Tara Reade’s Former Neighbor Says She Described the Assault in Detail in 1995

Elections
Former Vice President Joe Biden speaks during the Democratic candidates debate in Washington, D.C., March 15, 2020. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

A woman who used to live next door to the former Senate staffer who has accused Joe Biden of sexual assault says that she remembers being told about details of the allegation in the mid-1990s.

Lynda LaCasse told Business Insider that former Biden staffer Tara Reade told her “about the senator that she had worked for and he put his hand up her skirt” while the pair were smoking outside their respective apartments. During a podcast appearance last month, Reade accused Biden of forcing her against a wall in his Senate office and digitally penetrating her without her consent when she was working for him in 1993.

Public records confirm that Reade and LaCasse lived next to each other in a Morro Bay, Calif., apartment complex in 1995.

LaCasse said that while “I’m for Biden, regardless,” she felt an obligation “to come out and say this.” She added that Reade’s initial story of Biden’s “inappropriate touching” — which was reported by a Nevada City, Calif., newspaper last year — jogged her memory.

“She mentioned that she had come forward,” LaCasse said, “and so I said, ‘Oh my gosh. Yeah. I do remember that.’”

Business Insider also spoke to Lorraine Sanchez, a former coworker of Reade’s who served with her in the office of California State Senator Jack O’Connell from 1994 to 1996, and who also said Reade had told her about being “sexually harassed by her former boss while she was in D.C.”

Last week, a 1993 clip from CNN’s Larry King Live showed a woman calling in about “problems” her daughter had had with a U.S. senator. “I’m wondering what a staffer would do besides go to the press in Washington,” says the caller, who Reade has since identified as her mother. “My daughter has just left there, after working for a prominent senator, and could not get through with her problems at all, and the only thing she could have done was go to the press, and she chose not to do it out of respect for him.”

Last week, Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia said they were conducting an “active, ongoing investigation” after Reade filed an incident report but they announced Saturday that the investigation had been designated “inactive.” The Biden campaign has vociferously denied the accusations, and former Biden Senate staffers have said they do not recall Reade filing a complaint with the office after the alleged incident.

The Biden campaign announced on Monday that it would hold a “virtual women’s town hall” after the Business Insider story broke.

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