WASHINGTON — A girl who accused Joe Biden through the 2020 presidential race of sexual assault appeared Tuesday in Moscow, the place she mentioned she was asking President Vladimir Putin for Russian citizenship.
Tara Reade, who labored in Biden’s congressional workplace for a brief interval in 1993, mentioned she wished to remain in Russia after a Republican lawmaker advised her she was in bodily hazard.
Reade, 59, mentioned in a streamed interview with the Sputnik media group that she had arrived in Russia as a vacationer.
However, she mentioned, “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-senator Biden sexually assaulted her in a Capitol Hill hall in August 1993, when she was 29.
Her accusation got here simply as Biden was ramping up his marketing campaign towards incumbent president Donald Trump, who himself has confronted accusations of sexual abuse and rape.
Biden categorically denied her declare.
“It is not true. I’m saying unequivocally it never, never happened,” he mentioned.
Reade mentioned she filed a criticism after the alleged incident, however no document of it has been discovered.
But a 1996 courtroom doc information her ex-husband mentioning that she had complained of sexual harassment whereas working in Biden’s workplace.
It is just not clear if her allegations have ever been formally investigated.
Reade, who referred to as herself a geopolitical analyst, mentioned 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 referred to as a Russian agent.
Sitting alongside Maria Butina, a Russian lawmaker who was arrested and imprisoned in Washington in 2018 as an alleged spy, Reade advised the interviewer she has “always loved Russia.”
“I do not see Russia as an enemy nor do many of my fellow American citizens,” she mentioned.
She had one “large” request.
“I’d like to apply for citizenship in Russia, from the president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin,” she mentioned.
“I do promise to be a good citizen,” she mentioned, including that she additionally needs to carry onto her US citizenship. —Agence France-Presse
Source: www.gmanetwork.com