I read everything I could find about it and couldn’t find it credible. She’d been super anti-Putin, then had some tweet that made it sound like she’d been there, then abruptly started tweeting about how sexy Putin is for the next year or two (I forget). Published articles that came out in Russian before the English versions even though she just mentioned trying to learn a bit before it. She’s praised Biden’s commitment to women consistently in the past until this. Her initial claim was that what happened with him wasn’t sexual (her own words) but then she came out with a very sexual accusation. Every article I’ve seen where former coworkers were tracked down failed to find it credible—the claimed location was busy with constant foot traffic and nowhere private. She claimed he often asked her to work fundraisers in an objectifying way but multiple former staffers directly contradicted that—said Biden made a point of never putting women in a position that could even seem like that. (I’m phrasing horribly because it’s been a thousand years since I read about it, but I’ll reply with links in a sec.) I think her brother and a friend were the only ones who remembered her mentioning the assault at the time except her brother’s first response didn’t include anything about being sexually assaulted—he called back after to add that part.

I don’t know what happened to her. I’m not going to question whether she was assaulted but no matter how hard I looked into the details I couldn’t find any reasonable way to trust the story she told. I hope she’s okay and that the weird Russian propaganda phase was just a bizarre personal choice, but this is 2020 and shit like that is unsettling. The whole thing was a mess.