Investigating the sexual assault allegations against Joe Biden: Yahoo News Explains
In March, former Joe Biden staffer Tara Reade publicly accused the former vice president of sexually assaulting her in 1993. As new reporting provides potential corroboration for the decades-old allegation, veteran investigative journalist Rich McHugh explains his process for gathering evidence.
Video Transcript
RICH MCHUGH: Tara Reade was a low level senate staffer working for Joe Biden in 1992, 1993 for about eight months. She alleges that she was sexually harassed during that time by Biden and that she was sexually assaulted by Biden during that time. Initially, the Biden campaign came out with a response that this did not happen. This is out of character for the person we know. Kate Bedingfield, the communications director, did say, you know, we encourage journalists to thoroughly vet this and have an independent investigation. But that said, these allegations are false.
Truth be told, I didn't really want to go into this story, because, you know, it was just a political minefield. To me at the time, it was a no-win. And I was working on the Harvey Weinstein investigation. One of the Weinstein survivors, Sarah Anne Masse, reached out to me and said, hey, could you take a look at this case? Basically when I figured out that Tara had filed a police report-- when I got the police report, I was like-- you know, I realized that this woman has filed a police report and basically put herself a little bit at risk, because if you file a false police report, you're at risk of imprisonment by a number of days, et cetera. And I was like, this is a story. At this point, you know, I kind of have to report this.
So I talked to Tara. I interviewed her. I interviewed people around her that corroborated her story-- her brother, a friend who is remaining anonymous, an intern who worked under Tara when she was in the Biden office, and these two others that have gone on the record with "Business Insider"-- Lorraine Sanchez, they worked together for about three years. And Lynda LaCasse, her neighbor, who lived across from her in 1995.
People are attacking this story and saying the timing of it is so crazy and, you know, this is a political hit job. And if you look at the extended transcript of Linda's interview that I did with her-- interviews-- it's pretty clear. It's pretty hard to see that she would have any political motivation. She hates Trump. She's like-- she said it to me in the interview. I hate Trump. I don't want to help him get elected. And I'm still voting for Biden, but this is important, because this happened.
The Biden campaign has basically issued blanket denials to every outlet and given the same statements. I haven't seen a new statement recently. You have to get to a point where you collect enough data points that, you know, enough corroboration and they-- those corroborating points and voices inform your decision whether there's actually merit in reporting this. And I felt there was certainly merit in reporting it, especially after the police report was filed. And now that two more corroborating voices have come out on the record, I think it's-- I think it deserves to be heard.
