being afforded.