How Uncertainty Became a Weapon in the Tara Reade Story

Last week, BuzzFeed shared details of talking points that Joe Biden’s presidential campaign had circulated among its surrogates—bullet-pointed responses to the claim of sexual assault that had been made about the candidate, in late March, by his former staffer Tara Reade. In 1993, Reade alleges, Biden pinned her against a wall, reached under her clothes, and penetrated her with his fingers. The talking points denied that claim. “Biden believes that all women have the right to be heard and to have their claims thoroughly reviewed,” one of them read. “In this case, a thorough review by The New York Times has led to the truth: this incident did not happen.”

The response was both carefully worded and blithely misleading: The ’ investigation into Reade’s account was by no means an exoneration of Biden. But his campaign’s impulse toward absolutism was revealing—not only of the campaign itself, but also of the way Reade’s allegation has been metabolized by the American public. In the Biden campaign was referring to—reported over a span of roughly two weeks and bearing the notably hesitant headline “Examining did not make broad claims about whether the assault, as Reade had described it, had taken place. What the paper shared, instead, was something much more hedged: Its investigation had been unable to corroborate Reade’s assertion. The ’ story was comprehensive but not definitive; it recognized, implicitly, that there is more reporting to be done on the matter. But the campaign’s talking points took the result of that effort and turned it into something strident: .