Jyoti Pawar, 40, starts her day early when the sun is still low in Walhe, a village in the western Indian state of Maharashtra.
She's racing to beat the midday heat and a government-issued deadline to visit 30 to 40 households before noon.
Wearing a standard-issue pink jacket and a homemade cloth mask, she goes door to door, checking for cases of Covid-19.
Pawar is one of more than a million Accredited Social Health Activists -- or ASHA workers -- Indian women who act as a liaison between people and the public health care system in rural areas. It's considered the largest community health worker program in the world. In Hindi, ASHA means "hope."
The government considers ASHAs voluntary community health providers and pays them a monthly amount of Rs. 2,000 ($26.40), though in some states they can earn as much as Rs. 6,000 ($79.25) with additional task-based incentives, though the work is sporadic and unpredictable.
For years, ASHA workers and the unions that represent them have been pushing for more recognition -- and pay.
They say the coronavirus pandemic shows how important they are to India's health system, yet as voluntary workers they're not entitled to benefits like health care, insurance, paid leave, nor pensions.
Kyle Brown
Updated: May 31, 2020 11:35 PM
Created: May 31, 2020 11:14 PM
The former Minneapolis Police officer who was charged in connection with the death of George Floyd has been transferred from a county jail to a maximum-security prison, according to the Minnesota Department of Corrections.
Derek Chauvin, who was seen on video holding his knee on Floyd's neck for nearly nine minutes, was charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter on Friday in connection with Floyd's death. He was originally taken into custody at the Ramsey County Jail; he was then taken to the Hennepin County Jail on Sunday afternoon. Now, according to the DOC, he has been released to the Minnesota Correctional Facility in Oak Park Heights.
Those emotions have exploded once again, this time at a level not seen in decades, triggered by a disturbingly familiar event: the death of a black man suspected of a petty crime choked by a white police officer in Minneapolis, captured on video as he cried out, “I can’t breathe.”
Protesters in dozens of cities, homebound for months because of the coronavirus pandemic, have taken to the streets to condemn the Memorial Day death of George Floyd. Businesses have been looted and burned. Police have opened fire with rubber bullets and tear gas. Scores of protesters and officers have been injured. A dozen states have activated their National Guards.
The unrest and chaos is reminiscent of riots that convulsed the nation following the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the 1992 acquittals of Los Angeles police officers involved in the videotaped beating of Rodney King.
“You’re looking at a different kind of anger that you’ve never seen before,” said Cedric Alexander, the former public safety director in Dekalb County, Georgia, and former police chief in Rochester, New York, who now advises law enforcement agencies on improving community relations. “And this isn’t over. The rioting will stop but the powderkegs will continue to sit there.”
Alexander served on President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, formed in the wake of Brown’s and Garner’s deaths to recommend ways to improve trust between police and the public. Its final report, delivered in March 2015, made recommendations that were embraced by many police departments. But the document was essentially set aside by President Donald Trump and his attorneys general, who have reigned in attempts to oversee troubled police departments and have criticized protesters as undeserving of police protection.
“Somebody needs to pull that task force report out of the garbage can, dust it off and open it back up,” Alexander said.
Police force protestors from the business district into nearby neighborhoods on Aug. 11, 2014 in Ferguson, Mo.Scott Olson / Getty Images
He, along with protesters and civil rights activists, said that the current wave of unrest is not just a response to Floyd’s death, or about the divisive things Trump has done, but a reaction to several recent events that highlighted the enduring racism of American police and society.
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The first was on Feb. 23, when a black man, Ahmaud Arbery, was shot to death in Brunswick, Georgia, after being chased by a former police officer and his son, an attack captured on video that was released May 5. The second was the March 13 killing of EMT worker Breonna Taylor in her Louisville, Kentucky, home by police executing a “no-knock” warrant targeting her former boyfriend. The third was a videotaped May 25 confrontation in New York’s Central Park between a black bird watcher and a white woman who, caught walking her dog off leash, called police to report that “an African American” was threatening her.
Later that day, Floyd, 46, was accused of passing a suspicious-looking $20 bill at a Minneapolis grocery store. Officers approached him, and while he was being put in a squad car, he fell to the ground. As passersby videotaped the encounter, one officer, Derek Chauvin, put his knee on Floyd’s neck, and left it there for nearly 9 minutes, while Floyd complained he couldn’t breathe and cried for his mother.
All four events happened while much of America was under lockdown for the coronavirus outbreak, which has exacerbated the country’s racial and economic divides: Black Americans, and the poor, are more likely to get sick and die from COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and are more likely to lose their jobs and homes in the financial fallout. In some places, black people are disproportionately cited by police for violating social distancing orders
“We’re in a peak of a pandemic first off, so everyone is rattled with fear. Everyone’s been locked up for the past few months. And now in the middle of a pandemic, the black community especially has to deal with their lives being a risk,” LiIly Camp, who joined protests in Atlanta, told NBC News.
She added: “I know that this is going to be painted as like, ‘African-Americans are violent. This protest is dangerous. It’s not doing any good.’ But I would just like to say that the people who are doing this are doing this because they’re afraid and they’re tired and we have no right to tell people they shouldn't be violent and should only do things in peace when the government is only using violence and fear in us as well.”
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Civil rights advocates have also expressed frustration with a resistance within many police agencies — including officers’ unions — to some aspects of reform, such as civilian oversight and more effective disciplinary systems. In many parts of the country, minorities are still stopped, and arrested and killed, at disproportionate rates. And the number of people killed by police each year remains steady.
Many of the cities coping with violent protests are dealing with their own crises of police trust. They include Louisville, still reeling from Taylor’s death; Philadelphia, where several officers were caught last year making racist posts on Facebook; Chicago, whose long history of scandals includes the 2014 police shooting of Laquan McDonald; Cincinnati, which has tried to reform its police department since 2001 riots; and Ferguson and the neighboring city of St. Louis.
Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP, said violent protests and riots are the result of a broken justice system that has disregarded the voices of black Americans for decades, breeding a sense of neglect and hopelessness.
May 29, 202002:55
“What we have witnessed over the last couple of nights is the explosion of pent-up frustration not only because of the police violence, but the lack of opportunity that many African Americans see in all walks of life,” Johnson said Friday on MSNBC.
The size, scope and violence of the protests has fueled speculation of outside influences. Depending on who is talking, the culprits might be the radical left, the far right, white nationalists, anarchists, anti-fascists or members of the anti-government “boogaloo” movement that promotes civil war. But there’s little evidence that those groups are significantly driving the demonstrations.
Some activists have pointed out that before the Floyd protests, another group of Americans — mostly white, some armed, and many of them Trump supporters — converged on state capitols to protest government restrictions on daily life to curb the spread of the coronavirus. Trump encouraged those protesters on Twitter while calling the Floyd protesters “thugs.” And police generally showed restraint with the lockdown protesters, while the Floyd protests have been marked by violent clashes.
“It makes clear to me that we are fighting both a coordinated attack on our lives that is physical and we are fighting a coordinated attack on our lives that is about misinformation and disinformation,” said Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, a civil rights nonprofit.
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He added that it was important to keep in mind the changes that have already come as a result of social justice campaigns that intensified after the 2014 killings of Garner and Brown.
Some of the changes are political, such as the focus on Democratic presidential candidates’ criminal justice records and the growing number of prosecutors elected on promises to make the system fairer for minorities and the poor. Others are cultural, such as people being quicker to use their phones to record and share racist incidents and police violence. Robinson also said he saw progress in how quickly the Minneapolis Police Department fired Chauvin and the officers who stood nearby without intervening. Chauvin was charged on Friday with murder and manslaughter, less than a week after Floyd’s death.
Many of the changes made by local police agencies since the summer of 2014 have come about as the result of work by the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit that develops policies to strengthen public trust. That has included quickly releasing officer-worn body camera footage, using de-escalation techniques to avoid force, holding officers responsible to step in when they see misconduct and admitting when an officer or department has made a mistake.
Chuck Wexler, the forum’s executive director, said he believed the widespread protests had much to do with the video of Floyd’s death, which he called “egregious and painful to watch.” It is “completely understandable to be angry about the brutality in the video,” Wexler said.
But he worries about the impact of the current anger on all the effort that has gone into improving American policing in the last six years.
“The frustration on the policing side is that people will look at this video and think nothing has changed,” Wexler said, “and that’s tough because a lot has changed.”
The waves of unrest roiling the nation at the moment say that the change has not been enough.
“If someone were to ask me, ‘Where do we go from here to build relationships,’ I’d say that’s the wrong question to ask right now,” said Alexander, the former police chief and author of a book called “The New Guardians: Policing in America's Communities For the 21st Century.”
“Because after you just ran me down in the street and shot me, after you shot me in the middle of the night on a b.s. warrant, after you lied in a park that I assaulted a woman, and after you choked me in the street after I begged for my mama, where do you begin a conversation with someone about building relationships?
Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner Dermot Shea. | Richard Drew/AP Photo
NEW YORK — During three days of unrest in New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio has sided with the NYPD over protesters — a move many, including longtime supporters, see as cementing the mayor’s transformation from police reformer to police defender.
Faced with a series of videotaped incidents of aggressive police behavior toward protesters who have flooded New York City to decry the police killing of George Floyd, de Blasio has maintained the NYPD “acted appropriately.” He first blamed the chaos on out-of-towners intent on inciting violence. Then he said some of the aggression was coming from New Yorkers operating from an "anarchist" playbook, and he questioned their commitment to the cause of racial justice.
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In doing so, his own commitment was called into question by left-leaning politicians, police reform advocates and many of his former aides and allies. It is the latest controversy to highlight the tension for a mayor who won office on a platform of police reform — vowing to end the era of stop and frisk and combat racial disparities in the justice system — and has since grappled with dissent toward him within the NYPD.
“I think he’s living in an alternative universe at this moment in history,” said City Council Member Donovan Richards, chair of the Public Safety Committee.
“It’s disheartening, because there are a lot of folks who believed in his message,” he added. “They see these statements and they just say, ‘What the hell?’”
De Blasio delivered a defense of the NYPD after three nights of chaotic protests across the five boroughs, where some in the crowd set fire to police vehicles, broke windows and threw objects at officers, and a woman allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail into an occupied police van. Police officers were seen on video driving a vehicle into a throng of protesters, forcefully shoving a young woman to the ground and removing a man’s mask to pepper spray him.
“I’m not going to blame officers who were trying to deal with an absolutely impossible situation,” de Blasio said of the cops who plowed SUVs through a barricade and into a crowd of protesters, some of whom were throwing objects at the vehicles.
The mayor softened his stance a bit Sunday morning, saying “I didn’t like what I saw one bit” and promising an investigation of the SUV incident, though he continued to emphasize the culpability of the crowd. Overall, he said police acted with “tremendous restraint.”
But many of his own former staffers and allies were dumbfounded by his position.
“These protests are about America’s failure to honor the lives of Black people. If the law means anything, if our lives mean anything, then driving a police car into a crowd of protesters is a crime. Isn’t that obvious?” de Blasio’s former deputy mayor Richard Buery said in a tweet.
Actress and activist Cynthia Nixon, a key supporter of de Blasio’s 2013 campaign who later ran unsuccessfully for governor, said she “cannot begin to understand why our ‘progressive’ Mayor selected this man for commissioner” after Police Commissioner Dermot Shea said he is “extremely proud” of how police officers have responded.
“It is sad, baffling and cuts against our values for so many of us who have worked for him and stuck it out with him,” said one current city official, who would only speak on the condition of anonymity. “The overwhelming emotion of the colleagues who I’ve spoken to in the past 24 hours is sad.”
De Blasio won his seat in 2013 on a platform that repudiated the aggressive policing tactics of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, most notably the widespread use of stop and frisk. He settled a federal lawsuit challenging the practice and reduced its use.
De Blasio also settled a longstanding suit brought by the wrongfully convicted members of the Central Park Five, cut marijuana arrests sharply, equipped officers with body cameras and instituted a neighborhood policing program.
After the death of Eric Garner at the hands of police in 2014, and a grand jury’s decision not to indict the officer involved, the mayor delivered an emotional speech invoking his own biracial son Dante, saying he had to train the young man to be extra careful around police.
To some observers, that speech marked the beginning of the end of de Blasio’s time as a committed police reformer. It infuriated police unions, who accused the mayor of having “blood on [his] hands” after two officers were shot to death later the same month. At the hospital that evening, and again at their funerals, officers turned their backs on de Blasio en masse.
“It’s clear to me that the post-traumatic stress from 2014 has impaired the mayor’s perception of reality,” said City Council Member Ritchie Torres. “It clearly was the decisive turning point. Since then, he governs in fear of his own police department.”
Several former aides and advisers who worked for de Blasio during that time said it shattered his confidence in tackling perceived problems within the NYPD.
“Cops turning their back on him at funerals in late 2014 and the aggressive, yet seemingly successful, tactics of [police union president Pat] Lynch and the Police Benevolent Association, unequivocally impacted his strategic approach to these issues and arguably the fate of his mayoralty and how history will view it,” said political consultant Neal Kwatra, who has advised and supported de Blasio throughout his career.
That, coupled with his longstanding fear of a crime spike destroying his mayoralty — as the Crown Heights riots harmed his political mentor, former Mayor David Dinkins — have left him all but paralyzed to embrace more aggressive criminal justice reforms, according to three former aides.
“He fundamentally is caught in a tension between the movement progressive brand he ran on and an inherent cautiousness, an inherent conservatism and a deep deep-rooted fear of a perception that the city could descend into chaos like he saw during the Crown Heights riots under Dinkins,” said one former consultant who advised his 2013 campaign and no longer works for de Blasio.
Rachel Noerdlinger, a former City Hall aide, said de Blasio’s handling of the current protests is a sharp departure from the way he regarded crowds that flooded the streets in the months after Garner’s death. She was tasked with community outreach to quell violence during those demonstrations, which were largely peaceful.
“The mayor’s messaging was more empathetic, and there was a strategic plan in place to guide the community and people that were in pain,” she said. “That is not what has been happening here.”
De Blasio argues the perception that he has moved away from a pro-reform stance is unfair.
On Sunday, he said critics should look at “the history of six-and-a-half years of police reform, nonstop police reform.”
“It is a fundamentally different department in a variety of ways. Neighborhood policing has changed everything. We have a lot more to do but I just am not going to accept the people who seem to forget that we got rid of an unconstitutional broken policy of stop and frisk, that we retrained the entire police force in de-escalation, that we put body cameras on every officer on patrol, that we stopped arresting for marijuana,” de Blasio said. “There is a countless list of reforms. Don't take away that history.”
But de Blasio has opposed legislation to put tighter regulations on the NYPD, including making it a crime for a police officer to use a chokehold, the maneuver prohibited by NYPD policy that caused Garner’s death.
He deferred to the NYPD on discipline for Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who killed the Staten Island man, despite widespread pressure during his short-lived presidential campaign this year. The NYPD finally fired Pantaleo last summer, five years after the fatal incident.
The mayor has also clashed with police reform advocates on issues including bail reform and the policing of minor offenses like subway turnstile jumping.
Despite de Blasio’s efforts to walk a careful line and avoid criticizing the NYPD too harshly, he has never won over police unions that remain among his harshest critics. After attacks on police in February, the head of the sergeants union wrote that members of the NYPD “are declaring war” on the mayor.
Eugene O’Donnell, a former police officer who teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said the mayor was right to defend the policing of the protests, but the shift came too late.
“He’s had to grow up and mature and get a grip and act like a mayor, and it took him six and a half years,” he said. “Ironically, now he’s going to be hated by everybody. He’s going to be hated by the lunatic fringe.”
The mayor said he’s not concerned.
When asked Sunday whether he is worried about angering the NYPD — a possible explanation for his stance on the demonstrations — de Blasio replied, “I do not have fear or I wouldn't be in this job.”
In a different age, about three months ago, 20 bucks could buy you up to four sets of music at Smalls, the pulsing Greenwich Village basement club celebrated for crowd-pleasing, unfussy jazz. Squeeze into the front row and you’d be close enough to the musicians to sweat on one other. Buy a drink and you were welcome to stick around for a 1 a.m. jam session featuring brash up-and-comers — and maybe guest turns by established stars. That cover charge, and a willingness to pack yourself in, also bought access to the intimate Mezzrow, Smalls’s sister club, just across Seventh Avenue South.
Smalls and Mezzrow haven’t been packed in the last 12 weeks, of course. The clubs shuttered after performances on March 15, and their owner, Spike Wilner, said that even before the mandated shutdown, the crowds had diminished and musicians had been canceling gigs.
But there’s a funny thing about jazz: It keeps roaring back to life. Live music returns to Smalls on June 1, in a socially distant way, thanks to Mr. Wilner’s persistence, the club’s shift into full nonprofit mode and a windfall from a celebrity benefactor — a $25,000 donation to the SmallsLIVE Foundation from Billy Joel.
“That gift was such a positive vibe at a time when things were really dark,” Mr. Wilner said last week. “The impact of the virus has been devastating on the jazz community.”
In a phone interview, Mr. Joel said he felt compelled to support Smalls in its time of need: “Live music is the vitality of New York.” He added: “That great sound is the hum of the city. And during this pandemic, it’s the jazz and classical players who get hit first.”
Mr. Wilner’s plan for the money addresses the greatest hardship that jazz players are facing during the shutdown: lost gigs. He has booked a different jazz band at Smalls for two sets a night, at 7 and 8:30 p.m., all through June, paying the usual gig rate. It’s not quite a reopening, though. The musicians will be alone in the club except for an engineer and a manager. The audience will be at home, watching via the livestream that has regularly broadcast Smalls shows.
Smalls makes its sets available in real time, then archives them behind a paywall for donors who have given at least $10 to the SmallsLIVE Foundation. The livestreams will also be available on the club’s Facebook page.
Mr. Abadie watching a test run of the livestream to confirm its quality.Credit...Vincent Tullo for The New York Times
The livestreaming setup and soundboard in the back corner of Smalls.Credit...Vincent Tullo for The New York Times
No other major New York City jazz club is getting back to live, on-site performances so early. The trumpeter and composer Jeremy Pelt, who plays Smalls on reopening night in the drummer Joe Farnsworth’s quartet, has no qualms about being cautious while performing. “We’re armed with the basic knowledge of how the virus spreads. When I go down to Smalls, I’m not going to be hugging people and slapping high fives, even with my very dear friends. We’re going to make this music and leave.”
The organist and composer Akiko Tsuruga noted that the Smalls stage is large enough for the players to connect while still staying six feet apart. She said that when her quartet plays there on June 12 she’ll miss the club’s community — the crowds of aficionados and out-of-towners, the musicians who pop in to hang — but will simply be happy for the chance to play. “The lockdown has reminded me how important playing music is to my life,” Ms. Tsuruga said.
The money matters, too, of course. Jazz musicians rely more than ever on live performances to pay their bills, especially as streaming has gutted revenues from recordings. Ms. Tsuruga has lost gigs with the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra and the all-female collective Lioness, and Mr. Pelt had to cut short a European tour.
“This hit everybody right where it hurts, right in the pocket,” Mr. Pelt said. “That’s not even mentioning the mental effect of not playing with your colleagues.”
Some help has come from the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation, whose current president is Wynton Marsalis. The organization has allocated a million dollars for grants of $1,000 to the region’s working jazz musicians to be dispensed through an emergency fund.
Other clubs have booked players for Zoom gigs, like the Jazz Gallery’s Lockdown Sessions, in which musicians like Joel Ross or Camila Meza chat over Zoom with Rio Sakairi, the Gallery’s artistic director, and then present new, homemade videos of themselves playing solo or with a live-in partner. Some festivals, too, have moved online, such as the annual celebration for artists on the pianist Fabian Almazan’s Biophilia Records.
But jazz players insist that a Zoom connection doesn’t cut it when it comes to collaborative improvisation. “That connection can’t happen over a computer,” the pianist and singer Johnny O’Neal said.
Ms. Tsuruga agreed: “Musicians need eye contact and the same vibe.”
Mr. Pelt titled his most recent album “The Art of Intimacy, Vol. 1,” which refers not just to the romantic yearning of the set’s luminous ballads. “It’s not necessarily about the love aspect. It’s the fact that listening to this music is like listening in on a private conversation between the musicians.”
“The impact of the virus has been devastating on the jazz community,” said Mr. Wilner.Credit...Vincent Tullo for The New York Times
Conversations like that, Mr. Pelt believes, demand physical presence. “We’re almost able to play and interact digitally, with no blips and not being a nanosecond off. But what will never be replaced is the human interaction with your fellow musicians.”
Mr. Joel agrees. “There’s something about the atmosphere or the acoustics of playing together live in a small place that you can’t replicate any other way,” he said. “It’s an immediate sensation, feeling the vibrations of the drum and the resonance of a standup bass.”
Like the jazz players, Mr. Joel has also tired of canceled gigs, including a summer tour and his Madison Square Garden residency. The singer and pianist said that he’s fortunate enough to be able to pay his band and crew full salary during the shutdown, but he misses “the community aspect” of playing live — connecting with other musicians.
Mr. Wilner, meanwhile, is doing what jazz players do best. He’s improvising. Besides reaching out to other potential big-ticket supporters, he’s upgraded Smalls’ livestream technology and redesigned the club’s website to allow for financial contributions, large and small.
The cost of a donation allows patrons access to the Smalls archive of 18,000 recorded performances from about 4,000 musicians. Wilner’s royalty system cuts checks to musicians whose archived sets get streamed, though the issue of performance rights royalties for original compositions remains murky. “We look at it as a sponsorship rather than a subscription,” Mr. Wilner said. “We don’t want to sell this music. We want people to support it.”
He’s trying to get the cats playing again — and to get the cats paid. “We need to collect about $25,000 a month,” he said. “That would pay for 28 bands and one month’s rent.”
The Smalls that returns on Monday won’t be the Smalls of old, exactly. But it will still be Smalls. That means something to Mr. O’Neal, whose exuberant trio performs there on June 2. “Everybody comes to Smalls. Everybody. It will go down in history as one of the premiere jazz clubs in history.”
Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner Dermot Shea. | Richard Drew/AP Photo
NEW YORK — During three days of unrest in New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio has sided with the NYPD over protesters — a move many, including longtime supporters, see as cementing the mayor’s transformation from police reformer to police defender.
Faced with a series of videotaped incidents of aggressive police behavior toward protesters who have flooded New York City to decry the police killing of George Floyd, de Blasio has maintained the NYPD “acted appropriately.” He first blamed the chaos on out-of-towners intent on inciting violence. Then he said some of the aggression was coming from New Yorkers operating from an "anarchist" playbook, and he questioned their commitment to the cause of racial justice.
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In doing so, his own commitment was called into question by left-leaning politicians, police reform advocates and many of his former aides and allies. It is the latest controversy to highlight the tension for a mayor who won office on a platform of police reform — vowing to end the era of stop and frisk and combat racial disparities in the justice system — and has since grappled with dissent toward him within the NYPD.
“I think he’s living in an alternative universe at this moment in history,” said City Council Member Donovan Richards, chair of the Public Safety Committee.
“It’s disheartening, because there are a lot of folks who believed in his message,” he added. “They see these statements and they just say, ‘What the hell?’”
De Blasio delivered a defense of the NYPD after three nights of chaotic protests across the five boroughs, where some in the crowd set fire to police vehicles, broke windows and threw objects at officers, and a woman allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail into an occupied police van. Police officers were seen on video driving a vehicle into a throng of protesters, forcefully shoving a young woman to the ground and removing a man’s mask to pepper spray him.
“I’m not going to blame officers who were trying to deal with an absolutely impossible situation,” de Blasio said of the cops who plowed SUVs through a barricade and into a crowd of protesters, some of whom were throwing objects at the vehicles.
The mayor softened his stance a bit Sunday morning, saying “I didn’t like what I saw one bit” and promising an investigation of the SUV incident, though he continued to emphasize the culpability of the crowd. Overall, he said police acted with “tremendous restraint.”
But many of his own former staffers and allies were dumbfounded by his position.
“These protests are about America’s failure to honor the lives of Black people. If the law means anything, if our lives mean anything, then driving a police car into a crowd of protesters is a crime. Isn’t that obvious?” de Blasio’s former deputy mayor Richard Buery said in a tweet.
Actress and activist Cynthia Nixon, a key supporter of de Blasio’s 2013 campaign who later ran unsuccessfully for governor, said she “cannot begin to understand why our ‘progressive’ Mayor selected this man for commissioner” after Police Commissioner Dermot Shea said he is “extremely proud” of how police officers have responded.
“It is sad, baffling and cuts against our values for so many of us who have worked for him and stuck it out with him,” said one current city official, who would only speak on the condition of anonymity. “The overwhelming emotion of the colleagues who I’ve spoken to in the past 24 hours is sad.”
De Blasio won his seat in 2013 on a platform that repudiated the aggressive policing tactics of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, most notably the widespread use of stop and frisk. He settled a federal lawsuit challenging the practice and reduced its use.
De Blasio also settled a longstanding suit brought by the wrongfully convicted members of the Central Park Five, cut marijuana arrests sharply, equipped officers with body cameras and instituted a neighborhood policing program.
After the death of Eric Garner at the hands of police in 2014, and a grand jury’s decision not to indict the officer involved, the mayor delivered an emotional speech invoking his own biracial son Dante, saying he had to train the young man to be extra careful around police.
To some observers, that speech marked the beginning of the end of de Blasio’s time as a committed police reformer. It infuriated police unions, who accused the mayor of having “blood on [his] hands” after two officers were shot to death later the same month. At the hospital that evening, and again at their funerals, officers turned their backs on de Blasio en masse.
“It’s clear to me that the post-traumatic stress from 2014 has impaired the mayor’s perception of reality,” said City Council Member Ritchie Torres. “It clearly was the decisive turning point. Since then, he governs in fear of his own police department.”
Several former aides and advisers who worked for de Blasio during that time said it shattered his confidence in tackling perceived problems within the NYPD.
“Cops turning their back on him at funerals in late 2014 and the aggressive, yet seemingly successful, tactics of [police union president Pat] Lynch and the Police Benevolent Association, unequivocally impacted his strategic approach to these issues and arguably the fate of his mayoralty and how history will view it,” said political consultant Neal Kwatra, who has advised and supported de Blasio throughout his career.
That, coupled with his longstanding fear of a crime spike destroying his mayoralty — as the Crown Heights riots harmed his political mentor, former Mayor David Dinkins — have left him all but paralyzed to embrace more aggressive criminal justice reforms, according to three former aides.
“He fundamentally is caught in a tension between the movement progressive brand he ran on and an inherent cautiousness, an inherent conservatism and a deep deep-rooted fear of a perception that the city could descend into chaos like he saw during the Crown Heights riots under Dinkins,” said one former consultant who advised his 2013 campaign and no longer works for de Blasio.
Rachel Noerdlinger, a former City Hall aide, said de Blasio’s handling of the current protests is a sharp departure from the way he regarded crowds that flooded the streets in the months after Garner’s death. She was tasked with community outreach to quell violence during those demonstrations, which were largely peaceful.
“The mayor’s messaging was more empathetic, and there was a strategic plan in place to guide the community and people that were in pain,” she said. “That is not what has been happening here.”
De Blasio argues the perception that he has moved away from a pro-reform stance is unfair.
On Sunday, he said critics should look at “the history of six-and-a-half years of police reform, nonstop police reform.”
“It is a fundamentally different department in a variety of ways. Neighborhood policing has changed everything. We have a lot more to do but I just am not going to accept the people who seem to forget that we got rid of an unconstitutional broken policy of stop and frisk, that we retrained the entire police force in de-escalation, that we put body cameras on every officer on patrol, that we stopped arresting for marijuana,” de Blasio said. “There is a countless list of reforms. Don't take away that history.”
But de Blasio has opposed legislation to put tighter regulations on the NYPD, including making it a crime for a police officer to use a chokehold, the maneuver prohibited by NYPD policy that caused Garner’s death.
He deferred to the NYPD on discipline for Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who killed the Staten Island man, despite widespread pressure during his short-lived presidential campaign this year. The NYPD finally fired Pantaleo last summer, five years after the fatal incident.
The mayor has also clashed with police reform advocates on issues including bail reform and the policing of minor offenses like subway turnstile jumping.
Despite de Blasio’s efforts to walk a careful line and avoid criticizing the NYPD too harshly, he has never won over police unions that remain among his harshest critics. After attacks on police in February, the head of the sergeants union wrote that members of the NYPD “are declaring war” on the mayor.
Eugene O’Donnell, a former police officer who teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said the mayor was right to defend the policing of the protests, but the shift came too late.
“He’s had to grow up and mature and get a grip and act like a mayor, and it took him six and a half years,” he said. “Ironically, now he’s going to be hated by everybody. He’s going to be hated by the lunatic fringe.”
The mayor said he’s not concerned.
When asked Sunday whether he is worried about angering the NYPD — a possible explanation for his stance on the demonstrations — de Blasio replied, “I do not have fear or I wouldn't be in this job.”
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Longtime supporters dismayed at de Blasio's shift from police reformer to defender - Politico
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Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden makes a visit to Veteran's Memorial Park in New Castle, Del., last Monday. He made his second trip away from his home since the pandemic started on Sunday with a visit to a protest site in Wilmington, Del. OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Imageshide caption
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OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images
Former Vice President Joe Biden made an unannounced visit on Sunday to the site in Wilmington, Del., where protests took place the night before, one of dozens of protests across the country following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody.
It was the second time in a week that Biden left his home, following a brief Memorial Day wreath-laying ceremony at a veterans memorial in New Castle, Del. Biden has been campaigning exclusively from his house since coronavirus lockdowns began, repeatedly saying he is following stay-at-home orders issued by Delaware's governor.
We are a nation in pain right now, but we must not allow this pain to destroy us.
As President, I will help lead this conversation — and more importantly, I will listen, just as I did today visiting the site of last night's protests in Wilmington. pic.twitter.com/0h2ApbKT0C
As cities across the country have been overwhelmed by sometimes violent protests responding to Floyd's death, and as President Trump has stoked divisions with tweets about "vicious dogs" ready to respond to White House protests, labeling of Minnesota protesters as "thugs," and repeated blaming of unrest on Democratic mayors and governors, Biden has tried to increase his visibility to portray a more empathetic and conciliatory approach to leadership.
"We are a nation in pain, but we must not allow this pain to destroy us," Biden wrote on Twitter and Facebook, alongside a picture of him on one knee, wearing a mask, speaking to an African American man holding a child. "We are a nation enraged, but we cannot allow our rage to consume us. We are a nation exhausted, but we will not allow our exhaustion to defeat us."
"The only way to bear this pain is to turn all that anguish to purpose," Biden's post continued. "And as President, I will help lead this conversation — and more importantly, I will listen, just as I did today visiting the site of last night's protests in Wilmington."
Biden's campaign posted a picture of the visit on social media, but provided no additional information about how long Biden stayed at the protest site, how many people he talked to, or when on Sunday he made the visit, which was not announced beforehand.
While Biden and his campaign had purposely taken a low-visibility approach to the early days of the coronavirus crisis, preferring instead to keep the focus on President Trump and the daily press briefings credited with eroding the president's approval ratings, Biden has been much more responsive to Floyd's death and its aftermath, which have triggered a level of national protest not seen since the late 1960s.
Biden delivered a five-minute speech from his Wilmington home Friday, framing Floyd's death as the latest example of a centuries-old "open wound" of racism in the United States. Floyd's death, Biden said, was "an act of brutality so elemental it did more than deny one black man in America his civil rights and human rights. It denied him of his very humanity and denied him of his life."
Earlier Friday, Biden spoke to Floyd's family on the phone. Floyd's brother, Philonise Floyd, told MSNBC on Saturday that during the call, "I asked him could he please, please get justice for my brother."
A later call from President Trump, Floyd said, was much briefer. "I was trying to talk to him, but he just kept, like, pushing me off," Floyd said.
The President was there for a little under an hour before being brought upstairs. It's unclear if first lady Melania Trump and Barron Trump were also taken down with him.
Trump praised the Secret Service the next day for its handling of the protests outside the White House Friday night in the wake of George Floyd's death last week in Minneapolis.
On Saturday, only hours after the protests outside the White House had ended, Trump declared himself safe as he lashed out at the city's Democratic mayor and raised the prospect of his supporters gathering in place that night in what would amount to a counter protest.
In a series of tweets, Trump commended the US Secret Service for protecting him inside his fortified mansion Friday evening, saying he couldn't have felt "more safe" as protesters gathered outside over Floyd's death. The President suggested that dogs and weaponry were waiting inside the gates.
Trump claimed DC Mayor Muriel Bowser did not permit the DC police to "get involved," though Secret Service later said they were on the scene.
Later in the day, speaking at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida after the launch of the NASA/SpaceX rocket, Trump admonished protesters across the country, expressed support for the "majority of police officers" and blamed Antifa and the "radical left" -- without any proof -- in his most in-depth remarks since Floyd's death and the ensuing nationwide demonstrations.
"I stand before you as a friend and ally to every American seeking justice and peace. And I stand before you in firm opposition to anyone exploiting this tragedy to loot, rob, attack and menace. Healing, not hatred, justice, not chaos, are the mission at hand," Trump said.
Trump added that the voice of "law abiding citizens must be heard and heard very loudly."
"We must defend the rights of every citizen to live without violence, prejudice or fear," Trump said before supporting "the overwhelming majority of police officers who are incredible in every way and devoted public servants."
"No one is more upset than fellow law enforcement officers by the small handful who failed to abide by their oath to serve and protect," Trump added.
In his Saturday morning Twitter messages, Trump did not seek to lower the temperature or console Americans who find themselves facing parallel health and racial crises.
The decision to physically move the President came as protesters confronted Secret Service officers outside the White House for hours on Friday -- shouting, throwing water bottles and other objects at the line of officers, and attempting to break through the metal barriers.
At times, the crowd would remove the metal barriers and begin pushing up against the officers and their riot shields. The Secret Service continually replaced the barriers throughout the night as protesters wrestled them away.
Protesters pushed hard enough a few times that officers had to walk away with what appeared to be minor injuries. At one point, the agents responded to aggressive pushing and yelling by using pepper spray on the protesters.
Throughout the night, protesters could be heard chanting their support for Floyd, an unarmed black man who died after being pinned down by a white police officer, and their dislike of Trump. The protest, which began around 10 p.m. ET, Friday night outside the White House, had mostly quieted down by 3:30 a.m. ET, Saturday morning.
The crowd thinned out and Secret Service officers were able to expand their perimeter and barriers around Lafayette Park across from the White House.
Six arrests were made during the protests, the Secret Service confirmed in a statement Saturday afternoon.
The President on Thursday had used the threat of police retaliation and military intervention in Minnesota where protests turned violent and destructive -- saying on Twitter that "when the looting starts, the shooting starts." Trump's weekend tweets also invoked imagery tied to brutal civil rights-era police tactics.
Now, a serious divide has emerged among the President's top allies and advisers over how the President should address several nights of protests and riots.
Trump is being urged by some advisers to formally address the nation and call for calm, while others have said he should condemn the rioting and looting more forcefully or risk losing middle-of-the-road voters in November, according to several sources familiar with the deliberations.
This story has been updated with additional developments.
CNN's Kevin Liptak, Noah Broder and Brian Todd contributed to this report.
Last spring, after years of strife with friends and neighbors and a constant struggle for money, Tara Reade was making a fresh start in a new town, Grass Valley, Calif., near the outskirts of Tahoe National Forest.
She found a place for her adopted rescue horse, Charm, and a tidy ground-level apartment for herself and her cats. Ms. Reade, who had moved from the Santa Cruz area, told friends about a new passion and appreciation for Russia, its culture and its leader. She was working on a novel.
But trouble would find her in Grass Valley, too. Work would be hard to come by. Her car would be repossessed. Rent would fall into arrears. Acquaintances who tried to help would accuse her of failing to repay the money they had lent her, of skipping out on bills and misleading them, just as others had done in the places she had left behind.
It was a messy life, played out in obscurity.
Then came accusations from several women that former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had made them uncomfortable by touching or kissing them inappropriately in public settings.
Ms. Reade was reminded of her own experience with Mr. Biden, as a junior aide in his Senate office in 1993, and she went public in her local paper. Mr. Biden, she said, would rest his hands on her shoulder and run a finger along her neck. After he requested that she serve drinks at a reception because he “liked my legs,” she said, she refused, only to be marginalized and ultimately forced out.
Eleven months later, after alleging behavior that in her own telling fell short of “sexual misconduct” — it was “about abuse of power,” she said then — she would level a much more serious charge, of sexual assault, which Mr. Biden flatly denies.
Now Ms. Reade’s own back story has been caught up in the churn of #MeToo-era politics, as rising questions about her credibility add fuel to the social-media combat between Mr. Biden’s defenders and detractors.
In May, Antioch University Seattle said Ms. Reade had not obtained a bachelor’s degree there, as claimed on her résumé. That in turn raised questions about how she had gained admission to law school, and led defense lawyers and prosecutors in California to begin reviewing domestic-violence cases in which she had served as an expert witness. A prominent #MeToo lawyer, Douglas Wigdor, dropped her only two weeks after taking her as a client.
If the national stage is new for Ms. Reade, the sturm and drang is anything but.
Ms. Reade in 1992. Credit...via Tara Reade
To better understand Ms. Reade’s tumultuous journey to the roiling center of the presidential campaign, The New York Times interviewed nearly 100 friends, relatives, co-workers and neighbors and reviewed court records. What emerged was a shambolic life in which Ms. Reade, through her own pluck and smarts and powers of persuasion, overcame an unsettled and abusive childhood to find opportunities on the big stages of acting, politics and law. She won praise for what friends took as a sincere commitment to helping other abuse victims and to animal rescue.
“She was very funny and very engaging and completely well educated, intelligent,” said one former friend and co-worker, Deborah Ayres. But, she added, there was also “this other side that didn’t add up.”
It was there, on that other side, that those opportunities would dissipate amid new blows of abuse, acrimony and regret, leading to Ms. Reade’s more recent scramble for work as a pet sitter and census field supervisor. (That, too, would end in an allegation of maltreatment against her bosses.) She had “a heavy, dark sadness to her,” another friend recalled.
In many ways, The Times’s findings comport with the autobiography Ms. Reade, now 56, has rendered in cinematic detail across blog posts, online essays and court statements. But in the dramatic retelling of her life story she has also shown a tendency to embellish — a role as a movie extra is presented as a break; her title of “staff assistant” with clerical responsibilities in Mr. Biden’s office becomes “legislative assistant” when his shepherding of the Violence Against Women Act is an asset for her expert-witness testimony in court.
And there are the former friends who describe how she spun her way into their confidence with her story of abuse and perseverance, only to leave them feeling disappointed and duped.
Ms. Reade has insisted those friends were in the wrong — one was a “slumlord,” another a “drunk,” a third a tax cheat — just as she said Antioch was mistaken about her degree. In an email, she acknowledged taking “creative license” in some parts of her online biography. Other parts, she said, might include honest mistakes.
“If memories are not perfectly accurate, I will be condemned as a liar in the national press,” she wrote. “This standard is not applied to Joe Biden, who is allowed to make his denials without a simultaneous airing of all the hundreds of inconsistencies between reality and his public statements over the course of his life.”
Only two people know what did or did not happen between Ms. Reade and Mr. Biden in the spring of 1993. Still, like other significant chapters of the #MeToo moment, Ms. Reade’s comes with the statements of confidants who say they heard her account long before it became public.
But while five people have said Ms. Reade shared all or part of her account of sexual harassment with them around the time she says it happened, corroboration of the assault charge is shakier.
The two people who say she told them of it contemporaneously — her brother and a longtime friend — initially offered accounts of harassment, not assault. The friend told The Times in 2019 that Mr. Biden’s behavior was “a little bit just over the line, but nothing like, ‘Oh my God, call 911.’”
The friend says she had withheld the full story because Ms. Reade was not ready to share it, and two otherpeople have said she told them of an assault a few years later. Professionals who counsel sexual-abuse victims say it is not uncommon for them to reveal what happened piecemeal, over time.
It was fear of how her background would be portrayed, Ms. Reade has indicated, that kept her from speaking out sooner.
“It took me a long time to come forward,” she told the television journalist Megyn Kelly, “because of things that were happening in my life.”
Early Abuses and Ambitions
Ms. Reade, then Tara Moulton, on the family farm.Credit...via Tara Reade
Ms. Reade grew up as Tara Moulton, spending her early years on the family farm in Wausau, Wis., where she gained her love of horses and what she said was her first experience with abuse.
“The first powerful man who abused me physically and emotionally was my father,” she wrote in a Medium essay in January titled “Powerful Men and the Women They Choose to Destroy.”
Her father, Bob Moulton, was a journalist and community-theater actor turned public-relations executive. She was far closer to her mother, Jeanette Altimus, an amateur painter of some local renown. Ms. Reade described her in an email as “a beautiful inspiration” who “always stood up for justice” and took her along to protest marches in Madison and Chicago.
Both parents abused alcohol. They fought constantly, as did Tara with her father.
“They pushed each other’s buttons, and that brings the worst out in people,” her brother, the comedian Collin Moulton, said in an interview, describing their father as “a good guy in some ways, flawed in others,” who later found sobriety. “They had an abusive event, I don’t know exactly what it was,” he added.
Ms. Reade has not detailed the abuse, but wrote of her father as a defense contractor with the corporate ethics of a pirate who died “alone and broke” — karma, she suggested.
A stepbrother, Scott Thoma, disputed that characterization as “meanspirited.” Mr. Moulton’s defense work never went beyond public relations, he said, and he died neither broke nor alone.
Adding to the strife was Mr. Moulton’s affair with Mr. Thoma’s mother, which led to divorce, and the first beat in the peripatetic rhythm of Ms. Reade’s life.
Her mother would move her 160 miles south, to Verona, Wis. That pulled her away from what she portrayed in an online biography as qualifying for “the Junior Olympics in downhill ski racing” but which she acknowledged in an email was a regional “Jr. Ski race training program” in which she had shown promise.
High school brought a new passion: acting. In the Medium essay, Ms. Reade described moving to Los Angeles, looking for her big break, studying with Robert Reed of “The Brady Bunch.”
She would go on to nail her auditions for the Juilliard School in New York, she wrote, only to have an instructor inform her that no scholarships were awarded until junior year. Her father, whose income disqualified her for aid, refused to help, telling her, “Acting is a pipe dream.” (Her brother remembers their father denying tuition.) A Juilliard spokeswoman said school policy prohibited discussing specific applicants.
Ms. Reade with her half brother, Michael Enterline, in 1989.Credit...Tara Reade, via Associated Press
Even so, Ms. Reade wrote, she won parts in Equity productions and was “cast as a dancer in the film ‘La Bamba.’”
She is not one of the two dancers named in the film’s cast list, but is among scores of extras shown dancing in bars and music venues. Her brother recalled her excitement when she was singled out to do a hop and a twirl, visible briefly onscreen as Brian Setzer plays “Summertime Blues.”
It was during that time that she was nursing her older half brother, Michael Enterline, through the final stages of cancer. He had become a father figure, she recalled in an interview last year, and his death was devastating.
Her acting hopes were fading, too, and she shifted her ambitions to politics while studying at Pasadena City College. In the winter of 1991, she landed an internship with her congressman, Leon E. Panetta.
Then she spotted the opportunity she had been waiting for: a job opening in the U.S. Senate, in the office of Joe Biden of Delaware.
The Complaint
Mr. Biden at a 1994 news conference about the Violence Against Women Act.Credit...John Duricka/Associated Press
Ms. Reade’s descriptions of that inflection point in her life are sharply, dramatically precise.
“As the plane descended into Washington, D.C., my Siamese cat, Cleo, meowed loudly from under my seat,” she wrote in a 2009 essay for The WIP, an international women’s site. She recalled the city lights reflecting in the airplane’s windows as “my new job as a Senate staffer lay ahead of me.”
She came in as a staff assistant whose primary responsibilities were sorting mail and managing interns.
In interviews with The Times last year, she described Mr. Biden’s office as dominated by “alpha males.” But her arrival also came as Mr. Biden was working to undo the reputational damage wrought by his leadership of the insensitive all-male questioning of Anita Hill during the 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas.
By 1993, Mr. Biden was crafting the Violence Against Women Act and going out of his way to empower women on his staff. It was an unwritten rule that the senator preferred male aides to do menial tasks like chauffeuring him or fetching coffee, former aides have said.
The Biden Senate world was populated by striving Type A’s, and had a small-c conservative culture in which Ms. Reade didn’t quite fit. Former aides remember her as prone to storytelling and oversharing personal information. She rarely socialized with colleagues after work.
Ms. Reade has described chafing at the Ivy League tilt of the staff, and arguing for more interns from state schools. But her workplace issues would grow exponentially, starting with what she has described as the uncomfortable shoulder rubs from Mr. Biden.
None of the nearly two dozen former aides The Times interviewed remembered seeing Mr. Biden touch Ms. Reade.
Ms. Reade was a staff assistant with clerical responsibilities in Mr. Biden’s office.Credit...Tara Reade, via Associated Press
By her account, her problems came to a head with her refusal to serve drinks at a reception. A few days later, she said, Mr. Biden’s office manager, Marianne Baker, admonished her to dress more modestly — what Ms. Reade has described as one step in a campaign of retaliation.
Then, she says, when she met Mr. Biden in an empty Senate hallway to deliver his gym bag, he pushed her up against a wall, reached his hand underneath her skirt and penetrated her digitally.
Ms. Reade says she filed a harassment complaint to a Senate personnel office. She does not recall the date or the aide to whom she filed the complaint.
The Biden campaign said it could not locate documents that could shed light on Ms. Reade’s claims. Mr. Biden had called on The National Archives to release any pertinent documents, but it deferred to records-keepers at the Senate, who said they could not, citing privacy requirements. The campaign has refused to search for the record in Mr. Biden’s papers at the University of Delaware, saying nothing relevant is stored there.
What followed, Ms. Reade says, was effectively a demotion and freeze-out.
“I would get the silent treatment,” she said. “People looked at me like I did something wrong.”
She says she was removed, that April, from her position supervising the interns — which two of them recall — and her desk was moved to a windowless office.
Mr. Biden’s senior aides, Ted Kaufman and Dennis Toner, later gave her a month to find a new position, she says. Both men, as well as Ms. Baker, say they do not recall Ms. Reade or her charges against Mr. Biden.
There is some contemporaneous evidence that she complained of mistreatment while in Mr. Biden’s office.
As The Intercept reported in April, a woman living in California called in to “Larry King Live” in August 1993 to say her daughter had been working “for a prominent senator and could not get through with her problems at all.” She did not say what that trouble was. Ms. Reade has previously said her mother, who has since died, called into the program after she told her about her experience.
Three years later, in divorce proceedings, her husband, Ted Dronen, said Ms. Reade had “related a problem she was having at work regarding sexual harassment in U.S. Senator Joe Biden’s office.” He did not say Mr. Biden had himself harassed her.
She had started dating Mr. Dronen, then working for Representative Earl Pomeroy of North Dakota in the spring of 1993. As she struggled to find work — which she would attribute to being blacklisted by Mr. Biden’s office — Mr. Dronen helped her with money and eventually moved her into his apartment, he said in court papers.
And when his job required a move to North Dakota, Ms. Reade has written, the couple traded the capital for the “frozen tundra” of the Plains.
Trouble at Home
A pregnant Ms. Reade with her mother in 1994.Credit...via Tara Reade
The years that followed were ones of deepening struggle, punctuated by spasms of violence.
In North Dakota, Ms. Reade quickly became pregnant. But when Mr. Dronen reacted to the news by “slamming things around the house,” she fled to stay with her mother in California, fearing for her safety, she wrote in a sworn statement in 1996.
The mother-daughter living arrangement ended speedily and rancorously, Mr. Dronen wrote in a sworn statement, and soon the couple was back together, on California’s Central Coast.
Ms. Reade found work as an aide for State Senator Jack O’Connell. But two people familiar with her tenure said she regularly failed to appear at constituent meetings. When confronted by supervisors, these people said, Ms. Reade would insist she had shown up when she hadn’t.
She and Mr. Dronen had married in late 1994, and as the complaints about her work continued, Ms. Reade confessed that she was having a hard time at home, these people recalled. She was given a lighter schedule, but when the behavior repeated itself, she and the office agreed to part ways.
Asked about that account, Ms. Reade said she left because the office was not accommodating to her family situation, and she sent The Times a letter of recommendation from Mr. O’Connell; one of the people familiar with her time there said he had written it as a matter of course, hoping the best for her despite the outcome.
There was indeed trouble at home.
On the night of Feb. 21, 1996, Ms. Reade said in a court document, Mr. Dronen “slammed me up against the wall with such force that my neck, arms, shoulder and back are bruised. He punched my stomach and upper chest with a closed fist.”
Public divorce records show that Mr. Dronen admitted to spousal abuse, and that Ms. Reade got a temporary restraining order.
During an ensuing custody battle, Ms. Reade said she feared Mr. Dronen would beat their daughter if left alone with her for too long.
An official evaluation attributed Mr. Dronen’s eruptive anger to a tumultuous childhood, but suggested that Ms. Reade was exaggerating the threat, describing her as having “personality characteristics that predispose her to dramatically respond to a variety of situations.” Ms. Reade’s fear for her daughter, the evaluator wrote, was based less on a realistic assessment of risk than on her “unresolved anger towards her ex-husband.”
Mr. Dronen did not dispute Ms. Reade’s account of the violence on Feb. 21, calling it inexcusable. But according to the court record, he asserted that Ms. Reade had previously hit him in the face and, at one point, made a false allegation to get his probation revoked, resulting in the issuance and then withdrawal of an arrest warrant. (Ms. Reade denied doing so in a court declaration, and said she never initiated violence.)
In short, Mr. Dronen declared, “abuse, sexual harassment and other traumatic incidents” in Ms. Reade’s life were the “underlying psychological reason” she was “making me out to be some sort of monster.”
Ms. Reade would go on, actually, to describe him as a potential murderer. Mr. Dronen’s probation officer, she told her friend Wendy Dale, with whom she briefly worked on a biographical project a few years later, had warned her that her life was in danger, and that she should flee the state and change her identity. (The probation officer declined to comment.) Later, Ms. Reade would write that she learned her ex-husband’s “DNA was collected by the F.B.I. for two missing women’s cases.”
Apparently because of his record with Ms. Reade, Mr. Dronen was in fact among scores of local men questioned in the disappearance of two local women, two people familiar with the investigation said. But within weeks in 1999, the police had traced the women’s murders to a convicted serial killer, Rex Allan Krebs; a senior investigator said DNA was used only sparingly and was not collected by the F.B.I.
Mr. Dronen declined to comment beyond a statement from a representative saying he did not want to relive that period of his life but wished Ms. Reade well.
By then, mother and daughter had headed north to Seattle, seeking refuge with a domestic-violence organization called New Beginnings.
New Identity, Familiar Problems
Ms. Reade graduated from law school in 2004. It was recently revealed that she never obtained the undergraduate degree required for law school admission.Credit...via Tara Reade
Ms. Reade and her daughter had acquired new names and Social Security numbers in January 1998 under a program authorized by the Violence Against Women Act — the same law whose chief advocate had been Mr. Biden.
The newly renamed Alexandra McCabe secured a job as a victim advocate with the King County prosecutor’s office. She and her daughter lived in domestic-violence “safe houses” before settling into an apartment in the city’s Magnolia section.
By 2001, Ms. McCabe had enrolled at the Seattle University School of Law, where classmates recall that she struggled with some concepts and sought tutoring. She was so poor she had to borrow law books and occasionally brought her daughter to class when she couldn’t find child care. Her classmate Jenifer Robinson, who now practices law in Seattle, recalled her “heavy, dark sadness” and said it “appeared to be a real, genuine fear and was a huge part of her identity.”
She also harbored a secret. She had never obtained the undergraduate degree required for law school admission.
An Antioch University Seattle spokeswoman, Karen Hamilton, said Ms. McCabe had taken classes, but not enough to receive a degree; nor had she worked as an online instructor, as she claimed on résumés.
The law school, where she received a degree in 2004, has declined to comment on her status in light of that revelation.
After law school, Ms. McCabe took a job at the Snohomish County Center for Battered Women, where she was credited with creating a system to help victims navigate the courts.
But a legal career would not come together. She did not pass the bar exam and by 2006 was back in California, working in the domestic violence program at the YWCA of Monterey. Soon, she was also testifying as an expert in domestic-violence cases.
“She was meticulous and caring and sensitive,” said Ms. Ayres, her former co-worker and friend. “She always had that very calm demeanor about her. Her voice is such that it puts you at ease.”
But she frequently appeared at work late and had difficulty managing money as she tried to establish an upper-middle-class veneer for her daughter, Ms. Ayres said.
The two women had a falling out after Ms. Ayres, who had agreed to guarantee Ms. McCabe’s Pacific Gas & Electric account, received a bill of nearly $350, which included Ms. McCabe’s balance.
“She didn’t want to own it,” Ms. Ayres said. “She stuck me with the PG&E bill, and that was the last time I spoke to her.”
The YWCA job ended after Ms. McCabe and several other employees settled a lawsuit alleging various forms of discrimination by their superiors.
Another job, as executive director of a local animal shelter, would end after a couple of years amid concerns she was ill-suited for it, according to several people associated with the shelter.
Ms. McCabe was also running afoul of her landlord in Pacific Grove.
She had answered an ad in 2008 for a two-bedroom house, telling the landlord, Austin Chung, that she had little in the way of credit or references because she had escaped a domestic-violence situation. She appeared for her move-in without the full rent or security deposit.
“I knew it was a red flag, but I just walked right over it because she seemed so nice and I thought I could help a domestic-abuse victim and her daughter,” Mr. Chung said. “I put in new carpets for her, even repainted the bedrooms to their liking.”
Mr. Chung said he had to prod her to pay her rent, even after cutting the rate. Finally, feeling awful but fed up, he evicted her.
“She is the only tenant who ever made me weep,” Mr. Chung said. After she left, he recalled, Home Depot declared the carpets, damaged by her dogs and cats, a biological hazard.
Ms. Reade disputes his account of the condition of the house.
Ms. McCabe and her daughter moved across the bay, to Santa Cruz. By 2011, she had a new job as an adjunct professor at Hartnell community college in Salinas. She moved in with a new boyfriend, Edward Walker, with whom she hosted a radio show, “Soul Vibes.”
Her financial stresses, though, were growing. A bankruptcy filing from 2012 shows that Ms. McCabe owed her landlord $12,750 and was bringing in only $581 a month in government assistance. She was $400,000 in debt, largely in student loans.
Her relationship with Mr. Walker eventually came to an end after another instance of domestic violence. A neighbor told the police that Mr. Walker had physically abused Ms. McCabe and her daughter, The Associated Press reported, and he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor battery. He was sentenced to probation, and the charges were later dismissed.
Ms. McCabe moved to the next town, Aptos, where she started two ventures: a dog-walking service and a nonprofit that distributed outdated or damaged pet food to needy families.
That made for an odd fit with her work as an expert witness. “Now you’re working for Gracie’s Pet Food Pantry,” a defense lawyer said pointedly when she testified in an attempted murder case against two women. Noting that Ms. McCabe had no certification in psychology or sociology, defense lawyers asserted that they did not believe she was qualified.
The judge overruled the objection. One of the defense lawyers, Roland Soltesz, said in an interview that he decided not to press the issue after Ms. McCabe implied that, as a “legislative” aide in Mr. Biden’s office, she had worked on the Violence Against Women Act. Based on questions about her Antioch degree, he is considering a bid to reopen the case.
Ms. McCabe also volunteered at Pregnant Mare Rescue, a sanctuary for unwanted horses. There she fell in love with a foal, Charm.
She may have been broke, but she wanted to adopt him. The group’s founder, Lynn Hummer agreed to waive the $500 adoption fee, only to learn months later that Ms. McCabe had billed $1,400 in routine veterinary bills to Pregnant Mare Rescue.
She increasingly relied on the hospitality of strangers. Harriet Wrye and her husband, who knew a friend of Ms. McCabe’s, permitted her to move into a yurt on their property in Aptos. She would pay discounted rent and care for their horses.
“She confided in me a lot,” Ms. Wrye said, adding that “it was an irregular profile”: Ms. McCabe was caring and kind but also unstable and volatile, someone who did a good job with the horses but paid her $800 rent sporadically and asked for other financial assistance.
When Ms. Wrye and her husband decided to sell their house, they told Ms. McCabe she would have to move. She threatened to sue, and ultimately, Ms. Wrye said, “We had to pay her to leave.” That was in May 2018.
Asked about allegations that she had skipped out on rent, Ms. Reade wrote in an email, “I’m not going to wrestle in the mud with pigs.”
She moved to a rented room at a ranch owned by Kelly Klett, a lawyer who has worked pro bono for domestic-abuse victims. Ms. Klett, hearing Ms. McCabe’s history of abuse, used her truck to help her move. She offered her a reduced rent and lent her law books so she could study for the California bar exam.
“She knew that I had advocated for women in abusive situations,” said Ms. Klett, but in her time there, “she never once told me about all of these allegations that are coming out right now.”
The Fallout
Ms. Reade with her adopted rescue horse, Charm, in Penn Valley, Calif.Credit...Max Whittaker for The New York Times
When the rent at Ms. Klett’s ranch became too much, she moved north, to Grass Valley. Friends were retiring there and offered to rent her their guest apartment.
Ms. Reade — she had reclaimed her name, she says — was beginning to write her novel, “The Last Snow Tiger,” a political thriller about a friendship between a Wisconsin farm girl and her Russian-American neighbor.
At the same time, her online life was taking a sharp, pro-Russia turn. In 2017, on Twitter, she had shown support for the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. By late 2018, she was inveighing against “anti-Russian propaganda” in America.
“Why would a liberal Democrat support Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin?” she wrote in an essay on Medium. “Maybe it is because I believe he has saved the world from a large conflict on more than one occasion.”
She reposted that essay on the information-sharing social platform Quora, where she was following three accounts, all Russian-oriented, including those of a self-described former “Soviet propaganda executive” and a “Russian national-conservative” who has alleged that Ukraine’s anti-Moscow regime is a puppet of Mr. Biden.
She told visitors about a Russian man with whom she was video-chatting online.
The relationship was active when she made her first public accusations of harassment against Mr. Biden, according to two women who saw photos of the man, whom they took to be a love interest. Neither could recall his name. The relationship lasted through the summer, recalled one of the women, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity.
“She had a picture of a guy and said that they had been communicating,” recalled the other woman, Rachel Sabajo, a former housemate of Ms. Reade who confessed to developing a personal aversion to her. “I said, ‘Why Russia?’ And she said, ‘Putin is so dreamy, I really get him.’”
Ms. Reade denied having a romantic relationship with anyone in Russia, saying her online activity was part of her book research. She said Ms. Sabajo was trying to besmirch her, McCarthy style, because of personal animus, which she said Ms. Sabajo had exhibited through harassing messages. (Ms. Sabajo denied sending them.)
A close relative, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid becoming a target of online harassment, called the implication that Ms. Reade was somehow in league with Russia absurd, saying there was no interaction beyond innocent online chats as she explored Russian culture for her novel.
Ms. Reade was work-shopping the book in a writing group that included Don Rogers, the publisher of the local newspaper, The Union. After Lucy Flores, a former Nevada politician, published an essay recounting an uncomfortable encounter with Mr. Biden — he squeezed her shoulders and kissed the back of her head during an event, she wrote — Ms. Reade informed Mr. Rogers she had her own story to share.
That story, she told The Union, was about “power and control” in an abusive workplace. “I wasn’t scared of him, that he was going to take me in a room or anything,” she told The Associated Press.
And a friend who said she heard of Ms. Reade’s complaint at the time — she worked for Senator Edward M. Kennedy but now supports President Trump — told Vox that Mr. Biden “never tried to kiss” Ms. Reade, and “never went for one of those touches.”
Ms. Reade’s account was in line with other public complaints against Mr. Biden and did not get wide coverage.
Yet she came under harsh attack online. Mr. Biden’s defenders dug into her digital history and, upon finding her praise of Mr. Putin and her Quora page, would use that — with no substantive evidence — to suggest she was a Russian plant. Ms. Reade taunted them, in turn.
Working with her friend Ms. Dale, she produced a comic video of a mock interview in which she denied being a Russian spy while speaking in a bad Russian accent and being offered a lunch of vodka and caviar.
Behind the scenes, there was new trouble. Ms. Reade had begun working as a field supervisor for the Census Bureau, but she left after clashing with superiors, whom she accused in a formal complaint of creating a hostile work environment and discriminating against her.
Her online embrace of Russia seemed only to intensify. After the release of the Mueller report documenting Russian meddling in 2016, Ms. Reade posted an essay that decried xenophobia and opened with the Putin spokesman Dmitri Peskov quoting a proverb: “It is very hard to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if it is not there.”
She was also finding common cause with Mr. Biden’s detractors on the left, many of whom supported Bernie Sanders and believed Russia had been unfairly maligned in coverage of the Mueller investigation.
Among them was Katie Halper, a left-leaning podcast host. It was on Ms. Halper’s show that Ms. Reade made the assault allegation.
This time, her story moved toward center stage, fodder in the online political wars.
Mr. Biden denied her allegation even as he defended her right to be heard, while his defenders took to Facebook and Twitter to highlight the change in her account and emerging accusations of deceit from her friends.
Republicans in turn accused Democrats of hypocritically ignoring the “believe women” battle cry of the #MeToo movement even as they gave a pass to the two dozen allegations of harassment and abuse lodged against Mr. Trump.
Ms. Reade, deluged with messages of encouragement and threat, was by turns timorous and combative.
She gained and then lost a high-profile lawyer, Mr. Wigdor, but quickly procured the pro bono services of a lesser-known consumer protection and civil rights lawyer, Daniel Hornal.
When The Times approached her to discuss details of this article, she referred reporters to Maria Villena, her public relations consultant, who asked for written questions. After The Times submitted them, the actress and #MeToo activist Rose McGowan posted them on Twitter, as an example, she said, of the newspaper’s “tactics.”
Ms. Reade also put The Times in touch with a number of supporters. Among them was a law school classmate, Joseph Backholm, who said she had told him about an assault by an unnamed senator when they were students together. Mr. Backholm has run an organization in Washington State that opposes same-sex marriage and has received funding from local donors to Mr. Trump.
Ultimately, Ms. Reade responded in a string of emails and text messages.
“By coming forward about Joe Biden,” she wrote on Friday, “I have lost everything again, my job, my housing and my reputation. I have been called every vile name imaginable and presented as a monster by the media for daring to speak about Joe Biden and what happened. But I am free.”
