UPDATE: Two more women have come forward to accuse Biden of inappropriate touching, making four in all.
By David Futrelle
It’s not exactly news that Joe Biden has a groping problem. We’ve all seen the videos, year after year, of Biden playing the role of creepy uncle at event after event, pawing weirdly at the shoulders, and hips, and sometimes even the chests of women and girls in his vicinity, fussing with their hair, perhaps leaning in to whisper something in their ears or even to kiss them on the back of their head.
But up until now we haven’t heard from any of the women in these videos — or anyone else treated in a similar way when the cameras weren’t near. No more. On Friday. as you no doubt know, Democratic politician and former Nevada State Assemblywoman Lucy Flores came forward with a story about how Biden, backstage at an campaign rally, had come up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders.
“I felt him get closer to me from behind,” Flores wrote in an essay published in New York magazine’s The Cut on Friday.
He leaned further in and inhaled my hair. I was mortified. I thought to myself, “I didn’t wash my hair today and the vice-president of the United States is smelling it. And also, what in the actual fuck? Why is the vice-president of the United States smelling my hair?” He proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head.
Flores didn’t appreciate Biden’s act of “friendliness.” She was, rather,
embarrassed … shocked [and] confused. …
The vice-president of the United States of America had just touched me in an intimate way reserved for close friends, family, or romantic partners — and I felt powerless to do anything about it. …
At that moment, she recalled, she wanted the earth to open up and swallow her whole.
Now that she has come forward with her story, she may be feeling the same way — because her straightforward and eminently believable account is being attacked as a vicious lie, a smear job by a political operative who was possibly paid for her service.
Her attackers, most of them Democrats, are sounding more than a little like the MAGA-heads who attacked Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser
Christine Blasey Ford. It’s not a good look for any Democrat.
Some are asking her the same question so many Kavanaugh defenders asked about Ford: why didn’t she come forward immediately? The clear implication is that unless a woman goes public immediately with her accusations there is something fishy about her story.
There are all sorts of perfectly legitimate and understandable reasons victims of sexual harassment or sexual assault don’t come forward immediately, or ever.
And Flores has already answered this question in her piece on The Cut: He was the fucking Vice President of the United States, who was there doing her a political favor. She didn’t think his actions quite rose “to the level of what most people consider sexual assault.” If she and Biden had been working in the same office, she could (and says she would) have gone to HR; there’s no mechanism to deal with this sort of thing in politics. And then there was the reaction she knew she would get from Biden supporters.
“For years,” she writes,
I feared my experience would be dismissed. Biden will be Biden. Boys will be boys. I worried about the doubts, the threats, the insults, and the minimization. “It’s not that big of a deal. He touched her, so what?” The immediate passing of judgement and the questioning of motives. “Why now? Why so long after? She just wants attention.” Or: “It’s politically motivated.”
In the few days since her story appeared online, every single one of these fears has come true.
What made her decide to come forward at last? She says it was the videos, the same videos we’ve all seen. She couldn’t stand to see a possible future president of the US doing to other women and girls what she says he did to her.
Of course, most of Flores’ critics either haven’t heard her explanation, or they have and have decided to dismiss it. For them, it’s all a big “smear,” a political “hit job,” probably on behalf of some nefarious villain.
For a lot of the critics, that villain is Bernie Sanders.
In fact, while Flores was a Bernie supporter in 2016 and served on the board of the Bernie-friendly Our Revolution organization for a time, she hasn’t said who she’s supporting this go-around As CNN has noted, she was recently spotted at a Beto rally, and has said positive things about Kamala Harris’ campaign.
Some are even suggesting Flores — a former Nevada state assemblywoman, serial Democratic candidate, and the head of a progressive Latina advocacy group called Luz Collective — is working as an agent for … Donald Trump or some shadowy Trump-friendly right-wing cabal.
One critic even seemed to suggest a plot spearheaded by meatloaf-headed Fox News host and Trump fan Sean Hannity … and
an obscure publication called Cutter magazine?
This would be a strange conspiracy indeed, because, as far as I can tell, Cutter magazine doesn’t exist, and back when it did exist, it was not a political journal but rather a trade publication for hairstylists?
I kid. Obviously AlphaFemale is just mangling the name of the decidedly non-Hannityesque The Cut, where Flores’ piece was published, and which I’ve written for as well.
Many of Flores’ less-conspiracy minded critics think the only person she’s working for is herself — that she’s a fame-hungry nobody who just wants a moment in the spotlight.
This is, of course, exactly what many of Kavanaugh’s defenders said about Ford, who was, you may recall, so excited about her newfound fame that she literally went into hiding after her testimony to protect herself and her family from possible violence from the MAGAs who had bombarded her with threats and abuse.
Some are trying a time-tested strategy of psychological manipulation known as DARVO (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender), accusing Flores of being the real sexual harasser, because she allegedly put her hand on his shoulder first.
Never mind that a simple hand on the shoulder was never the issue. Flores, as you recall, says Biden, backstage at an event, grabbed both of her shoulders from behind, leaned forward to sniff her hair, and then “proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head.” That’s different than briefly putting not even your hand but just two fingers on the shoulder of someone taking a selfie with you in it.
But the strangest, er, argument I’ve seen against Flores is that she’s a hypocrite because … she let Bernie touch her shoulders and didn’t complain about it.
When I first ran across this argument last night, in the tweet below, I was completely taken aback.
As I put it on Twitter: yeah, it’s kind of up to Flores to decide who can put their hands on her shoulders, since they are, you know, her shoulders.
Also, I don’t see Bernie smelling her hair or planting a big wet one of the back of her head.
Remarkably, I’ve run across others making the same weird argument as Holle:
This is appalling. It’s also not going to work. Kavanaugh won his #MeToo battle because Republicans — the politicians and the voters alike — have shown that they don’t give two shits about even the most credible stories of sexual harassment, sexual assault, or even child molestation — at least if the alleged perp is one of them.
But Democrats — most of them, anyway — actually care about this shit, as well they should. And Flores is only the first Biden accuser to speak up. A second accuser has already come forward with another story of inappropriate touching by Biden. More will surely follow, and because of the ample video evidence of Biden’s long history of bad touches it won’t be hard for most of us to believe them.
Last night I tried watching some of the videos in a Twitter thread devoted to Biden’s creepy behavior, and I couldn’t make it past the first couple of them without literally flinching in disgust — as some of the women and girls in the videos can’t help but doing themselves. To anyone still supporting Biden, I challenge you to watch the videos in this thread. Every single one of them. And then tell me that Flores is lying and that Biden is just a friendly old uncle. I don”t think you’ll be able to. His behavior is disqualifying. It can’t be excused any longer.
2020 is going to be ugly. But it will be a lot less ugly if Biden does the right thing and takes himself out of consideration. He’s had a long political career. It’s time for it to be over.
NOTE: I’m aware that there are trolls and even presumably some Russian bots on Twitter who are eager to amplify fights between the supporters of different candidates. I’ve made a point in this post to only quote those Tweeters who seem to be legit Democrats posting sincerely and to avoid those that have small follower counts or that look fishy for other reasons. And in case you’re wondering: I have not yet chosen a candidate myself; I have some issues with everyone out there, frankly, though there are several candidates I certainly could end up supporting without too much regret. I obviously would vote for even a literal piece of shit over Trump, but I would really prefer it if that piece of shit was not named Joe Biden.
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“It’s really important to me that there be a level of unwanted touching of women that remains socially acceptable, and I should be the one to draw the line between acceptable and not.”
@jeff ryan
A hit dog hollers.
I reallllly wanna know how DANGEROUS it is for these poor men with the outrage. What oh what kind of danger will they be in?! Wont someone think of the OUTRAGE AND ITS DANGER!
What will happen to these poor men, bc their contact with women is annoying ? Will they get the presidency? Supreme court? Vice presidency?
So. Much. Danger.
I saw some of the immediate Lucy Flores backlash on the centre-left “mommyblog” Wonkette yesterday. I hang out there because their sense of humour is more my speed (classic dry 90s snark versus the meme-driven edgy nonsense you’d find on Twitter or some Discord server somewhere), but for a lot of the commenters there, the ones who put Kamala Harris in their avatars and spent the past year drooling over Robert Mueller… they still haven’t gotten over the 2016 election and any story about a Bernie person “targeting” the other candidates is immediately met with “BERNIE GON BURN DOWN OUR PARTY!!!111”
I get that 2016 broke a lot of people’s brains (I still remember the zombie-like state I was in the day after), but continuing to hold Bernie Sanders responsible for imagined slights against Clinton that somehow kneecapped her general election chances is not only a stretch, but ultimately detrimental to the health of the party in the long run if you have this need to reflexively defend your candidate against the very concept of critiquing their records. Not even defending their records, but cutting off any critique with “STOP LIGHTING THE PARTY ON FIRE!” (I got almost this exact quote yesterday.)
I’m tired of this constant hand-wringing about the political calculus involved in every single story that could hurt this or that person. Matt Taibi has pointed out exactly this failing on the part of the media hyping the Russia story to the exclusion of critical Republican malfeasance and I’ve had my fill of it in the SNC-Lavalin “scandal” up here in Canada. Justin Trudeau doesn’t need me to defend him on social media. The issue I have with the story is that the media are invested in making it some reality show-level personality fight rather than engaging with the underlying issues of concentrated power in the Prime Minister’s Office and the implementation of Deferred Prosecution Agreements. Thankfully, the news cycle is moving on for the time being, but it sucked all the oxygen out of March and the better part of February to talk about important stuff.
As for Flores’ accusations, I didn’t need them to think less of Joe “I Screwed Over Anita Hill and Do The Bidding of MasterCard” Biden. His track record of crap decisions in the Senate stand tall. I just find them entirely consistent with the Creepy Uncle Joe persona of his.
@Katamount
This shit times 1,000.
I prefer Warren over Sanders this time around, and he’s absolutely no saint given the many problematic things he’s said about identity politics; but centrists are entirely full of shit. They keep on blaming him for Hillary’s loss even though he campaigned for her after she lost the bid.
I highly suspect this shit isn’t about Sanders himself, but about social democracy as a whole and maintaining social power dynamics. The perceived slights and the critiques are far, far too extra and inconsistent.
I remember when the Brooklyn purge happened during the primaries and you could read dozens, if not hundreds, of comments on Facebook from Clinton voters cheering the disenfranchisement of Sanders voters (and no, they weren’t celebrating victory, but explicitly celebrating and mocking the fact that over 100,000 voters were disenfranchised). You know, the very same people that then turned around and complained about Republican voter suppression.
I often find centrism to be even more disgusting than far Right ideology because, more often than not, they are ALL about preserving the status quo and regressive power dynamics, they just like to pretend that they aren’t, so as to appear “nice”.
To the people claiming this is out of the blue, or a smear job: this has been a known grossness about Biden for years. How is anybody over the age of 20 surprised about this?
I remember Black activists talking about this back in 2016 or so re: the way Biden behaved towards the daughters of the Obama family. He can go straight to hell, and so can anyone still proud to support him. (People who think the US is “not yet ready for a woman President”, I am looking especially right at you.)
@Jeff Ryan
Re “putting up with shit from men.” That myth about how women like jerks? We don’t, we’re just terrified to say no to them. The part you see is us smiling and nodding and giggling to salve their egos; the part you miss is when we break down in front of our friends later, and actually feel the hurt now that we’re out of immediate survival mode.
Well guess what, that creed works when it comes to winning elections.Sad but true.
Joe Biden may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s Our son-of-a-bitch.
@Button
If you ask me, I’d say that a part of the problem is this “living in the eternal now” that social media has brought about. The only way for something to have an impact is to ride the current moment’s news cycle. A part of the reason that I watch so much film and television from the 80s and 90s is just to remember that there were discrete events (often far-reaching) that occurred in those very specific times that anybody who lived through them should see echoes of today.
Take Brexit, for example. I gotta wonder, do the Leave supporters remember Northern Ireland before the Good Friday Agreement? That happened the same year The Matrix came out; you can’t just take a Troubles-free UK for granted with an agreement that young.
The only explanation I’ve got is that the young Leavers don’t know how bad the Troubles got and the old Leavers don’t care.
I knew Joe Biden was gaffe-prone, but the creepiness is new to me. He needs to drop out, like, yesterday. Those video clips are nauseating and would be used to great advantage by Republicans.
Honestly, though, I’m just done with old white dudes in general. Don’t want Bernie, don’t want Joe. It’s just a gut thing with me, but I can’t help it. Even younger white dudes get the side-eye from this 58 year old white housewife. Pete Buttigieg might be okay but I’ll have to see him in some debates first. Beto is only attractive (as a candidate) if you compare him to other centrists, so nah.
There’s also the fact that I’ve been yearning for a woman in high office since Geraldine Ferraro* got dangled in front of us in 1980. I rooted for Shirley Chisolm knowing at the tender age of 12 that it was the longest of long shots.
*I very well might have voted for Mondale/Ferraro if I hadn’t been stationed in Italy at the time. Yes, I know, I could have voted absentee but I didn’t. Bad Hambeast! In my defense, I was very conflicted about voting Republican even though I was very anti-political at the time. But I also *really* wanted a woman VP!
I have always been very touchy with my own kids. I loved cuddling with them when they were young. My 21 year old son still gives me a hug every time I see him. However, my 14 year old daughter has stopped wanting me to touch her at all. It doesn’t matter that I really want to hug her or rub her shoulder to comfort her when she is having a bad day. I respect her wishes to keep my hands to myself even though I am her own mother. If I can do it so can everyone else.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!
Holy Christ on stick, Biden defenders, do you hear yourselves? The hypocrisy is almost tangible.
Every time I see this guy, I just hope he doesn’t open his big stupid mouth. All I can think about when he starts talking is how during the H1N1 crisis he almost caused a mass panic.
@Nowherepants There’s no reason why he has to be ‘ours’.
Friendly reminder that not everyone who objects to some of the things Bernie Sanders or his supporters have said and done is a centrist. Framing it that way is super dismissive of a whole lot of progressive women and/or POC and their concerns.
Personally, I’d love to move on. But Bernie running again has made that an impossibility. Personally, I’m super grossed out that David Sirota was secretly working on his campaign while using his position as a journalist (not op ed columnist) to attack the other candidates. We’re already off to a bad start. I hope neither Sanders or Biden get the nomination.
@Nowherepants
Right now we’re still deciding who the forking candidates will be, so you can go straight to the bad place with this bullshirt. He may be your son-of-a-birch, but he’s not mine and I will not lay claim to him and I will condemn his actions in the hopes that we actually get a candidate who has some modicum of respect for women. Kindly fork off, ash-hole.
I’m willing to give Biden the benefit of the doubt that his intentions are innocent. That really doesn’t matter though. The current social climate of what is “too far” is changing and people need to change with it. These things happened before, the people they happened to felt uncomfortable but they didn’t complain. That doesn’t mean that those things that are “bad” now were “good” then. It just means that the standard for respecting other people’s comfort is higher. People tend to be less considerate of women and children’s comfort and bodily autonomy, which is why you don’t see Uncle Joe petting and kissing men. I don’t think that it’s even a conscious thing, just an expression of internalized beliefs.
I’ve been on both sides of this. I’m a tiny cis woman of a certain age, so I’ve been on the groped side more often, but I went though a phase where I thought that everyone needed a hug. (Hint: this is not the case.) I made a friend of mine so uncomfortable that he started aggressively avoiding me. I didn’t mean anything sexual or inappropriate by it, but that doesn’t matter. I lost a good friendship and I deserved to. The thing I regret the most is that I never had the chance to apologize for being so inconsiderate.
Having two young children, I’m really aware of how little many adults respect kids’ bodily autonomy. Older relatives and family friends seem to be particularly prone to it. Hearing grandma say, “Come on, give me sugar” to the kids after they say no thank you to a hug creeps me the flip out. They are never required to hug someone just because it’s expected of them. Uncle Joe can be happy with a fist bump or high five. If he’s not, he can suck it.
Gross, no he’s not. No matter what side their on a creep is a creep.
No he’s not. Most people here don’t even like his politics. And even if we did letting him get away with shit like that gives us nothing and betrays the ideals we claim are important.
Also like ?? He’s not even an announced candidate yet? Why is it so important that we all support this creepy dude, who frankly was only ever popular because of The Onion?
@wwth, thank you. I feel gaslit every time someone suggests very real grievances against Bernie are ridiculous. It’s his behavior in the last election, sure, but it’s also his continued behavior and apparent inability (or refusal) to learn from his fuckups. I see prominent WOC in politics writing explainers on this all the time and the dismissal sounds an awful lot like “you’re being hysterical” to me. It feels utterly demeaning and crazy-making.
@Mels and WWTH
I’m actually a Bernie backer (albeit a Canadian Bernie backer, so just cheering from the sidelines) and I agree with you both wholeheartedly. Some of the responses he’s had regarding issues of race and gender have been questionable to say the least and it would have been nice if he stuck around in the Democratic Party to have some skin in the game. He needs to address these.
That said, I think the concerns about the demography of Bernie’s support base are overblown. He may have trouble tying the economic justice argument to social justice, but there’s plenty of POCs that know what he’s about and back him because of it, regardless of his lack of understanding surrounding the phrase “identity politics.”
@Katamount
Please sit this one out and listen to the women and PoC whose lives would have actually been affected by his policies had he been in office, and whose lives are currently affected by his bros and what they did to the 2016 election. Thank you.
At the very least, the fact that so many of the louder Bernie bros went for Trump afterward should give people pause. That cross-crowd is not a demographic interested in fixing things, that’s a demographic that just wants to wreck the status quo to pull down the current big guys but feels safe about where they’ll be afterward because they’ve never really known how bad things can get.
And as for Biden… I hadn’t heard much of this part about him, but I’d certainly heard that he was every bit as much of a ‘Blue Dog’ Republican-lite as both the Clintons and Obama, if not more so. The sort that feels they can ignore the actual left because who else are they going to vote for in a vote between the corporate sell-outs and the religious sell-outs?
Biden was a shitty candidate to start with; he has zero appeal with any significant Democratic voting bloc, zero real policies, and zero charisma, for those who consider that a reason to vote for someone (such people should really not vote at all, but there’s no way to stop them, so.). The fact he’s also a shitty person is unsurprising.
@Curious_Diversions:
Yes, we don’t get to decide how others receive our words and actions. I don’t think he meant any harm, but I also don’t think he has any right to touch people without permission. That’s like the first thing you learn in kindergarten: keep your hands to yourself.
To all the people talking about his intentions: does he sniff men’s hair? No? Maybe his intentions aren’t so innocent. Maybe his intentions stem from a selfish desire to experience women’s and girls’s bodies in a way that he doesn’t care whether they’re comfortable with or not.
You cannot hand-wave away deeply inhaling someone’s hair as something a purportedly charismatic person doesn’t understand is a violation of personal space.