A woman who briefly worked as an aide for former Vice President Joe Biden in the 1990s has expanded her claims that he harassed her to now include an instance of sexual assault, which Biden's campaign denies and says is untrue.
The woman, Tara Reade, first made the assault allegation public last month, saying in a podcast interview that Biden — then a veteran senator from Delaware and a powerful committee chairman — penetrated her with his fingers under her skirt when she brought him a gym bag in spring 1993. At the time, she was a staff assistant in his office on Capitol Hill.
NBC News has spoken with Reade multiple times since she came forward with the assault allegation on March 25 and has also spoken with five people with whom Reade said she shared varying degrees of detail over time. Three of those people said on the record that they do not recall any such conversation with Reade.
A fourth person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Reade told her about the alleged assault at the time. A fifth person, who also spoke with NBC News anonymously, recalled that Reade told her in the mid-2000s that Biden had been inappropriate and touched her when she worked in his office but that she didn't detail the alleged assault.
Former Biden staffers, including his former chief of staff Ted Kaufman and his longtime executive assistant Marianne Baker, were both named by Reade as having been told about harassment at the time, but both said they have no recollection of the claim. Biden's campaign has said the alleged assault "absolutely did not happen."
Thursday evening, Reade filed an official complaint with the Washington, D.C., police. The public incident report — which is one page long and doesn't name Biden — was obtained by NBC News and recounts an assault sometime from March 1 to May 31, 1993. Reade confirmed that she is "Subject-1" in the report and that "Subject-2" is Biden. It is illegal to falsify police reports, and the statute of limitations for prosecuting the allegations has passed.
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