A woman who lived near Tara Reade, the onetime staffer of former Sen. Joe Biden, says Reade told her about an alleged sexual assault decades ago.
Reade, 56, filed a police report earlier in April accusing Biden, 77, of sexually assaulting her while she worked for him in 1993.
Lynda LaCasse, 60, a retired medical staff coordinator, lived next door to Reade in 1995 and 1996 in an apartment complex in Morro Bay, California.
LaCasse told Business Insider that Reade one night shared a story.
“We were talking about violent stories, because I had a violent situation,” she said.
“We just started talking about things and she just told me about the senator that she had worked for and he put his hand up her skirt.”
LaCasse described herself a “a very strong Democrat” who will support Biden regardless of what happened but felt she had to come forward to share the moment in time in part because of the attacks Reade has faced since coming forward.
“She didn’t ask me to,” LaCasse said. “I volunteered to do that just recently. If this was me, I would want somebody to stand up for me. It takes a lot of guts to do what she’s doing.”
Lorraine Sanchez, who worked with Reade for California State Senator Jack O’Connell after Reade left Washington, also told Business Insider that Reade relayed a story of being treated badly by a former employer.
In honor of April Sexual Assault awareness month, I will continue to stand and speak up. 1993 was the year I was sexually harassed and assaulted by Joe Biden, my then boss. The smears and mistruths about me will not take my dignity or change what happened. This was me 1993 pic.twitter.com/mrMnkaenff
— taratweets ( Alexandra Tara Reade) (@ReadeAlexandra) April 9, 2020
Reade said “she had been sexually harassed by her former boss while she was in DC, and as a result of her voicing her concerns to her supervisors, she was let go, fired,” Sanchez said.
Attempts to reach Reade and Biden were unsuccessful.
Biden’s campaign has ignored three requests from The Epoch Times for comment on the matter, including inquiries about whether the presumptive Democratic presidential will personally address it.
In a statement sent to other outlets, spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield said: “Women have a right to tell their story, and reporters have an obligation to rigorously vet those claims. We encourage them to do so, because these accusations are false.”
Biden himself has suggested that women who enter the national spotlight to accuse high-profile men of sexual wrongdoing should be believed.
“For a woman to come forward in the glaring lights of focus, nationally, you’ve got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real, whether or not she forgets facts, whether or not it’s been made worse or better over time. But nobody fails to understand that this is like jumping into a cauldron,” he said in 2018.
The two women sharing how they’d been told by Reade about an alleged assault came after an unearthed video showed a woman calling into CNN’s “Larry King Live” in 1993 and asking King about a situation her daughter, who was in Washington, was embroiled in.
“Yes, hello. I’m wondering what a staffer would do besides go to the press in Washington?” the woman said. “My daughter has just left there, after working for a prominent senator, and could not get through with her problems at all, and the only thing she could have done was go to the press, and she chose not to do it out of respect for him.”
Reade said that woman was her mother.
