Is this the kind of sentence you wind up with when you have a really good Presidential candidate that you should be proud of and proud to vote for

This latter sentence fragment has now been edited out of the story & their whole tweet thread was deleted. This is their confusing explanation. I get it was embarrassing, but what's "imprecise" about the established record of unwanted touching from Biden? https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1249365361939660802

Anyway, dubious edits or no, this article is still the best explanation I've seen of the exact allegations by Tara Reade. Reade had previously accused Biden of touching and sexual harassment; now she's describing a specific incident that qualifies as rape. https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1249270878451482624

So let's talk about this.

There is a problem when talking about sexual abuse allegations. False allegations exist, allegation retractions very occasionally happen. However, in basically every single case, the accused is going to *pass off* the allegation as a false one.

The social pressure of the rape culture we live in is going to be, in all cases, to treat every case as being one of the false ones. In all probability, the vast majority of allegations are true. But our culture treats the vast majority of allegations as false.

It is disruptive, to accept an allegation— any— as real. It makes men uncomfortable to face the possibility sexual assault is common and performed all the time by powerful and trusted people. The gravity of the culture pulls toward performing a universal, case-neutral coverup.

This gravity exists at macro and micro levels. A common response if one has been sexually assaulted is to push it down *yourself*. It hurts to think about. The consequences for speaking up are severe. It would be so much easier, if it hadn't happened, if you just forgot about it.

It can sometimes to take years, when you are the *victim*, to admit to yourself what happened. It can take years to face it, or in some cases to push down the voice in your head arguing okay it was bad but it wasn't "really" rape.

In any single case of alleged sexual abuse, you *know* all this is happening. You know you yourself will be biased against accusers. The specifics of an allegation can rarely be proven or disproven. So you need some kind of rubric, for deciding which allegations to treat as true.

A straightforward rubric would be: Believe women. Treat all allegations as true. That sounds ideal! But I'm not sure how many people would actually *stick* to it, instead of devolving into "believe all women— EXCEPT this one who is accusing a guy I like, that's an exception".

Tara Reade's allegation is by itself a great example of this. *So many* people whose claimed rubric was "believe women" have clammed up on this one case. I'll refrain here from quote-RTing Alyssa Milano.

Apparently people are applying mental rules, even if they say they aren't.

One possible guide for allegations that come out long after the fact is whether there was contemporary documentation/speech by the victim. This was clearly the case with Christine Blasey Ford; it appears to be the case with Reade. This is new to us, but it isn't out of the blue.

The best guide I know for evaluating sexual abuse claims is whether the accusation fits with some sort of pattern of behavior. The rape allegations against Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Brett Kavanaugh or Bill Cosby are all noteworthy for fitting patterns that stretch across years.

Cosby or Trump stand out in that the assault allegations themselves comprise incredibly similar stories from unconnected women, suggesting a pattern of acts the rapist concluded they could get away with and performed roughly the same way again and again.

In the case of Clinton or Kavanaugh, the rape allegations additionally align with a documented pattern of non-assault behavior which make the assault allegations more credible— Kavanaugh's blackout drunk sessions in college, Clinton's usage of work as a dating/hookup service.

(The facts of the consensual experience between Clinton and Monica Lewinsky are, in fact, relevant to corroborating the nonconsensual allegations made by Paula Jones.)

In the case of Biden--though the NYT apparently feels they need to just delete this fact from the story rather than face the discomforting presence of a pattern of behavior— there is a pattern of behavior. https://www.thecut.com/2019/04/joe-biden-accuser-accusations-allegations.html

People are focusing on the NYT's "accidentally telling the truth" gaffe from the deleted tweet— and yeah, I screenshotted it myself— but this is, I think, actually the most gut-punch sentence from the article.

This is something you can say about Joe Biden.

These mental "guides" I mention-- was the allegation discussed at the time? is there a pattern of behavior?-- are not fair to victims. You can't expect a victim to provide good documentation of their state of mind after a traumatic event, one they likely feel shamed by—

—especially not when the stature of the offender scares them into silence. (Reade in specific believes she was retaliated against for trying to talk about Biden's behavior; the facts are consistent with her being pushed out of the job around that time).

A pattern of behavior strengthens an allegation's credibility, but it's absurd to expect one to always be present. Surely there are rapists who actually did happen to commit rape exactly once. Or where only one victim spoke up in the end.

However, these guides *do* support the Reade allegation. When you have a man with a long pattern of alarming lechy behavior, it's hard to argue it's a stretch he would in one instance escalate from repeatedly stroking a woman's neck to doing the same thing between her legs.

The allegations against Biden aren't as severe as those against Trump, Reade's allegations aren't as well documented as those against Kavanaugh. Does this matter? Sex assault isn't like running for president; it isn't enough to be less bad than another guy. If he did it he did it

Let's take a look in the *other* direction: Al Franken. The allegations against Franken are (to my understanding— maybe you could convince me I'm incorrect) less severe and less cleanly documented than those against Biden. Franken stepped down anyway, *and this was a good thing*.

Al Franken was removed from office and it wasn't *necessarily* because all the allegations were true or severe— it was because it was *better* to give that position of power to someone who hadn't committed those actions. It was better for Minnesota, for the Democrats, everyone.

But Reade's allegations *are* severe, and if she backs down again from the new/original assault allegation to merely saying Biden kept stroking her neck then Biden's pattern of behavior, and the fact we're uplifting someone with that pattern of behavior, will still be horrifying.