A girl who accused Joe Biden through the 2020 presidential race of sexual assault appeared Tuesday in Moscow and stated she was asking President Vladimir Putin for Russian citizenship.
Tara Reade, who labored in now-President Biden’s congressional workplace for a brief interval in 1993, stated she wished to remain in Russia after a Republican lawmaker instructed her she was in bodily hazard.
Reade, 59, stated in an interview streamed by the Sputnik media group — a Russian press outlet — that she’d arrived in Russia as a vacationer.
Nevertheless, she stated, “Once I acquired off the airplane in Moscow, for the primary time in a really very long time I felt secure, and I felt heard and felt revered.”
“I am nonetheless type of in a daze a bit however I really feel superb,” The Guardian quotes her as saying. “I really feel very surrounded by safety and security.”
Reade sparked headlines in early 2020 by claiming in a podcast that Mr. Biden, who was a senator on the time, sexually assaulted her in a Capitol Hill hall in August 1993, when she was 29.
Her accusation got here simply as Mr. Biden was ramping up his marketing campaign in opposition to incumbent President Donald Trump, who himself has confronted accusations of sexual abuse and rape.
Mr. Biden categorically denied her declare.
“It isn’t true. I am saying unequivocally it by no means, by no means occurred,” he stated.
AP Photograph / Donald Thompson
Reade stated she filed a grievance after the alleged incident, however no report of it has been discovered.
A 1996 courtroom doc says her ex-husband talked about that she’d complained of sexual harassment whereas working in Mr. Biden’s workplace.
It is not clear if her allegations have ever been formally investigated.
Reade, who known as herself a geopolitical analyst, stated within the Sputnik interview that after making her allegations public in 2020, she was threatened with jail, her life was threatened, and she or he was known as a Russian agent.
Sitting alongside Maria Butina, who was arrested and imprisoned in Washington in July 2018 as an alleged spy for Russia and launched in October 2019 and deported, Reade instructed the interviewer she has “all the time liked Russia.”
“I don’t see Russia as an enemy nor do lots of my fellow Americans,” she stated, including that she had one “massive” request.
“I would like to use for citizenship in Russia, from the president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin,” she stated.
“I do promise to be citizen,” she stated, including that she additionally needs to carry onto her U.S. citizenship.
Based on The Guardian, Reade stated of Butina, “I simply actually so respect Maria and everybody who’s been giving me [protection] at a time when it has been very tough to know if I am secure or not.
“I simply did not wish to stroll house and stroll right into a cage or be killed, which is mainly my two decisions.”
Butina is now a member of Russia’s parliament, the Duma.
