Nicole Egan, the author of Chasing Cosby: The Downfall of America’s Dad, says the #MeToo movement lost credibility last year when it failed to defend Tara Reade, the former Biden staffer who accused him of sexual assault.
“I think the Me Too movement suffered a huge credibility gap when they threw the Joe Biden accuser, Tara Reade, under the bus last year and wouldn’t support her,” Egan told John Solomon on his podcast Thursday. “What happened to ‘Believe all women’? They did not support her, they threw her under the bus. The media went after her with all they had. I was reading the coverage, and I was shocked.”
Egan is correct, of course. Liberals have a sad history of standing by prominent Democrats accused of sexual misconduct. So, naturally, Reade’s accusations were mainly only covered by conservative media. Even I was skeptical at first. Initially, her allegations were just decades-old claims that were unverifiable. I didn’t want to play the game that liberals so often play: take a weak allegation from many years past, assume it’s true, then give it as much exposure as possible.
The #MeToo movement certainly had its issues from its inception, as the notion of innocent until proven guilty was thrown out the window in favor of “believe women” and “believe survivors” regardless of evidence. But the movement’s rush to condemn those accused had its exceptions, the most notable example being Joe Biden.
Related: Tara Reade: ‘Unspeakably Hard’ to Watch Biden Become President
Joe Biden has a well-documented history of inappropriate behavior with young women—and even little girls. But Reade was making a much more serious accusation against Biden than other women who had come forward had done. That distinction made a difference, especially after the despicable way Democrats exploited the weak allegations of Christine Blasey Ford during the Kavanaugh hearings. I had no interest in stooping to their level.
While I initially ignored the story, I eventually found it harder and harder to dismiss the allegations as another bogus claim like Christine Blasey Ford’s or any others made against Brett Kavanaugh that never deserved to be taken seriously. Tara Reade’s allegations against Biden, it quickly became apparent, were far more credible than Ford’s accusations against Kavanaugh.
As my PJ Media colleague Rick Moran noted back in March 2020, “Reade filed a complaint at the time [of the incident], and told her mother, her brother, and a friend who worked in Sen. Ted Kennedy’s office.” The same couldn’t be said for Ford. She had no corroborating witnesses, and her story changed multiple times. In fact, Ford’s lawyers tried to pressure one of Ford’s witnesses into changing her story. Ford even claimed in her testimony that someone drove her home from the party, but she couldn’t say who that person was, and no one ever came forward saying they had driven her home. It’s reasonable to assume that Ford changed the timeline of the assault from the mid-1980s to 1982 so she could say the alleged assault took place while Kavanaugh was still in high school. But in doing so, that meant she wouldn’t have been old enough to drive at the time, leaving a massive hole in her story.
One key piece of evidence that changed my mind was that Reade said her mother called in anonymously to the Larry King Live show to get advice on what she could do about a situation involving a prominent U.S. senator without going to the media. This was ultimately proven to be true when a clip of the show surfaced in April 2020.
Yet the #MeToo movement never supported Tara Reade. The same people who said, “Believe all women” and “Believe survivors” exposed the fine print below their slogans: If you accuse a powerful Democrat politician of sexual misconduct you won’t be taken seriously or given any attention whatsoever. When you are a threat to the left-wing agenda, it doesn’t matter if you were sexually assaulted. You are the enemy.