Tara Reade, the U.S. woman who moved to Russia after accusing President Joe Biden of sexual assault, said she has returned to the U.S. to press charges against the incumbent running for re-election.
Reade said during the 2020 presidential race that then-Senator Biden sexually assaulted her on Capitol Hill in August 1993 while she was working in Biden’s congressional office. Biden categorically denied Reade’s claim.
In May 2023, she appeared in Moscow asking President Vladimir Putin for Russian citizenship in a press conference organized by state-run media, claiming that a Republican Congressman had warned her she was in physical danger.
“Tara Reade, the Joseph Biden sexual abuse victim has returned to the United States from Russia to press criminal charges against Joseph Biden for Third Degree Sexual Abuse,” her lawyer Jonathan Levy said in a statement emailed to The Moscow Times.
The felony charges carry a penalty of up to 10 years in prison, Levy said.
“I am in the USA, and I hope to have some measure of justice,” Reade wrote on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday evening.
Reade, 60, said that after making her allegations public in 2020, she was threatened with prison, her life was threatened, and she was called a Russian agent.
Reade had said she filed a complaint after the alleged incident when she was 29, but no record of it has been found.
But a 1996 court document records her ex-husband mentioning that she had complained of sexual harassment while working in Biden's office.
It is not clear if her allegations have ever been formally investigated.
AFP contributed reporting.
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