After much hype, Megyn Kelly’s interview with Tara Reade went live on Friday night. I decided to watch for myself, since it’s the first time Reade has spoken up since the immediate time after she went public with her claim that Joe Biden sexually assaulted her.
All told, it wasn’t a complete softball fest. Kelly is one of the few right-leaning women whom I would trust to do a halfway credible interview with Reade. But at the same time, there were some misses that would have been obvious to anyone who has been paying attention to this story.
After a rundown of Reade’s background, Kelly asked Reade about how Biden touched her in a way that made her uncomfortable—as distinct from the sexual assault.
My spidey senses went off. After all, this ignores the biggest red flag so far in her story—and the moment that, for me, led me to conclude Reade wasn’t credible. Literally hours before she sat down with Katie Halper on March 25, Reade quietly edited a post on her Medium blog she’d made the previous April to better match her new claims. What is more, she did so some nine days after she last promoted the original version of her story, as published in The (Grass Valley) Union in April 2019, as the true version of events.
This isn’t the first time that we’ve seen a case of Kelly failing to do a basic background check on the subjects of her interviews. If you’ll remember, when she made her grand debut on NBC, she led us to believe she was interviewing an ordinary Russian television reporter. But a basic search would have revealed that she was actually interviewing the deputy director of Russia’s flagship state television channel—something that would have been revealed with a simple Google search.
Another example of Kelly failing to do her homework came when she asked about Reade filing a harassment complaint. She says she filled out an intake form at the Senate Office of Fair Employment Practices, the Senate’s version of an HR department, and strongly implied that she’d been fired after it came to light.
But wait a minute. Reade had previously told the AP that she “chickened out” when she went to fill out an intake form to report the harassment. When NBC’s Mike Memoli reported on the Secretary of the Senate turning down Biden’s request for any records related to a Reade complaint, he indicated that based on this version of events, there probably is no complaint.
Later, Reade called for Biden to allow access to his papers at the University of Delaware. However, Congressman David Jolly, who spent the better part of the 1990s and early 2000s as an aide to his predecessor, Bill Young, believes any search for a complaint in those papers would be a fool’s errand.
Again, a little bit of research would have turned this up. Not a good look, Megyn.
Some other highlights:
- Reade describes the alleged assault in pretty graphic detail, claiming that Biden pushed her up the wall, got his hand underneath her skirt, started kissing her neck and saying, “I want to f**k you.” He then supposedly put his fingers in her vagina.
- Reade has publicly said that she has found it hard to get any media outlets to listen to her. However, she told Kelly that it took several months for news outlets to look into her story and investigate it.
- When Kelly asked Reade why she hit the “like” button on Biden’s tweets about domestic violence and sexual assault advocacy, Reade replied she was somewhat conflicted about Biden and wasn’t sure about speaking up.
- Reade claims she was retaliated against when trying to speak up about sexual harassment. However, she blamed Biden’s staffers for this, not Biden himself.
- Reade explains her now-deleted paeans to Putin by saying she was studying Russia as part of a creative writing group. However, she isn’t too keen on Putin’s primitive line on domestic violence.
- Regarding the now-infamous “tic toc” tweet, Kelly noted that it sounded political and suggested Reade was “excited to drop this bomb.” Reade says that at the time, she’d gotten in touch with someone from Time’s Up. Um, Tara? Why not use the hashtag? Ultimately, Time’s Up refused to subsidize Reade’s PR and legal fees due to concerns such expenditures would endanger its nonprofit status.
- Reade identifies as a progressive. While she’s left the Democratic Party, she has no desire to become a Republican, and doesn’t want to help Trump win. As she sees it, she’s “politically homeless.”
- Reade wasn’t happy with Team Biden calling for the media to look into her claims. Um, Tara? Who else is supposed to look into this in order to see if there’s a there there?
- Kelly asked Reade what her “endgame” was. She says she wants to be able to tell her story, “not be torn apart,” and to heal.
Since the interview went live, we’ve learned of some other details that cast doubt on Reade’s credibility. Reade claimed to have reached out to the Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris campaigns to get her story out. However, a senior adviser to Harris denies any such contact took place.
Reade also implied that she was fired not long after she filled out the intake form. But not only doesn’t that match up with what she told the AP, but multiple Twitter users searched through public records to discover Reade had been charged with check fraud right around the time she was forced out.
All things considered, if you listen to Kelly’s interview and were skeptical of Reade’s story beforehand, you should come away from that interview still feeling skeptical. Personally, my view remains unchanged—in the absence of something we haven’t heard or seen, Tara Reade’s claim isn’t just not credible, but without merit.