Tara Reade, the former Senate aide who in 2020 accused then-Presidential candidate Joe Biden of sexually assaulting her nearly three decades earlier, has fled the U.S. for Russia and asked President Vladimir Putin for citizenship.
Reade made her surprise announcement on Tuesday in a lengthy interview with the pro-Russian Sputnik media organization. She appeared on a broadcast alongside Maria Butina, a suspected Kremlin spy who spent 13 months in a U.S. federal prison before being deported back to Russia in 2019, and thanked Butina for her assistance.
“I’m still kind of in a daze a bit but I feel very good,” Reade told Sputnik, saying she made the “very difficult” decision to leave the United States because she feared for her safety. She stopped short of saying she was formally defecting and renouncing her U.S. citizenship.
“My dream is to live in both places, but it may be that I only live in this place and that’s okay,” Reade said.
During the joint appearance, Butina promised to appeal to Putin himself to “fast track” Reade’s citizenship request.
More:Read Joe Biden’s full statement on Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegation
“I feel very surrounded by protection and safety” in Russia, Reade said. “And I just really so appreciate Maria [Butina] and everyone who’s been giving me that at a time when it’s been very difficult to know if I’m safe or not.”
“I just didn’t want to walk home and walk into a cage or be killed, which is basically my two choices,” Reade said.
Reade didn’t specify why she felt threatened in the United States or provide any details about how she ended up in Russia. But she hinted that it was linked to her interest in talking publicly about her alleged relationship with Biden long ago, especially with the 2024 presidential election campaign heating up.
A Biden accuser in 2019, and again in 2020
Reade first came forward with her allegations against Biden in 2019 when she was one of several women who accused him of kissing, hugging or touching them in ways that made them feel uncomfortable. Then, in a March 2020 podcast, Reade accused Biden ‒ then the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee ‒ of inappropriately touching her in a Capitol Hill building 27 years earlier, when she worked in Biden’s Delaware Senate office in 1993.
Biden has repeatedly and vehemently denied Reade’s allegations, and so have some key staffers who worked with both of them in at the time.
Last December, Reade called on House Republicans to use their new majority to investigate Biden, and to call her as a witness to testify against him. “I think we need to have the conversation, instead of me being erased, and other women that were erased that tried to come forward,” she told the conservative news outlet The Daily Caller.
Also in December, Russian officials moved to invite Reade to appear before the United Nations Security Council, purportedly as an expert witness on weapons trafficking, according to the U.S. media outlet Semafor,
Reade appeared to reference those efforts in her Russian media appearance, saying that, “based on what was happening and sort of the push for them to not want me to testify, I felt that while this election is gearing up and there’s so much at stake, I’m almost better off here and just being safe.”
Ties to a Russian state agent
Butina was a young American University student who charmed Republican and NRA high rollers before the FBI arrested her in Washington in 2018 on suspicion of acting as a Russian intelligence asset. Since returning to Russia, she has become a media star and celebrity of sorts, and now serves in the Russian parliament as a representative of Putin’s political party.
During their joint media appearance Tuesday, Reade praised Russia and Putin specifically, and criticized America – especially the “few Washington elites who are determined to cause problems” between the two superpowers.
Reade also said she wasn’t the only American who has forsaken the U.S. for Russia.
“There are many Americans here, and I don’t want to out a bunch of Americans, but there are people here that are coming to Russia – much like back in the day when Soviet Union people defected over to the US – now you have the opposite,” she said. “Now you have US and European citizens looking for safe haven here. And luckily, the Kremlin is accommodating. So we’re lucky.”
The Sputnik news story said Reade’s message to other Americans is that they should take action to protect themselves and their families “and to really look at who you’re voting for.”