US presidential candidate Joe Biden on Friday emphatically denied sexually assaulting a former aide, saying the incident she says occurred 27 years ago "never happened."
The former vice president thus broke a month of silence on the most potentially damaging claims he has confronted since launching his White House bid a year ago. Republicans have weaponized them in an effort to damage his prospects against President Donald Trump in November's election.
"They aren't true. This never happened," Biden said in a statement regarding the accusations made by Tara Reade, a former staffer in his US Senate office. The campaign of the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee had forcefully denied the allegations, but Biden himself had yet to address them publicly until now.
Biden, 77, said Reade's then-supervisor and former senior staffers in his office "have said, unequivocally, that she never came to them and complained or raised issues."
Reade said on a podcast in March that then-senator Biden sexually assaulted her in a Capitol Hill corridor in 1993, when she was 29.
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