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According to Backholm, the two were sitting with other law students on a hotel patio by the water chatting late at night during one of these conferences. Eventually everyone went to bed except Backholm and Reade, who continued discussing Reade’s plans to become a domestic violence advocate. “She said, ‘When I was in Washington, D.C. I was sexually assaulted by someone you would know,’ and that’s how she phrased it, ‘someone you would know’ and she didn’t give a name,” Backholm said. “I didn’t ask for a name.” Reade confirmed to the DCNF that she knew Backholm and that she...

To better understand Ms. Reade’s tumultuous journey to the roiling center of the presidential campaign, The New York Times interviewed nearly 100 friends, relatives, co-workers and neighbors and reviewed court records. What emerged was a shambolic life in which Ms. Reade, through her own pluck and smarts and powers of persuasion, overcame an unsettled and abusive childhood to find opportunities on the big stages of acting, politics and law. She won praise for what friends took as a sincere commitment to helping other abuse victims and to animal rescue.

Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said she's "frankly disgusted" by presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden's political shift when it comes to women who claim to have been the victims of sexual misconduct. In a Friday interview, DeVos told me she thought Biden was a "total hypocrite" for demanding more due process in vetting accusations than he wants to provide to others. DeVos recently announced a new and highly consequential rule change regarding sexual harassment in public schools. It came as the former vice president was defending himself from an accusation by Tara Reade, who in the early 1990s worked...

The Monterey County District Attorney’s office has launched an investigation into whether Tara Reade lied on the witness stand while acting as an expert witness.

A conservative group is urging more Joe Biden “victims” to come forward in a digital ad campaign featuring former Biden Senate staffer and sexual assault accuser Tara Reade. The 60-second ad produced by Club for Growth Action features Reade accusing Biden of assaulting her in 1993 and directs viewers to the website joebidenvictims.com to, “Fill out the form below about your experience with Joe Biden.” The pro-free market group generally supports Republican candidates and worked with the Trump administration to reduce business regulations. The group told The Post it is initially spending $2,000 with a focus on promoting the ad...

I'm impressed with Alyssa Milano. This is the kind of convoluted series of rationalizations you would expect from a career Washington Post columnist, not a former sitcom actress who became famous for tweeting a hashtag. The fallacies are obvious. In defending her support for Biden, she keeps using women as a collective group. As if she and her decisions represent all women. There are the strawmen and the false choices, accompanied by a distortion of history.  As an activist, it can be very easy to develop a black and white view of the world: things are clearly wrong or clearly...

Sometimes it’s hard not to resort to insults and this is one of those times. Alyssa Milano has written a piece for Deadline explaining why she still supports Joe Biden even though the evidence as it stands now points in the general direction of him being guilty of sexual assault. It has the not terribly original title “Living in the Gray as a Woman.” You can probably imagine without even reading it how this piece is going to attempt to let Milano recede into uncertainty. The person who championed “#BelieveWomen” is now tap-dancing around epistemic uncertainty. But actually, what she’s...

Actress Rose McGowan has come out as one of the rare prominent members of the #MeToo movement who is backing Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegations against presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. Reade’s claims Reade is a former Senate legislative aide to Biden who claims that in 1993, the then-Delaware senator sexually assaulted her by pushing her “up against the wall,” and going “down my skirt and then up inside it and he penetrated me with his fingers.” Though several family members, former colleagues, and neighbors have corroborated key details in Reade’s story, her credibility has been questioned by the...

Actress-turned-activist Rose McGowan criticized a New York Times reporter over the weekend for questions allegedly submitted to Tara Reade, accusing the Gray Lady reporter of using "tactics" to twist the minds of readers. Times reporter Lisa Lerer – who is also a CNN analyst – apparently sought a detailed list of answers from Reade, who has accused the Democrats’ presumptive 2020 presidential nominee Joe Biden of sexual assault, which the former vice president has denied. “BREAKING NEWS: New York Times ‘journalist’ sent these questions to Joe Biden’s accuser, Tara Reade. The public needs to see how @llerer and the ‪#NYT...

A liberal columnist for The Nation dismissed sexual allegations against presumptive Democrat nominee Joe Biden saying she would vote for him even "if he boiled babies and ate them."Katha Pollitt's remarks signal a shocking trend amongst the left and Democrats who have disregarded increasing evidence of sexual assault allegations against the former Vice President.

A feminist writer has brushed off Joe Biden's sexual assault allegations and says she would vote for him to be president even 'if he boiled babies and ate them'. Magazine columnist Katha Pollitt, 70, wrote she was so desperate to get President Donald Trump out of the White House that democrat presumptive nominee Joe Biden had her vote despite allegations he sexually assaulted Tara Reade in 1993. Writing in The Nation, where she has a bimonthly column called Subject To Debate, Ms Pollitt said: 'I would vote for Joe Biden if he boiled babies and ate them.' 'I cannot believe...

The Nation columnist Katha Pollitt has come under criticism for a column in which she wrote that she would "vote for Joe Biden if he boiled babies and ate them" given the importance of ending President Trump's White House tenure. "I would vote for Joe Biden if he boiled babies and ate them. He wasn't my candidate, but taking back the White House is that important," Pollitt wrote. Pollitt also write that she would also vote for the presumptive Democratic nominee even if she believed sexual assault allegations leveled against him by former Senate staffer Tara Reade regarding an incident...

A columnist for The Nation defended 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden from allegations of sexual assault by his former senate staffer Tara Reade, saying, “I would vote for Joe Biden if he boiled babies and ate them.” Columnist Katha Pollitt would vote for Joe Biden even if she believed Reade’s allegations of sexual assault, she wrote in her Wednesday column. “Fortunately, I don’t have to sacrifice morality to political necessity,” she wrote. Reade has accused Biden of kissing her, touching her, and penetrating her without her consent in 1993 when she worked for him as a senate staffer in Washington,...

Former Vice President Joe Biden hired a “senior adviser” on Wednesday who said in 2017 that no one who has been “accused of sexual harassment or assault” should run for public office. Karine Jean-Pierre, who was then the chief public affairs officer for left-wing MoveOn.org, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on State of the Union that even if nothing had been proved against a candidate, the mere accusation of sexual impropriety should be disqualifying. Tapper asked Jean-Pierre to respond to a case in which a female Democratic candidate for Congress in Kansas named Andrea Ramsey dropped out of the race because...

A chief operative for TIME’S UP Now donated the maximum amount possible to 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden’s campaign in April, according to Federal Election Commission records. TIME’S UP Now Chief Strategy and Policy Officer Jennifer Klein donated $4,600 to the former vice president’s campaign on April 22, FEC records show. Klein, who has worked for TIME’S UP Now since April 2019, previously worked under former President Barack Obama and failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

The Atilis Gym in Bellmawr, New Jersey open for business today..... Car-rental company Hertz filing for bankruptcy under Chapter 11 in Delaware today.... Economic advisers to the President see better economic news later this year...... For the first time since a major economic downturn in 2002, Argentina is in default on a loan tonight..... Iran's top military commander says his country has intelligence on US military movements in the Persian Gulf region and far beyond....... A successful test of a laser weapon by the United States........ The US is considering a nuclear weapons test for the first time since 1992.........

The lawyer for Tara Reade, the former Senate aide who has accused Joseph R. Biden Jr. of sexual assault, said Friday that he was no longer representing her, just two weeks after taking her on as a client. The lawyer, Douglas H. Wigdor, has been a leading plaintiff’s attorney of the #MeToo era. His firm is best known for bringing discrimination cases against Fox News — and its former star host Bill O’Reilly — and Harvey Weinstein, and his presence at Ms. Reade’s side gave her claims added legal heft. His announced departure came a day after defense lawyers in...

Lynn Hummer, founder and president of the Watsonville-based Pregnant Mare Rescue, remembers a woman named Tara McCabe emailing her in 2014 and asking if she could help out and volunteer with her nonprofit. Things started out fine, but Hummer says the relationship frayed after two years—once her volunteer had taken more than a combined $2,000 from Hummer herself and from her organization. Hummer grew to believe that the woman was constantly playing the angles or looking to run a scam. “She was always in crisis, always looking for money,” Hummer says.

Columbia Law School was essentially united in opposition to Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court confirmation in 2018 -- as the university established a new, mandatory sexual misconduct education initiative, dozens of faculty members signed a petition in The New York Times saying the nominee's "temperament" alone was disqualifying, and students staged round-the-clock protests. Now, as Joe Biden prepares to deliver a virtual commencement address at Columbia Law School on Wednesday, he also stands accused of sexual assault (which he, too, adamantly denies) along with previously reported incidents of inappropriate touching. The once-vocal advocates for women's rights and the "Me Too" movement...

“Regarding the incident, he said it didn’t happen, but if there are future records that are unresolved that refute that, then he is going to have to do damage control, and suburban women are not the kind of demographic that you want to do damage control on.” Ms. Reade said she was working as a junior Senate staffer for Mr. Biden in the early 1990s when he pinned her against a wall in the basement of the Capitol complex, shoved his hand up her skirt and penetrated her with his fingers.