Back on Sunday, I mentioned that Tara Reade, the woman who tried to accuse Joe Biden of sexually assaulting her, resurfaced after several months to give an interview to NewsBusters. A number of Kossacks wondered why I felt the need to post it. Well, it’s simple. In letting Reade rant and rave about why Kamala Harris and the mainstream media have given her the cold shoulder, Brent Bozell and his friends at the Media Research Center ignored the 500-pound gorilla in the room. Reade has been completely discredited.
To recap—not only do we know that her account of what Biden supposedly did to her in 1993 while she was working in his office has shifted too many times to count, but we also know that it almost certainly didn’t happen the way that she says it happened. The hidden location where Biden supposedly assaulted her literally doesn’t exist, making it implausible for a Senator to commit such a brazen attack that soon after Anita Hill.
Moreover, we also know that Reade misrepresented her credentials. She never got a degree from Antioch University Seattle, as she has long claimed. Most seriously, we know that she lied about those credentials under oath while testifying as an expert witness in domestic violence cases on California’s Central Coast. While this meets the real-world definition of perjury, prosecutors in Monterey County are investigating whether it met the legal standard. If so, in all likelihood her misrepresentations put innocent people in jail, and could also result in manifestly guilty people going free.
It is beyond comprehension that NewsBusters saw fit to give Reade a platform. But as if to add obscenity to insult and injury, Reade’s misrepresentations about her credentials and her perjurous statements about them were never even mentioned in the article. Just in case no one at NewsBusters could be bothered to look into it, I helped put together an interactive timeline at National Memo.
When a friend tipped me off that Reade was back, it was all I could do to keep my composure. After all, I have an all-too-personal experience of the real-world damage perjury can do—and how outrageous it is that we don’t take it as seriously as we should.
Many longtime Kossacks know that in 2006, literally weeks after I left an abusive three-year marriage, my ex-wife saw fit to inflict more abuse on me. I’d pressed charges against her son for making good on threats to beat me up. Her response? She got a girl who was staying with us to falsely claim that I’d made her watch X-rated movies and threatened to beat her up if she told anyone.
Fortunately, I got a really good lawyer—a former DA here in Charlotte. When he looked at the charge sheet, he noticed that my ex-wife had supposedly made this discovery just hours after her son had been arrested for beating me up. His spidey senses went off—he knew this was retaliation. Per his request, I got my time card for that week.
On paper, that should have been DNA-level evidence she was lying, and enough to end this ordeal before it started. But on the day of the first appearance, I was stunned to know that the case was still going forward. When my lawyer mentioned the time sheet, the DA responded, “We have a right to present our case!” It is still beyond comprehension why no one in that office put two and two together.
But it shouldn’t have even taken that. The girl’s mother sat there while all this was happening and did absolutely nothing. What mother with any kind of love for her child would allow someone to tell their child to lie under oath? She had numerous opportunities to speak up—and didn’t. In other words, she utterly failed in her most basic duty as a mother.
And because of those failures, I had to go through calling pretrial release every Monday for five months. For years afterward, I had nightmares of being taken to the hole for my own protection. Even today, I wonder if people think I’m a monster.
Fortunately, they never showed up for court. I suspect that they expected me to just wave my hands and rant about how I’d been yelled at, screamed at and cursed at for three years rather than actually try to defend myself. When they realized that they could potentially be racked up for perjury and subornation of perjury if they peddled this story in court, they didn’t have the guts to take their medicine. Ironically, I suspect a similar dynamic with Reade. Her story is so flimsy that I believe she was banking on Biden screaming “politically motivated!” rather than actually refute her accusations.
But it shouldn’t have even gotten that far. I believed then, and I believe now, that my ex-wife and her friend wouldn’t have even thought about trying this stunt if there were an effective deterrent against perjury. Intentionally lying under oath is not only an attack on the integrity of the system, but it can cause undue real-world pain. If they had known from the get-go that they could be the ones going to jail, and would have to bear the opprobrium of being convicted felons, they would have left me alone when I walked out in 2006.
Likewise, if perjury were really taken seriously, NewsBusters would have never even considered stooping to the level of giving Reade a platform. Even allowing for the fact that most of their audience doesn’t even give the mainstream media the time of day, this is shameful even by Bozell’s standards. They want to bring down Biden so badly that they have to allow an exposed embelisher and perjurer a forum? If you were wrongfully imprisoned as a result of Reade’s testalying, or you were a victim of an abuser who might go free because of said testalying, you would have every right to be very angry at NewsBusters.
Lately, the Media Research Center has been running ads urging us to “believe America, not the media.” If their vision of America includes chasing down sexual assault claims even when they are non-credible, or giving a platform to exposed perjurers, we should want no part of it. And as someone who was a victim of perjury, I wish I could say—no, yell—that right in Bozell’s face.
