Three more women have accused Joe Biden of inappropriate touching after Biden released a video via Twitter promising he would be more mindful of currents norms of personal space.
The new accusations add to the four women who have already accused Biden of inappropriate physical contact. The new accusers say Biden hasn’t clearly apologized, despite the new video, according to The Washington Post.
Social norms are changing. I understand that, and I’ve heard what these women are saying. Politics to me has always been about making connections, but I will be more mindful about respecting personal space in the future. That’s my responsibility and I will meet it. pic.twitter.com/Ya2mf5ODts
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) April 3, 2019
Vail Kohnert-Yount was an intern at the White House during Biden’s tenure as vice-president. She said Biden came up to introduce himself as she was trying to get out of his way.
“He then put his hand on the back of my head and pressed his forehead to my forehead while he talked to me. I was so shocked that it was hard to focus on what he was saying. I remember he told me I was a ‘pretty girl,’” Kohnert-Yount said in a statement to via the Post.
Kohnert-Yount qualified her statement further according with suggestions that Biden’s behavior is a result of personal style and not an intent to do harm.
“I do not consider my experience to have been sexual assault or harassment,” she further stated. “But it was the kind of inappropriate behavior that makes many women feel uncomfortable and unequal in the workplace.”
Another new accuser, Sofie Karasek, was part of a group of sexual assault survivors that came onstage at the Oscars with Lady Gaga. Biden conducted the introduction to Lady Gaga’s performance.
Karasek met Biden there, and she told him a story about a sexual assault victim that committed suicide. In response, she said Biden grasped her hands and touched his forehead to hers. She said she didn’t know how to react to Biden crossing into her personal space during such a sensitive time, according to the Post.
Karasek had a photo of the moment, a widely circulated image, framed on her wall. But she later took it down after the Me Too movement spread, the Post reported.
“We’re not lucky — we have survived and that’s why we were there.” Sofie Karasek https://t.co/gcu7jlrcGa pic.twitter.com/4GLCj1c9LF
— Miss Representation (@RepresentPledge) March 7, 2016
Ally Coll was a Democratic staffer running an event in 2008 when she met Biden. She says Biden squeezed her shoulders and complimented her smile. However, she said Biden held her “for a beat too long.”
“There’s been a lack of understanding about the way that power can turn something that might seem innocuous into something that can make somebody feel uncomfortable,” said Coll, via the Post.
The women similarly express that at the time the interaction may not have bothered them much, or that they weren’t sure what to think, but later, when they looked back, they came to see the interactions were inappropriate.
Biden is expected to announce his bid to run for president later this month, according to the Post.
“Today I want to talk about gestures of support and encouragement that I’ve made to women and some men that have made them uncomfortable,” Biden said in the Twitter video. “I shake hands. I hug people. I grab men and women by the shoulders and say ‘You can do this.’ Whether their women, men, young, old, it’s the way I’ve always been.”
He goes on to say that he will adjust to changing norms of personal space. His accusers didn’t accept the video as an apology of his behavior, and even the top Democrat, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has expressed dissatisfaction with Biden.
“To say, ‘I’m sorry that you were offended’ is not an apology,” Pelosi said, via the Post. “That’s not accepting the fact that people think differently about communication, whether it’s a handshake, a hug. . . . He has to understand in the world that we’re in now that people’s space is important to them, and what’s important is how they receive it, not necessarily how you intended it.”
Author and commentator Heather Mac Donald said she thinks that Biden is reaping what he has sown by supporting feminist causes, and now he finds himself a victim of a monster he helped raise.
“You have to realize that precedent and principle matters, and the precedent that you are setting will be used against you. There’s always changes of power. The ideal for human experience is to live by something that is not sheer partisan vengeance, and to set principles that you’re happy to live with for yourself and for other people,” Mac Donald told Fox News.
Prior to his video addressing the accusations, Biden’s Twitter account is full of posts supporting feminist and women-related causes.
She said that “his real sin is just his own history of stoking the feminist furies.”
Still, she urges that Biden’s case be looked at objectively, and that the reaction to his behavior could further the Me Too movement beyond its intentions and create a world where personal interactions are cold and sterile or, as she put it, “inhuman.”
“How about accepting the diversity of an older generation that has a different style of engagement, that has not been terrorized into frigid self-criticism by the feminist harpies that cannot understand that there are different human beings, there are different ways of relating to people,” Mac Donald said in the video interview with Fox News.
Mac Donald elaborated on the feminist worldview that Biden helped push forward.
“The feminist worldview is brittle, it’s intolerant, it’s unforgiving, and it’s utterly narcissistic. These females are saying their worldview, their subjective experience, should be now the norm for everybody else. Regardless of whether it is objectively reasonable what their interpretation is.”
