I’d dreaded writing about the festering sexual-assault allegation against Joe Biden, because as soon as you say “sexual-assault allegation,” people will usually assume it’s true. And given the specious nature of this particular charge, I’d been loath to help give it oxygen.

But today, Biden himself made my job easier:

“I want to address allegations by a former staffer that I engaged in misconduct 27 years ago. They aren’t true. This never happened…

“She has said she raised some of these issues with her supervisor and senior staffers from my office at the time. They – both men and a woman – have said, unequivocally, that she never came to them and complained or raised issues. News organizations that have talked with literally dozens of former staffers have not found one – not one – who corroborated her allegations in any way. Indeed, many of them spoke to the culture of an office that would not have tolerated harassment in any way – as indeed I would not have.

“There is a clear, critical part of this story that can be verified. The former staffer has said she filed a complaint back in 1993. But she does not have a record of this alleged complaint…There is only one place a complaint of this kind could be – the National Archives. The National Archives is where the records are kept at what was then called the Office of Fair Employment Practices. I am requesting that the Secretary of the Senate ask the Archives to identify any record of the complaint she alleges she filed and make available to the press any such document. If there was ever any such complaint, the record will be there.”

He’s basically putting his candidacy on the line – and contrasting himself with the guy in the White House who has stonewalled sex misconduct allegations from 25 women. Biden said:

“As a Presidential candidate, I’m accountable to the American people. We have lived long enough with a President who doesn’t think he is accountable to anyone, and takes responsibility for nothing. That’s not me. I believe being accountable means having the difficult conversations, even when they are uncomfortable. People need to hear the truth.”

Unlike the incumbent misogynist, Biden never forced Tara Reade to sign a non-disclosure agreement. He hasn’t reacted to her allegation by hurling personal insults or threatening to sue her. Instead he’s sticking to the substance of the matter – “the full and growing record of inconsistencies in her story, which has changed repeatedly in both small and big ways” – and he’s pledging transparency.

This is very tricky territory, as we all know, because the #MeToo era makes it imperative that we respect women’s allegations. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be scrutinized at all. Michael Stern, a former state and federal prosecutor who handled many sex assault cases, says it well: “We can support the #MeToo movement and not support allegations of sex assault that do not ring true. If these two positions cannot coexist, the movement is no more than a hit squad.”

Reade’s verbal complaint – that Biden penetrated her with his fingers some time in 1993, in a location she can’t specify – has long struck me as suspect. Twenty-seven years had passed, and suddenly she leveled the sex charge during the same week in March when Biden effectively clinched the nomination by defeating her candidate, Bernie Sanders.

And, frankly, I thought her lust for Vladimir Putin was a tad weird. In 2018 she wrote: “President Putin has an alluring combination of strength with gentleness. His sensuous image projects his love for life, the embodiment of grace while facing adversity. It is evident that he loves his country, his people and his job. President Putin’s obvious reverence for women, children and animals, and his ability with sports is intoxicating to American women.” And last year, she said that “like most women across the world, I like President Putin…a lot, his shirt on or shirt off.”

Granted, just because a woman thinks Putin is hot, it doesn’t mean her sex assault charge is false. And a woman can conceivably stay silent for 27 years before mustering the courage to charge a senator with sex assault (although I do wonder why she didn’t “out” him when he was tapped for the vice presidency in 2008). But, as Biden pointed out today (and several newspaper investigations have confirmed), Reade’s story has changed numerous times.

Until March, she’d only claimed that Biden had touched her shoulder and neck in ways that made her feel uncomfortable. Reade’s brother recently told The Washington Post that he remembered Reade telling him only about neck-and-shoulder touching; days later, he texted The Post with a new memory (coached by Reade?), that Biden had gone “under her clothes.” And it appears that Reade’s mother called in anonymously to Larry King’s CNN show in 1993; the voice on the phone said her daughter had a complaint about “a prominent senator,” but “could not get through with her problems at all.” There was no mention of any sexual assault, and Reade’s mother is now deceased.

Actually, there was a process for complaints in 1993. Reade insists now that she did file a complaint with Senate officials – but that she doesn’t have a copy. No such complaint has been found (The New York Times and The Washington Post dug in vain), and, indeed, if a complaint had been filed, the allegation would’ve triggered an official hearing. Yet there’s no evidence or record that a hearing ever happened.

Yes, Biden has made a few women uncomfortable with his old-school touchy-feely ways (as he acknowledged last year). But nobody, aside from Reade recently, has ever alleged a sexual assault. Michael Stern, the ex-prosecutor, writes: “It is possible that in his 77 years, Biden committed one sexual assault and it was against Reade. But in my experience, men who commit a sexual assault are accused more than once…like Donald Trump.”

Indeed, if we’re truly weighing this claim against Biden, we need to remember that Trump squats on the other scale. If the treatment of women were to be the pivotal issue in this campaign, the decision in November would be a no-brainer. But that won’t happen, not at a time when tens of thousands of innocent civilians are dying in a pandemic that the unfit incumbent could have mitigated if he’d fulfilled his pledge to protect the American people. That was the core of Biden’s message today, when he referred to a president who “takes responsibility for nothing.”

That’s the pivotal issue in 2020. The Tara Reade saga is merely “Hillary’s emails” redux, and I question whether the electorate will be fooled a second time.