“Believe women?” Not when it’s politically harmful.
Democrats famously weaponized the #MeToo movement during the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2017.
Now that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has been accused with credible allegations of sexual assault, Democrats — led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — are changing their tune.
Without evidence, Pelosi says she believes Biden, not his accuser.
Former Biden aide Tara Reade claimed that in the early 1990s, then-Sen. Joe Biden cornered and forcibly penetrated her with his fingers while in the Senate building.
Pelosi says she doesn’t believe Reade — and she doesn’t want to answer any more questions about the story after Biden denied the accusation.
“It never happened,” Biden said Friday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “Believing women means taking the woman’s claim seriously when she steps forward, and then vet it, look into it. That’s true in this case as well. … But in the end, the truth is what matters, and in this case, the truth is the claims are false.”
Democrats are giving Biden a pass they didn’t afford Kavanaugh when he denied Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation of sexual assault when they were teenagers, critics say.
Pelosi, the nation’s highest-ranking Democrat, says she simply won’t talk about it anymore.
“I believe him,” not his accuser, Pelosi said in a recent interview with MSNBC. She called the sexual assault allegation a “closed issue” and will refuse to discuss it further.
“I have said I am proud to support Joe Biden for president,” Pelosi said. “I believe him when he says it didn’t happen. But I also believed him when he said, ‘Let them look into the records,'” she said.
“But I’m not going to answer this question again,” she added. “I will just say, I have every confidence that Joe Biden will be a great president of the United States.”
Pelosi has become increasingly defensive over the issue. She recently snapped at a reporter questioning the double standard during her weekly news conference.
“I don’t need a lecture or a speech,” she said as she cut into a reporter’s question. “With all the respect in the world for any woman who comes forward, I have the highest regard for Joe Biden. And that’s what I have to say about that.”
Others have been less succinct. Liberal actress and leading #MeToo activist Alyssa Milano sat behind Kavanaugh during his televised confirmation hearings, a position she sought as a way to stand in “solidarity” with Blasey Ford.
But as Tara Reade’s allegations swirled around Biden and a party finally uniting around him, Milano penned an essay for Deadline.com in which she acknowledged “shades of gray” and reiterated her support for the former vice president.
“Believing women was never about ‘Believe all women no matter what they say,’ it was about changing the culture of NOT believing women by default,” Milano now says.
A few hours after Biden’s Friday appearance on MSNBC, Trump’s campaign posted a video featuring many of Biden’s political allies — Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Kamala Harris of California, and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii — saying in the past that female accusers should always be believed.
The reel begins and ends with Biden and Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic nominee whose husband, Bill Clinton, was impeached in connection with his extramarital affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The episode remains one of the party’s fraught chapters in its advocacy for women.
Unreleased document troves — Biden’s at the the University of Delaware and other Senate files at the National Archives — have raised questions about what might be found in them.
Reade told The Associated Press in an interview Friday that she had filed a limited report at that time with a congressional personnel office that did not explicitly accuse Biden of sexual assault or harassment.
She said she described her issues with Biden but “the main word I used — and I know I didn’t use sexual harassment — I used ‘uncomfortable.’ And I remember ‘retaliation.’”
Biden said Friday that he was not aware that any complaint against him exists. He asked the Senate and the National Archives to search their records to try to locate a complaint from Reade, which the Secretary of the Senate said she cannot legally do.
RELATED: Why is Biden hiding his records from the public?
The Associated Press contributed to this article