The first time I was raped I was 13 years old. I know where it happened, but I can’t remember the exact date. I’m not sure who I told about it, or when. I think about these things when I consider the scrutiny that Tara Reade’s entire life is being subject to. I didn’t report my first rape. I didn’t even tell my own mother about it for almost 20 years. I didn’t report the other times I was raped, either. When I imagine what I would do if one of my abusers ran for political office, I consider the things I do and don’t remember and how they would be used against me. I consider my history of mental illness and substance abuse and know these things would be weaponized to discredit me.
It is not easy to write about these things. Just writing this first paragraph I’ve taken several pauses to breathe as my heart began to race. There was a moment when I thought I might pass out. For survivors of sexual violence, the debate around Biden’s allegations is not purely ideological. When we engage in this dialogue, our tongues are heavy with the weight of our own lived trauma. It is deeply painful, triggering, and exhausting.
According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, rape is the most under-reported crime. 63% of sexual assaults are not reported to police (Rennison, C. M. (2002). Rape and sexual assault: Reporting to police and medical attention).
Additionally, we know that false reports of rape are estimated at only 2-8%. In an academic article titled False Reports: Moving Beyond the Issue to Successfully Investigate and Prosecute Non-Stranger Sexual Assault, authors Dr. Kim Lonsway, Sgt. Joanne Archambault (Ret.), and Dr. David Lisak write,
“This realistic and evidence-based estimate of 2-8% thus suggests that the American public dramatically overestimates the percentage of sexual assault reports that are false. It’s probably not hard to imagine why. For example, we have all seen how victims are portrayed in the media accounts of rape accusations made against popular sports and cultural figures. These media accounts show us just how easy it is for us as a society to believe the suspect’s statements (a respected cultural icon) and both discount the victim’s statements and disparage her character.
This tendency to overestimate the percentage of false reports can then introduce bias into an investigation and prosecution because it causes us to give less credibility to victims and more credibility to suspects. This is especially true if the victim’s behavior is seen as risky or problematic and if the suspect seems like a “nice guy” who doesn’t look like a stereotypic rapist. We describe these characteristics as “red flags,” in the characteristics of sexual assault cases.” (Lonsway, K.A., Archambault, J., Berkowitz, A. (2009). False Reports: Moving Beyond the Issues to Successfully Investigate and Prosecute Non-Stranger Sexual Assault. End Violence Against Women International.)
Many parts of the above article read as though they were written with Tara Reade and Joe Biden in mind. It states, for example, that “investigators and prosecutors cannot determine that the sexual assault did not happen, simply because they suspect that the report is false, view it with suspicion, or because the victim changes his or her account of what happened.” The similarities grow more chilling with lines such as, “it is similarly impossible to determine that a sexual assault did not happen based on sympathy for the suspect, because he seems sincerely outraged and upset by the charges, he has a credible story, or he appears to be a responsible citizen who does not meet our personal assumptions about who is likely to be a “rapist.””
It is important to note that this is not a criminal trial, which would require convincing a jury of Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. This bar is so high, in fact, that out of every 1000 sexual assaults only 4.6 perpetrators will be incarcerated. This means that even for the small amount of sexual assaults that are reported (1 in 4), the majority of sexually violent perpetrators never face criminal consequences for their actions.
In Rebecca Weston’s excellent breakdown of Michael J. Stern’s victim blaming opinion piece for USA Today, she writes, “I am not taking the perspective of prosecutor, whose job is to convince a jury “beyond a reasonable doubt” — a high evidentiary bar. Instead, I take the perspective of a psychotherapist who has worked with rape victims as they navigate the court system and as an expert witness in trials involving sexual abuse and rape. Even when we are viewing things from the perspective of trauma-informed, feminist sex crime prosecutors, it is nevertheless true that the vast majority of rapes do not get prosecuted. This is precisely because rules of evidence, the nature of rape, privacy and societal attitudes about sex and sexual assault make that forum notoriously clunky and unresponsive to the lived reality of such situations. Some of the best prosecutors I know are deeply troubled by the frequency with which they must turn down factually true cases for “lack of evidence” or anticipated “jury bias.” Successful prosecution is one thing. Truth is another.”
Weston’s piece is thorough and convincing. In it, she addresses the shameful reality that the prosecution of high profile serial rapists such as Harvey Weinstein have set an unrealistic expectation for survivors of sexual violence to be one of many.
“While data does indicate that perpetrators often commit more than one assault (just as data indicates that women rarely make false reports), that does not in fact mean that all perpetrators always commit more than one assault.
One problem with the way #MeToo has played out is that it has made it very difficult for individual women to speak their story: if they don’t have a line up of multiple victims, they can’t be telling the truth. Setting aside the possibility that there could in fact be other silent survivors of assault from Biden, it is profoundly unfair to use abstract data to discredit the story of an individual.
That is akin to suggesting that because most people die from a certain type of cancer, no single individual can survive. Abstract data does not tell us anything about a specific case. If it did, people would believe Reade insofar as abstract data indicates that women rarely make false reports.”
This idea that if Reade’s allegation were true other women would have come forward is damaging for several reasons. The first being that it denies Biden’s documented history of touching women and children inappropriately on camera, 7 of whom came forward to accuse him of invading their personal space.
It is also damaging because it supports a notion that all rapists are serial rapists. While it’s true that more than half of all suspected rapists reported to prosecutors have at least one prior conviction, it is also true that 3 out of every 4 sexual assaults goes unreported. What can be said about these other alleged rapists? Heather Murphy’s 2017 NYT article titled What Experts Know About Men Who Rape notes that even experts struggle to answer these questions:
“There is a heated debate among experts about whether there is a point at which sexual assault becomes an entrenched behavior and what percentage of assaults are committed by serial predators.”
Nevertheless, there is evidence that some of these undetected rapists are not serial offenders.
“Some of these men commit one or two sexual assaults and then stop. Others — no one can yet say what portion — maintain this behavior or even pick up the pace.”
The article further states that even incarcerated rapists don’t view their actions as rape, which makes Biden’s strident denial ever less convincing. It’s clear that it is possible for someone, even Joe Biden, to commit a single assault amid a lifetime of inappropriate touching and comments. From the article:
“Most subjects in these studies freely acknowledge nonconsensual sex — but that does not mean they consider it real rape. Researchers encounter this contradiction again and again.
Asked “if they had penetrated against their consent,” said Dr. Koss, the subject will say yes. Asked if he did “something like rape,” the answer is almost always no.
Studies of incarcerated rapists — even men who admit to keeping sex slaves in conflict zones — find a similar disconnect. It’s not that they deny sexual assault happens; it’s just that the crime is committed by the monster over there.”
Even outside of Joe Biden’s documented history of lying, it’s extremely likely that he would both deny and lie about the assault on Tara Reade.
Like all survivors who have come forward before her, Tara Reade has endured countless attacks to her credibility. Given that victim blaming is a rampant problem and one of the main tenants of rape culture, these attacks come as no surprise. Returning to Weston’s piece, she writes,
“Whether or not one decides to participate in “lesser evil” politics, it is vital that we counter such regressive attacks on Tara Reade. In such attacks, the Democratic Party not only squanders one issue on which it once held the moral high ground, it sets back the feminist struggle by decades. A profound harm on its own, the so-called “private” issue of sexual assault—and the social relations from which it gets generated —is linked to the broader political and economic oppression that women face in every other part of their lives: unequal pay, domestic violence, unpaid child care, discriminatory hiring. If the left seeks to build a collective struggle against authoritarian neo-liberalism, it must take seriously Tara Reade, support her calls for justice, and take a stand in defense of #MeToo, regardless of how it impacts Biden.”
When considering the nature of the attacks on Reade, it’s important to look at studies of victim blaming. In Kayleigh Roberts’ 2016 article for The Atlantic titled The Psychology of Victim Blaming, one study revealed something interesting. Participants were presented with vignettes describing hypothetical crimes before being asked what could have been done differently to change the outcome. The surprise came when changing the order of the victim and the perpetrator in the vignettes altered the responses of the participants:
“Niemi and Young manipulated the sentence structure in the vignettes, changing who was the subject of the majority of sentences, the victim or the perpetrator. Some groups were given vignettes with the victim in the subject position (e.g. “Lisa was approached by Dan”) and others were given vignettes with the perpetrator in the subject position (e.g. “Dan approached Lisa”).
When the perpetrator was the subject of the sentence, participants’ “ratings of victim blame and victim responsibility went down significantly,” Niemi says. “And when we asked them explicitly how could this outcome have been different and then we just gave them an empty text box and they could fill in whatever they wanted, their actual references to victim’s actions—things like, ‘Oh, she could have called a cab’—they decreased. So they actually had a harder time coming up with things that victims could have done and were focusing less on the victim’s behavior in general. That suggests that how we present these cases in text can change how people think about victims.”
While Gilin notes that people are more likely to be sympathetic to victims that they know well, reading about crimes reported in the media can sometimes increase a tendency for victim-blaming. The victims people read about in the media are usually strangers to them, and those stories can trigger that cognitive dissonance between the ingrained belief in a just world and clear evidence that life is not always fair. What’s more, if the coverage focuses on the victim’s experience and story—even in a sympathetic way—Niemi and Young’s research suggests it might increase the likelihood of victim-blaming. Stories that focus on the perpetrator of the crime, however, could be less likely to provoke that reaction.”
What would it look like if the focus was on Joe Biden instead of Tara Reade? For one, his documented history of lying would be the forefront of the news.* Biden has lied consistently about anything from his educational background, his involvement with the civil rights movement, his arrest record, and even the death of his first wife. Perhaps the most telling example comes from the year 1988, when Biden was forced to withdraw his presidential campaign after it was revealed that he had plagiarized numerous speeches.
In a recent article for Common Dreams titled Joe Biden, Rape Culture, and Living in the Dark, professor and former Rape Crisis Center director Anthony Zenkus writes,
“In the case of Tara Reade, Joe Biden’s documented history of public lying is never looked at. His fantastic and completely false claim of being arrested in South Africa while visiting Nelson Mandela goes unmentioned by politicians and the media. His years of lies about having been involved in the civil rights movement go unnoticed. We’re not allowed to talk about why he had to drop out of a presidential race because he plagiarized and then lied about it multiple times on the campaign trail. We only seem to have permission to deconstruct his victim, Tara Reade. We question the timing of her disclosure. We say she changed her story. We look for inconsistencies in her claims about filing a complaint after she was sexually harassed while working for then Senator Biden. We share hit pieces on social media which paint her as a “manipulative, deceitful user” because she may have been late on her rent and owed people money. We attempt to look into every nook and cranny of her life, and while doing so, make sure we keep the spotlight off of the man accused of victimizing her. It’s hot under those lights, best we keep them turned on the victim.”
The truth is that none of these attacks have any bearing whatsoever on the validity of Tara Reade’s allegation. They are purely intended to keep the focus on her and off of Biden, directly causing everyday voters to blame Tara instead of considering whether a man like Biden is fit for the presidency.
Even PBS’ interview of 74 former Biden staffers is suspect, in spite of many people using it as the final indication that Reade’s claim is false. I think back to my first rapist when I was just 13 years old. He was a football player, as well as my boyfriend. Months before he raped me, we lost our virginity to one another, which was a positive experience in spite of how young we both were. All of this and more would be used against me if he ran for public office and I came forward with my story. In their article for PBS, authors Daniel Bush and Lisa Desjardins write,
“None of the people interviewed said that they had experienced sexual harassment, assault or misconduct by Biden. All said they never heard any rumors or allegations of Biden engaging in sexual misconduct, until the recent assault allegation made by Tara Reade. ”
I can imagine a similar response from the members of my rapist’s high school football team if interviewed by PBS. As to be expected, everyone using these interviews as proof of Tara Reade’s lack of credibility focus only on quotes like the one above, even though it is followed immediately by this,
“Former staffers said they believed Reade should be heard, and acknowledged that their experiences do not disprove her accusation.”
Similarly, many people have used the news that Tara Reade’s lawyer dropped her as a client to bolster their belief that she is lying. These people are either willfully ignoring Douglas Wigdor’s own words or simply sharing articles for the headlines without actually reading them. Her former lawyer stated quite clearly that his decision is “by no means a reflection on whether then-Senator Biden sexually assaulted Ms. Reade.” Wigdor also agreed that “much of what has been written about Ms. Reade is not probative of whether then-Senator Biden sexually assaulted her, but rather is intended to victim-shame and attack her credibility on unrelated and irrelevant matters.”
Wigdor’s belief in the validity of Tara Reade’s allegation is not isolated. According to a Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll, 55% of voters overall believe that Biden assaulted Tara Reade, 26% of democrats believe Biden should withdraw from the race due to the allegation, and 28% of democratic women believe Biden should be replaced.
While it is dismaying that prominent Democratic women such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar plan to vote for Biden in spite of being some of the only democrats who believe Tara Reade, we must continue to prove that there is a better way. I believe that AOC and Omar will gladly vote for a different democratic nominee when Biden steps down. It is my strong belief that the majority of democratic voters would follow suit given a viable alternative to Joe Biden. We know that the DNC has a plan to replace a candidate at the convention in case of an emergency, but many voters are so disillusioned with the system and frightened of Donald Trump that they have resigned themselves to voting between the supposed “lesser” of two rapists. But one rape is one too many, and this is an emergency, not just for the democratic party or for survivors of sexual violence, but for the entire United States of America. We must defeat Donald Trump, and we cannot do so with a candidate facing the allegations that Joe Biden is facing.
I know that this fight is exhausting, but you are not alone. Tara Reade has unequivocally stated that Joe Biden should drop out, and nearly 5,000 people have signed this petition. Given what we know to be true about trauma, false allegations, the culture of victim blaming, and Biden’s history of lying as well as touching women and children on camera, it is our responsibility as democrats to demand that Biden drop out of the 2020 presidential race.
*It is important to note that while Biden’s lies are numerous, they barely scratch the surface of his inadequacy as a leader in this historic moment. This is evidenced most recently by his “You ain’t black” comment, which is both embarrassing and so ill-timed that it occurred during the same week as nationwide protests erupted against police brutality, demanding justice for the state sanctioned murders of Breonna Taylor, Auhmaud Aubery, and George Floyd. Police have injured countless activists and members of the press since the protests began. More than 4,000 people have been arrested nationwide, and at least 6 people have died.