Tara Reade's real legacy--a perjurer who doesn't care about survivors of sexual assault
Tara Reade may have risen to fame for her accusations against Biden. But we must not forget that she committed real-world perjury by lying about her credentials under oath.
On Tuesday, Tara Reade, the former congressional staffer who briefly rocked the 2020 presidential campaign with bogus claims that Joe Biden had sexually assaulted her, announced she was defecting to Russia and applying for Russian citizenship. She made the announcement alongside Maria Butina, the former journalist and entrepeneur who was convicted of spying for Russia—and is now a member of parliament for the party of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
In the absence of something I haven’t heard or seen, there has been radio silence from the elements who initially trumpeted her cause for much of the 2020 presidential campaign. Namely, Rose Twitter and Chapo Trap House Twitter. Perhaps being seen on stage with a convicted Russian spy made them realize they’d been taken for a ride.
One would have thought, though, that the scales would have fallen off their eyes far sooner. To be sure, Reade’s claims didn’t withstand even rudimentary scrutiny, leaving the impression that she was banking on Biden waving his hands and screaming “politically motivated!” in the manner of Donald Trump and Roy Moore. But we must not forget that Reade’s real legacy—at least for now—is something far more outrageous. How do you get worse than attempting to blow up a presidential campaign with bogus claims of sexual assault? Quite easily, it turns out. By misrepresenting your credentials under oath.
In May 2020, as part of a profile of Reade, CNN revealed that Reade claimed a bachelor’s degree from Antioch University Seattle under the name Alexandra McCabe—a name she used for much of the 1990s and early 2000s after fleeing an abusive marriage. She claimed to have completed her coursework through a “protected program” in which then-school president Tullisse Murdock worked with her to ensure her identity was protected while she completed her coursework. She also claimed to have returned to Antioch Seattle as a visiting professor for parts of five years. But according to an Antioch spokeswoman, Reade/McCabe attended Antioch but never graduated. The New York Times investigated further, and revealed Murdoch denied there was any sort of arrangement to keep Reade’s identity private.
This set off alarm bells in Monterey County, California—in the heart of California’s Central Coast. According to the Monterey County Weekly, Reade had testified in several cases as an expert witness on domestic violence. One of those cases involved Victoria Ramirez and Jennifer Vasquez, who were charged with attempted murder for setting fire to the home of Ramirez’ boyfriend after they caught him cheating. At that trial, Reade, who at the time was still calling herself Alexandra McCabe, testified about the nature of intimate partner violence—specifically, why the boyfriend initially claimed he saw two women fleeing the scene, but later told police that he actually saw two men on the run. On that basis, Ramirez and Vasquez got life in prison.
According to Vasquez’ lawyer, Roland Soletsz, the Monterey County DA treated Reade “like a star witness” because her testimony convinced jurors not to believe the boyfriend’s claim that Vasquez and Ramirez weren’t the ones who set the fire. Soletsz’ law partner, William Pernik, explained that expert witnesses like Reade are only called in for the toughest cases, making the risk of a wrongful conviction “astronomically higher.” Saying that Reade may have perpetrated “a fraud upon the court and got paid for it,” Pernik felt compelled to file a writ of habeas corpus in hopes of throwing out the conviction.
Pernik wasn’t alone. The Sixth District Appellate Program, which represents indigent appellate clients in Silicon Valley and the Central Coast, was concerned enough to ask area Monterey County defense attorneys to review any cases in which Reade lied about her credentials. Executive director Patrick McKenna told Politico that his office quickly identified at least six cases where Reade testified as an expert witness, with more to come. By then, Antioch had confirmed that Reade had only attended Antioch Seattle for three quarters in 2000 and 2001, and never graduated.
The implications were nothing short of seismic. If Reade misrepresented her credentials under oath, it’s possible that innocent people were wrongfully convicted. Almost as alarming was the prospect that manifestly guilty defendants could have their convictions thrown out. Even if the evidence was overwhelming, an expert witness intentionally misrepresenting their credentials is something that cannot be tolerated in a criminal trial—and there is no remedy short of a new trial.
Before the week was out, the Monterey County DA announced an investigation into Reade’s testimony to determine if it rose to the level of perjury. By then, it was already clear that her actions met the real-world definition of perjury. The sheer volume of cases made it hard to believe that Reade didn’t know she was lying. In particular, she had to have known when she took the stand at Vasquez and Ramirez’ murder trial that they could die in prison if convicted.
Had she been charged with perjury and convicted, she could have faced up to four years in prison. At the time, I initially wondered if an effective deterrent would be to slap her with a whopping fine, send her the bill for any legal expenses incurred in ferreting out her lies, and stick her with a restitution bill large enough to ensure she would have spent the rest of her life paying it. But the fact that she misrepresented her credentials in a murder trial was too much to overcome. She had to have known her testimony could have sent Vasquez and Ramirez to prison for life—and she lied about her credentials anyway. For that reason, I believed that if she was convicted in perjury, she needed to go to prison.
Unfortunately, in November—a few weeks after Biden’s victory—prosecutors decided not to charge Reade with perjury. They concluded that Reade had testified as an expert witness in 10 cases from 2006 to 2019; earlier estimates suggested she’d testified in as many as 20 cases in the previous decade. However, they believed that it would be too difficult to prove whether Reade’s misrepresentations of her credentials would have influenced the outcome in any of those cases. That’s hard to understand. After all, as public defender-turned-defense attorney Mark Reichel told The Times, expert witnesses have to show that they have “expertise above the regular person” in order to be allowed to testify. You would think claiming you have that expertise when you actually don’t have it would be the definition of materiality.
Less than a year later, in October 2021, prosecutors tacitly admitted that there was a chance a judge would see differently. They reached a deal with three of the defendants for sharply reduced sentences. In the biggest reduction of all, Vasquez had her sentence reduced to nine years and eight months, while Ramirez had hers reduced to 10 years. Another defendant, James Sloop, had his sentence cut almost in half, from 17 years to eight years. You don’t make such a deal unless you’re not willing to chance a new trial.
In reporting the deal, the Weekly said that Reade’s “big accusation” against Biden brought her into the headlines, but her “small lie” about her credentials had major repercussions. The Weekly got it wrong—bad wrong. Her lies about her credentials cast doubt on the very integrity of our criminal justice system. Every single case in which she testified now has a huge asterisk by it. And even if her actions didn’t meet the legal definition of perjury, they damn sure met the real-world one. For that reason, it was nothing short of obscene when she whined to NewsBusters that the Democrats weren’t taking her seriously. It was equally obscene when Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene invited her to testify before Congress. Seeing elements of the right-wing ecosystem platform someone who, by any standard, perjured herself when that same ecosystem kneecapped Bill Clinton for something that really wasn’t perjury is the definition of hypocrisy—and proves they, like Reade, don’t really give a damn for survivors.
Yep, you read that last part right. It’s inconceivable that Reade didn’t know what impact that overturning convictions of manifestly guilty defendants could have potentially had on victims. According to a profile of Reade in the Monterey County Weekly, Reade worked as a victim advocate for the King County, Washington (Seattle) Prosecutor’s Office, and also worked as a community services manager at a battered women’s shelter in nearby Everett. This woman knew exactly what she was doing. If she cared one iota about giving survivors closure, she would have never misrepresented her credentials and potentially forced them to go through the ordeal of another trial. That is many, many times more depraved than her attempts to upend the 2020 campaign.
Reade may have come to public attention for her accusations against Biden. But don’t forget, never forget, that this woman was doing something far more heinous for some time before she lobbed those accusations. She was willfully misrepresenting her credentials under oath—and thus potentially sending innocent people to prison and jeopardizing the convictions of the manifestly guilty. Let that be her legacy.