MSNBC host Chris Hayes responded to critics Friday after covering the sexual assault allegation Tara Reade brought against former Vice President Joe Biden.
Reade, a former Senate aide to Biden, alleged in March that he sexually assaulted her in 1993, according to the Hill.
“A lot of people were unhappy with the fact that we even covered the story, which is why you may have seen the hashtag #FireChrisHayes trending on Twitter most of the day yesterday,” he said during a segment on his show, All In.
Hayes then categorized the feedback into three groups, calling the first “People who basically said ‘I don’t believe Tara Reade; I believe Joe Biden.'”
He continued:
Now, the second set of responses I got was from people who fall into the “I don’t care” category. Some of them even used the phrase “We’re in the midst of a national nightmare, the worst disaster in generations, and we just need to get rid of Donald Trump.” Now, that is not the way that I think about analyzing this particular story, but it’s an honest expression of how some people view the trade-offs and the stakes here.
And in the third category, which I got a lot of, was the one that was most disquieting to me. Which is a whole lot of people pointing to various aspects of Reade’s character or her writings or her politics, as a kind of proof that she’s not credible; she’s making it up: “Oh, she didn’t report this sooner or she’s said nice things about Joe Biden, her former boss at one point. So how could he have assaulted her?” or “She supported candidate Bernie Sanders, so clearly this is just a political hit job.” Or “She said things that people find strange on social media” and on and on. Much of it adding up to, “You just can’t trust this woman.”
“Hayes was the first prime-time host on the network to address the allegations on his show, citing information collected by a New York Times investigation,” the report noted.
Friday, Hayes called the criticism of Reade “things that have been used forever against women,” adding that to him, the lesson of the Me Too movement was not that every allegation should be believed.
“No, the lesson is to take accusations seriously, to swiftly investigate the facts surrounding them as best as one can, while leaving aside the worst age-old instincts to drag the women who make those claims through the mud,” he concluded.
However, during an interview Friday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe with co-host Mika Brzezinski, Biden said the alleged assault “never happened.”
Later, Brzezinski tweeted that her interview with the former vice president was “difficult” and questioned if the trend of believing all women, regardless of their claims’ credibility, was the right approach:
The interview with @JoeBiden was difficult, having known and greatly respected him for decades. (I still do.) The notion that all women are to be believed, which dominated the Kavanaugh hearings, was revisited. Should it be? Were Democrats wrong THEN or NOW?
— Mika Brzezinski (@morningmika) May 1, 2020
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