Liberal Daily Beast Rips Late-Night Hosts For Hypocrisy Over Sexual Assault Allegations Against Biden
Liberals were all about #MeToo until one of their own faced allegations.
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, who has already been accused of fondling and molesting more than eight women over the years, faces credible accusations by a former Senate staffer that he sexually assaulted her in 1993.
In a huge surprise (jk), the late-night talk shows aren’t teeing off on the 76-year-old candidate. But a liberal website is teeing off on them.
“Why Have the Big Late-Night TV Hosts Gone Silent on Tara Reade?” the Daily Beast wrote on Monday.
The piece opens with a laundry list of comments from the late-night hosts about President Trump, then adds, “it’s disappointing to see them fail to apply a similar standard to Joe Biden.”
Among the late-night set, the only hosts to address the Reade story were HBO’s John Oliver and Bill Maher. And they did so in passing, with Oliver issuing a disclaimer of sorts that she “deserves to be heard” before moving on to the latest Trump scandal, and Maher, a noted #MeToo critic, dismissing it by saying he thought it was “ridiculous and that it would go away and no one would pay any attention to it.”
The big four politically inclined late-night hosts, however—[Stephen] Colbert, [Jimmy] Kimmel, [Seth] Meyers and [Trevor] Noah? Radio silence. Instead of addressing it on his popular Late Show program, Colbert relegated the Reade news to his new Tooning Out the News animated series, albeit in a rather playful bit poking fun at her upcoming interview with Megyn Kelly. “If we ‘believed all women,’ we’d have to also believe Megyn Kelly when she says Santa can’t be a proud black lesbian,” argues one of the animated anchors.
And The Beast had a message to the talk-show hosts. “Sexual assault and abuse of power is an abomination, regardless of the political party it’s attached to. If these late-night hosts intend to use their millions-strong platforms to censure the Trumps and [Bill] O’Reillys of the world, and cast themselves as outspoken allies of the #MeToo movement, then they shouldn’t hold back from holding their fellow lefties’ feet to the fire.”
Reade said during a podcast in March that Biden pinned her against a wall and penetrated her with his fingers without her consent in his Senate office in 1993. She was 29 at the time, Biden was 51.
“He greeted me, he remembered my name, and then we were alone. It was the strangest thing,” Reade said. “There was no like, exchange really. He just had me up against the wall.
“It happened all at once,” she said. “His hands were on me and underneath my clothes, and he went down my skirt and then up inside it and he penetrated me with his fingers and he was kissing me at the same time and he was saying something to me.
“I remember him saying first, like, as he was doing it, ‘Do you wanna go somewhere else?’ And then him saying to me when I pulled away, he got finished doing what he was doing and I kind of pulled back and he said, ‘Come on, man. I heard you liked me.’ ”
In an interview with former Fox New host Megyn Kelly on May 8, Reade said Biden told her, “I want to f*** you.” When she pulled back, Biden “pointed his finger at me and he said, ‘you’re nothing to me. You’re nothing,” Reade said, choking back tears.
More evidence that Reade had told people about the alleged incident shortly after it happened emerged last week when a video clip from 1993 surfaced that allegedly shows Reade’s mother calling into CNN’s “Larry King Show” to ask what her daughter should do after having problems with a “prominent senator.”
Part of the transcript is below:
KING: San Luis Obispo, California, hello.
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.
KING: In other words, she had a story to tell but, out of respect for the person she worked for, she didn’t tell it?
CALLER: That’s true.
For his part, Biden vehemently denied the claim last week, saying, “It is not true. I’m saying it unequivocally — it never happened. It didn’t. It never happened.”
Last week, a court document from 1996 surfaced that shows Reade told her ex-husband she was sexually harassed while working for Biden.
In it, then-husband Theodore Dronen wrote Reade told him about “a problem she was having at work regarding sexual harassment, in U.S. Senator Joe Biden’s office,” said the document, exclusively obtained by The Tribune in San Luis Obispo, California.
In the filing dated March 25, 1996, Dronen testified that he met Reade in the spring of 1993 while the two worked for separate members of Congress in Washington, D.C.
Dronen wrote that Reade told him she “eventually struck a deal with the chief of staff of the Senator’s office and left her position.”
“It was obvious that this event had a very traumatic effect on (Reade), and that she is still sensitive and effected (sic) by it today,” Dronen wrote.
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