On Wednesday, blogger Roman Smith detonated a bombshell. He discovered that mere hours before Tara Reade went public with her claims that Joe Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993, she edited an old post on her Medium blog to match the allegations she was about to make. No appending of corrections, no clarifications, nothing. Fortunately, Smith was able to compare the edited version to the original version published in The (Grass Valley) Union in 2019.
On paper, this should have been finis, curtains, sayonara for Reade’s credibility. Did she really believe that no one would look into her claims, given their magnitude? Then again, maybe she didn’t, considering that she blew a gasket when she found out that one of her former employers was speaking out. It’s been two days since Smith revealed this, and unless I missed something, she has yet to address them.
Ever since Reade’s allegations went public, her defenders have claimed that if we don’t stand by her, #MeToo means nothing. Well, what Reade appears to have done here may have set the movement back further than Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation did. In the absence of something I haven’t heard or seen, there is literally no good-faith reason for her to have gone back and edited that post in this way.
Comparing her account in The Union to her edited blog post, the most benign interpretation for Reade’s behavior is that she wanted to call attention to how backwards things still were in 1990s Washington. Indeed, looking at Reade’s original account, one can draw disturbing parallels to how little things have changed since then. Remember, for a long time, staffers who complain about sexual harassment faced a very arduous and very degrading process for having their claims heard—and it could have been as long as 90 days before anyone knew that there was a potential predator lurking in Capitol Hill.
But at best—at best—Reade seems to have embellished her previous account to match her current allegations. And in so doing, she may have delayed a badly-needed conversation about how backwards things still are on Capitol Hill. Even if she were telling the truth, given the matter in which she edited her post and when she edited it, who can believe her?
It’s beyond belief that a woman with a law degree would have even thought this was a good idea. As maroge04 put it when s/he stumbled on this, “honest people don’t behave this way.” Or at least, those who seriously care about their credibility. What she has done here can only be described as a betrayal to everyone who has had to endure domestic violence and sexual assault. Situations like this are why even when survivors finally come forward, they get doors slammed in their faces. As someone who stayed in an emotionally abusive marriage because I was afraid no one would believe that I was being emotionally abused, this is especially outrageous to me on a personal level.
I was looking for a parallel, and I happened to remember the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case in New York back in 2011. It was based almost entirely on the accuser’s word, given that the physical evidence didn’t indicate foul play. If you’ll remember, the case came unraveled in a hurry when it emerged that DSK’s accuser had frequently changed her story about what happened before, during and after the alleged rape, and had also lied about being gang-raped in Guinea. As a result, even if DSK had done anything, prosecutors felt that there was no way they could bring this to trial. Ethically, there was no other option. Situations like this are exactly how innocent people get railroaded.
I also think back to how Urban Meyer was almost certainly allowed to not only keep his job at Ohio State, but walk away on his own terms, due to an inexplicable lapse of journalistic ethics by Brett McMurphy in 2018. By all rights, Meyer should have been fired for allowing one of his assistants, Zach Smith, to keep his job after it emerged he’d assaulted his then-pregnant wife. However, it was likely stymied by McMurphy’s decision to not append corrections as more details came in about the investigation. He simply edited his original story in the same manner that it appears Reade edited hers. In so doing, McMurphy likely made it all but impossible for Ohio State to legally justify firing him. After all, it would have appeared that Meyer was being fired for attempting to defend himself and correct the record.
This whole situation should make us, on the left and as a nation at large, realize that it’s time for a happy medium on how we respond to domestic violence and sexual assault. In some cases, we’ve gone from sweeping accusers under the rug to chasing down allegations even when it is obvious they aren’t credible. When you do the latter, all you do is give more ammunition to those who claim that survivors are just out to ruin people’s lives.
I hope you’re proud of yourself, Tara. You have betrayed every survivor of domestic violence and every survivor of sexual assault. This outrages me on a personal level, as a survivor of domestic violence myself. What she has done is exactly why we aren’t believed.
