A woman who accused US President Joe Biden during the 2020 US presidential race of sexual assault appeared on Tuesday in Moscow, where she said she was asking US President Vladimir Putin for Russian citizenship.
Tara Reade, who worked in Biden’s congressional office for a short period in 1993, said she wanted to stay in Russia after a Republican lawmaker told her she was in physical danger.
Reade, 59, said in a streamed interview with the Sputnik media group that she had arrived in Russia as a vacationer.
Photo: Reuters
However, she said: “When I got off the plane in Moscow, for the first time in a very long time I felt safe, and I felt heard and felt respected.”
Reade sparked headlines in early 2020 by claiming that then-US senator Biden sexually assaulted her in a Capitol Hill corridor in August 1993, when she was 29.
Her accusation came just as Biden was ramping up his campaign against then-US president Donald Trump, who himself has faced accusations of sexual abuse and rape.
Biden categorically denied her claim.
“It is not true. I’m saying unequivocally it never, never happened,” he said.
Reade said she filed a complaint after the alleged incident, but no record of it has been found.
However, a 1996 court document records her ex-husband mentioning that she had complained of sexual harassment while working in Biden’s office.
It is not clear if her allegations have ever been formally investigated.
Reade, who called herself a geopolitical analyst, said in the Sputnik interview that after making her allegations public in 2020, she was threatened with prison, her life was threatened and she was called a Russian agent.
Sitting alongside Maria Butina, a Russian lawmaker who was arrested and imprisoned in Washington in 2018 as an alleged spy, Reade told the interviewer she has “always loved Russia.”
“I do not see Russia as an enemy nor do many of my fellow American citizens,” she said.
She had one “large” request.
“I’d like to apply for citizenship in Russia, from the president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin,” she said.
“I do promise to be a good citizen,” she said, adding that she also wants to hold onto her US citizenship.
Some time before September, a massive explosion 3,000 light years from Earth is to flare up in the night sky, giving amateur astronomers a once-in-a-lifetime chance to witness this space oddity. The binary star system in the constellation Corona Borealis — “northern crown” — is normally too dim to see with the naked eye. Every 80 years or so, exchanges between its two stars, which are locked in a deadly embrace, spark a runaway nuclear explosion. The light from the blast travels through the cosmos and makes it appear as if a new star — as bright as the North Star, according
TACKLING GANG VIOLENCE: About 70 Canadian soldiers have been sent to Jamaica to train troops from Caribbean nations to take part in a UN-sanctioned mission to Haiti Two men in Haiti were hacked to death by a mob who thought they were buying ammunition or guns for gangs that have terrorized the country, police said on Saturday. Police said the crowd snatched the men from police custody after they were found with about US$20,000 and the equivalent of about US$43,000 in Haitian cash in their car, along with two pistols and a box of ammunition. Carrying that amount of cash was considered suspicious, and residents assumed it was a weapons purchase for gangs. The killings happened on Friday in a town near the provincial city of Mirebalais. Police appeared to
A digital tool considered vital in tracking viral falsehoods, CrowdTangle is to be decommissioned by Facebook owner Meta in a major election year, a move researchers fear will disrupt efforts to detect an expected fire hose of political misinformation. The tech giant said CrowdTangle would no longer be available after Aug. 14, less than three months before the US election. The Palo Alto company plans to replace it with a new tool that researchers say lacks the same functionality, and which news organizations would largely not have access to. For years, CrowdTangle has been a game-changer, offering researchers and journalists crucial real-time transparency
China has dethroned the US to become the top alignment choice for Southeast Asians, as Washington loses ground on a range of key issues from regional economic engagement to the Israel-Hamas War, a new survey showed. A survey of 1,994 Southeast Asians by the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute published yesterday shows China’s popularity in a head-to-head race with the US climbing from 38.9 percent last year to 50.5 percent in 2024. Among individual nations, Beijing garnered some three out of four votes in Muslim-majority Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei. “Confidence in the US has waned,” the survey said. “This could be attributed partly to