A former aide for Joe Biden says the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee sexually assaulted her when she worked in his Senate office in 1993 - an allegation the Biden campaign says is "absolutely" not true.
"He just had me up against the wall," Tara Reade told podcast host Katie Halper in a March 25 episode, the first time Reade went public with her Biden accusation. "The wall was cold. I remember it happened all at once."
In interviews with the Associated Press, The New York Times, NBC News and other outlets published this week, Reade, now 56, claimed Biden used his fingers to penetrate her under her skirt when she went to give him a gym bag while at work.
She reportedly worked for then-Sen. Biden as a staff assistant and was employed in his office from December 1992 to August 1993.
"He firmly believes that women have a right to be heard - and heard respectfully," Biden's spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield said in a statement. "Such claims should also be diligently reviewed by an independent press. What is clear about this claim: It is untrue. This absolutely did not happen."
Reade told Halper that she was asked by a superior staffer to meet with Biden to deliver a bag to him while he was on his way to a Senate gym. When the two met, Reade said, Biden allegedly assaulted her.
"The gym bag, I don't know where it went, I handed it to him and it was gone," she said. "And his hands were on me and underneath my clothes, and then he went down my skirt but then up inside it and he penetrated me with his fingers." (Reade told The Washington Post she did not remember the exact location of their alleged encounter on Capitol Hill nearly 30 years ago but that they were in semi-private.)
She alleged that Biden was kissing her and asked, "Do you want to go somewhere else?" before she pulled away from him.
Biden looked "almost puzzled or shocked," she told the Times, and allegedly said, "Come on, man. I heard you liked me."
"He grabbed me by the shoulders - I don't know how I looked, but I must've looked something - because he grabbed me by the shoulders and said, 'You're okay. You're fine,' " Reade told Halper. "And then he walked away and he went on with his day."
The public portion of a report Reade filed last week with Washington, D.C., police states only that she said "she was the victim of a sexual assault." According to the complaint, obtained by PEOPLE, she said it occurred between March and May of 1993.
Reade first accused Biden, now 77, of inappropriate physical contact last year around the same time multiple other women said the former vice president touched them uncomfortably, such as on the shoulders, neck and back, and entered their personal space in an unexpected or unwanted way.
Those other women did not say Biden sexually assaulted them.
Reade (who did not respond to messages from PEOPLE) originally told a local newspaper in April 2019 that when she worked in Biden's Senate office, he crossed a line by touching her on the shoulder and neck.
In articles this week, Reade said she initially withheld her more grave allegation of assault because of online harassment she received in 2019 after speaking about Biden, who has said he "offered countless handshakes, hugs, expressions of affection, support and comfort and not once - never - did I believe I acted inappropriately."
"The boundaries of protecting personal space have been reset. I get it. ... I'll be much more mindful. That's my responsibility, and I'll meet it," Biden said last year.
In addition to the denial of Reade's account, Biden's campaign provided a statement from Marianne Baker, who worked as his executive assistant from 1982 to 2010.
Reade told the Times, the Post and others that in 1993 she went to Baker to complain of harassment but not her accusation of assault.
Baker, through her statement, denied this: "In all my years working for Senator Biden, I never once witnessed, or heard of, or received, any reports of inappropriate conduct, period - not from Ms. Reade, not from anyone."
Various staffers from Biden's years in the Senate, including other women, told the AP, the Post and the Times that they did not witness misconduct and that their experience was not like Reade's.
"When you work on the Hill, everyone knows who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, and Biden was a good guy," Melissa Lefko, a former staff assistant from the same period Reade worked with Biden, told the Times.
Two other top Biden aides whom Reade said she complained to of harassment in '93 tell PEOPLE they don't recall working with her or her coming to them.
"If it happened, I would have remembered it," says Dennis Toner, then the deputy chief of staff. "I don't remember it and I don't believe it's accurate."
Separately Reade said she told her mother, who is now dead, about the alleged assault at the time and also told her brother, Collin Moulton, and two friends, according to the AP and the Post.
A friend, speaking anonymously, confirmed to the Post that Reade did tell them about it. Another friend told the Times that Reade spoke in 2008 of an upsetting experience from her time in Biden's office and said he allegedly touched her inappropriately.
Moulton told The Intercept, a left-wing news site, that their mother wanted Reade to go to the police. "Woefully, I did not encourage her to follow up," he told the site. "I wasn't one of her better advocates. I said, 'Let it go, move on, guys are idiots.' " Moulton told the Post that Reade had told him in '93 of the alleged touching; days later, he followed up with the paper to say she told him Biden touched her "under her clothes." (Moulton did not respond to a message from PEOPLE.)
Reade told Halper that "there was no framework back then" to report sexual harassment or assault.
Baker, Biden's former assistant, said she had "absolutely no knowledge or memory of Ms. Reade's accounting of events," which she said "would have left a searing impression on me as a woman professional and as a manager."
Reade claimed, however, that after there was no action taken she filed a written complaint with the Senate personnel office - and soon afterwards had her work duties limited and was moved to a windowless office. (The Times and other outlets were unable to find a copy of the complaint Reade said she filed.)
Two interns from Biden's office in '93 told the Times they remembered she did suddenly stop supervising them - one of her job duties - that April, though they said they never saw her and Biden together.
Toner, Biden's former deputy chief of staff, and former Chief of Staff Ted Kaufman both say Reade did not speak out to them.
"She did not come to me. I would have remembered her if she had," says Kaufman, who later replaced Biden in the Senate. "I do not remember her."
Reade told Halper it was still difficult for her to talk about her recollection openly.
"This has been excruciating for me because I liked Biden," Reade said. "He was a powerful figure for me. I was his subordinate, I was hoping to have a career in the Senate. I wanted to be a senator, I didn't want to sleep with one."
"I'm never going to sue or whatever, it's past the statute of limitations," she told Halper. "I'm doing this for the next generation. I'm doing this for my daughter, because the generation that we're in - that I'm in - we need to stop this. We need to stop thinking that because someone's powerful we can't speak out and we can't be safe in our workspace."
Her new allegation against Biden comes as the former vice president has all but won the Democratic Party's 2020 presidential primary, with his last opponent, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, dropping out of the race last week and endorsing him on Monday.
According to the Post, Reade said she voted twice for the Obama-Biden ticket because she agreed with President Barack Obama's policies. However, Reade has been vocal on Twitter about supporting Sanders in the primary and previously stated her support for candidates Marianne Williamson and Sen. Elizabeth Warren. (She's tweeted supportively of Biden as well.)
Reade, who told the Times she was a "third-generation Democrat," said her decision to come forward now was not motivated by partisanship.
Reade has also defended herself against what she called claims by critics she is a "Russian agent," given a history of unusual views on Russia and its president.
As recently as last year Reade made pro-Russia posts on her Medium blog or tweets sympathizing with the "compassionate, caring, visionary" Vladimir Putin, an authoritarian leader with a checkered human-rights history in Russia.
"With all due respect, Vladimir Putin is always cast as a villain by America. But is he?" she tweeted in December. "I worked for the Senate, I know the plan to bring Russia to its knees."
In a since-deleted post from 2018, she wrote of "the reckless imperialism of America" when recounting her decision to leave D.C. politics to pursue her artistic passions.
Reade told the Times her views on Putin were "misguided" and attributed some of what she'd said to work on an unpublished novel related to Russia.
"It was trying to smear me and distract from what happened, but it won't change the facts of what happened in 1993," she said.
President Donald Trump's allies, including oldest son Donald Trump Jr., have been critical of the media's coverage of Reade's accusations. Trump's campaign manager, Brad Parscale, last week said Reade's story had not been written about widely enough.
The president has himself faced more than a dozen allegations of sexual harassment, misconduct and assault, including rape.
Former PEOPLE reporter Natasha Stoynoff said Trump forcibly kissed her during an interview in December 2005. "Within seconds he was pushing me against the wall and forcing his tongue down my throat," she recalled in 2016.
(He has denied these stories and is being sued by two women who claim he defamed them by saying they weren't telling the truth.)
Trump was infamously recorded on the set of Access Hollywood in 2005 bragging about abusing women.
"When you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything," he said then. "Grab 'em by the p--. You can do anything."
The tape was leaked in the lead up to the 2016 election.
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