Joe Biden accuser Tara Reade called for the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee to drop out of the 2020 race in an exclusive interview Thursday with independent journalist Megyn Kelly.
Last week, Biden denied his former Senate staffer’s accusations that he sexually assaulted her in the basement of a Capitol Hill office building in the 1990s.
In an excerpt posted to Twitter Thursday, Kelly asks Reade what she would say to Biden if he were watching the segment.
“I want to say, you and I were there, Joe Biden,” Reade said. “Please step forward and be held accountable. You should not be running on character for the president of the United States.”
Kelly then asks Reade if she wants Biden to withdraw from the race.
“I wish he would,” she said.
Asked if she wanted an apology from Biden, Reade said, “I think it’s a little late.”
Last week, Biden unequivocally denied the charges.
“I want to address allegations by a former staffer that I engaged in misconduct 27 years ago,” Biden said in a statement. “They aren’t true. This never happened.”
Biden then addressed the allegedly directly in an interview with MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski.
“I’m saying unequivocally, it never, never happened,” said Biden.
From there Biden sent a letter to the secretary of the Senate on Friday asking her to help locate a possible harassment complaint filed by Reade from 1993.
“I request that you take or direct whatever steps are necessary to establish the location of the records of this Office, and once they have been located, to direct a search for the alleged complaint and to make public the results of this search,” Biden wrote in a letter to Julie Adams, the secretary of the Senate.
“I would ask that the public release include not only a complaint if one exists, but any and all other documents in the records that relate to the allegation,” he added.
This came after Biden initially sought the records from the National Archives, which advised him to consult with Senate record-keeping.
Biden’s campaign also issued a statement in early April denying the allegation, and a number of former Biden staffers have defended their boss in interviews.
Reade has said previously that she believes the complaint could be found in Biden’s Senate records housed at the University of Delaware, but the school has previously said that it will not release any records until two years after Biden has retired from public life.
In another segment of the interview with Kelly, Reade answered yes when asked her if she would go under oath to be cross examined in the case against Biden.
When Kelly asked Reade if she would be willing to take a polygraph, Reade said:
“I’m not a criminal. Joe Biden should take the polygraph. What kind of precedent does that set for survivors of violence? Does that mean that we’re presumed guilty and we all have to take polygraphs? So I will take one if Joe Biden takes one. But I'm not a criminal.”
A longtime anchor at Fox News, Kelly reinvented herself in 2017 with Megyn Kelly Today on NBC, but the show lasted only about a year. She left the network in January 2019 and now posts exclusive interviews and news segments to her various social media channels.
— This is a developing story. Please come back to AJC.com for updates.
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