Joe Biden denies sexual assault allegation, saying ‘it never happened’

Joe Biden denied a former Senate staffer’s allegation of sexual assault on Friday, saying “this never happened”.

It’s the presumptive Democratic nominee’s first public comment on an accusation of sexual assault by his former Senate staffer, Tara Reade.

“I’m saying unequivocally, it never, never happened,” Biden said in an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

According to Tara Reade, the former staffer, Biden assaulted her in 1993 in a hallway on Capitol Hill.

“He went down my skirt but then up inside it and he penetrated me with his fingers,” Reade said in a late March interview on the Katie Halper Show podcast.

Biden said he will ask the National Archives to determine whether there is any record of such a complaint being filed.

“The former staffer has said she filed a complaint back in 1993,” Biden said. “But she does not have a record of this alleged complaint. The papers from my Senate years that I donated to the University of Delaware do not contain personnel files.

“There is only one place a complaint of this kind could be – the National Archives. The National Archives is where the records are kept.

“I don’t know why after 27 years all of this gets raised,” Biden said. “But I’m not going to question her motive. I’m not going to attack her.”

But he stressed that “I have a right to say, look at the facts. Check it out.”Biden appeared on MSNBC as he faces mounting pressure, including from President Donald Trump, to address the allegations, and as top Democrats rushed to the party flagbearer’s defence.

“Women are to be believed, given the benefit of the doubt, if they come forward and say something happened to them,” he told MSNBC. “Then you have to look at the circumstances and the facts. The truth matters. These claims are not true.”

Trump, who himself faced more than a dozen accusations of sexual harassment and assault before he became president, said he knew little about the claims against Biden, even as his re-election team and Republican campaign operations aggressively push the controversy.

“I think that he should respond,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “It could be false accusations. I know all about false accusations, I have been falsely charged numerous times.”

Other women have accused Biden of touching or embracing them inappropriately in the past, and Reade’s initial claims were similar – and less severe than her most recent allegations.

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The New York Times reported it interviewed Reade on multiple occasions, along with her friends and others who worked for Biden in the 1990s. The paper said it uncovered no pattern of misconduct.

Biden has pledged to pick a woman as his running mate, and on Thursday he launched a committee to help him search for and vet a vice presidential candidate.

“Selecting a vice-presidential candidate is one of the most important decisions in a presidential campaign and no one knows this more than Joe Biden,” campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement.

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The committee co-chairs include congresswoman Lisa Blunt Rochester and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti.

US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who this week endorsed Biden for president, addressed the issue at her Thursday press conference, which focused on the coronavirus pandemic.

“There was never any record” about the assault, and “nobody ever came forward to say something about it apart from the principal involved” until 27 years later, she said.

Biden is “a person of great values” who has fought for women’s rights throughout his career, she said.

Additional reporting by Associated Press