Tara Reade: Anita Dunn Was ‘Basically Reporting’ to Biden About Her Accusations

The Me Too movement rose to prominence after accusations of sexual harassment and assault against filmmaker Harvey Weinstein surfaced in the media. The next year, Time’s Up was funded by Hollywood celebrities to provide legal and media support for victims of workplace sexual harassment and assault. It raised at least $24 million by 2020.

Anita Dunn, a senior advisor to the White House and the co-founder of SKDKnickerbocker, a crisis management fund that worked with Time’s Up, ostensibly an advocacy group for survivors of sexual assault, was “basically” reporting back to then-candidate for President Joe Biden about the sexual assault accusations leveled at him by former Senate Staffer Tara Reade, Reade said in an interview.

“I went to [the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund] for help to come forward about Joe Biden. And, all the time, Anita Dunn… was basically reporting back to Joe Biden. She was literally getting paid at the same time I was there,” Reade told Sputnik’s Fault Lines. “It was egregious. It was absolutely egregious.”

In a previous interview, Reade explained that she would have never gone to Time’s Up if she had known Dunn was involved with the organization, noting that she only found out after an article about her case by journalist Ryan Grim was published about the situation. “I gave them so much personal information and they say they didn’t give it to Biden. But come on. They said they had firewalls or something.”

“I feel like my trust was violated,” she added.

Dunn’s firm was given more than $806,000 from the Biden campaign from the time Lucy Flores, the first Biden accuser to go public, made her claims until Time’s Up informed Reade that they would not fund her legal fees.

Reade accused Biden of assaulting her while she worked for him as a Senate aide in 1993. She says the then-Senator raped her in the Senate hallway. Reade’s case is significant because it has an unusual amount of corroborating evidence for an assault that allegedly took place decades ago.

Reade has multiple witnesses that she told about the assault shortly after it occurred and her mother seemingly called a US TV show to complain about the assault that same year. She also says she filed a complaint about the attack, but it is currently sealed by the University of Delaware, despite pressure to release them.

The school said in 2020 that it is “curating” Biden’s Senate papers and will not release them until two years after Biden retires from public life.

Reade says there are also mentions of the assault in a legal protection order against her ex-husband in 1995, which he also signed.

Reade currently lives in Russia where she works for RT and hosts a podcast. The Russian translation of her book is due out in two weeks. She claims she was forced to move to Russia because the FBI was harassing her, noting that they issued sealed subpoenas against her social media accounts but that they won’t tell her what the accusations against her are.

“Why was I such a threat in 2019, 2020 all the way through now? Well, it's because I'm telling the truth and they know it,” Reade concluded.

Anita Dunn was the communications director for the White House under former President Barack Obama. In 2019, she was hired by the Biden campaign to advise on communications, but she continued to work at SKDKnickerbocker, which also oversaw Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund’s public relations efforts.

In January 2020, she was reportedly given “decision making authority” in the Biden campaign, the same month that the Biden campaign contributed $548,480,27 to the SKDKnickerbocker which also happened to be the same month Reade approached Time’s Up about legal representation.

A SKDKnickerbocker spokesperson told media outlets at the time that it “was not involved in any conversations with them about Tara Reade’s situation. In fact, SKDKnickerbocker didn’t even know that Ms. Reade has asked for support from the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund until a reporter asked us about her.”

However, Reade’s case was not the only time Dunn was accused of using her position at SKDKnickerbocker to influence sexual malfeasance cases. Last year, it was reported that SKDKnickerbocker received more than $200,000 to provide “crisis communications” to Michael Madigan, then the speaker of the House of Illinois and the leader of the Democratic party in that case. Madigan was accused of retaliating against an employee who claimed her immediate supervisor sexually harassed her through text messages. At the same time, that employee, Alaina Hampton, was receiving legal advice from SKDKnickerbocker and Time’s Up.

“They never told me that they were also working for Michael Madigan and had they disclosed that with me, I would have never applied for legal funding or PR support with them,” Hampton said in an interview with US media.

She, like Reade, felt betrayed by Time’s Up. “It’s really a violation of trust and it feels like a betrayal.”

Besides Biden and Madigan, it was also revealed that SKDKnickerbocker advised Harvey Weinstein about the accusations levied against him and Time’s Up Board Chair Roberta Kaplan resigned after it was revealed that she was advising Democratic former Mayor of New York Andrew Cuomo about sexual assault accusations against him.

Dunn, meanwhile, has continued to be embraced by the Biden White House. Initially, she was brought in as a “temporary” senior advisor. In 2021, she announced that her tenure in that role was ending and she would soon step down. But in 2022 it was announced that she was rehired in the same press release that announced that Karine Jean-Pierre would take over as White House Press Secretary for Jen Psaki. She is now described as the “senior advisor to the president” and “assistant to the president.”

Last year, US media described her and her husband Bob Bauer, a personal lawyer to Biden as “the power couple at the center of Biden’s political universe.”