Okay. The story I read had the timeline messed up and I failed to doublecheck.
And not all of them are bad for Biden.
But it is an odd confluence, regardless.
Josh, I see these as the possibilities:
1. She was harassed by Biden, and then, at a later date after 1998, decided to amplify the story to make her status as a victim more clear-cut, and used racy details borrowed (wittingly or unwittingly) from Dad's novel. A partial fabrication.
2. Sexual scenes in racy novels often involve manual penetration, and the similarities are coincidence. She didn't confide in her father between 1993-98 about an actual sexual assault which just happened to share elements with the fictional scene he wrote.
3. (more disturbing) She did confide in her father and he, God only knows why, used details of her story in a novel and turned an assault into a sexy and titillating tryst. If this were the case, the guy has horrendous issues.
4. Reade has a major mental illness which led her to believe in an encounter that in fact she had only fantasized, a projection of her perhaps legitimate fears of men with power.
5. Reade is lying completely, also lied completely back in the 90s, and unwittingly borrowed elements of her current lie from a book by her father, and is a sane person who, for personal reasons, or political reasons, or both, wants to take down old Joe.
So far, I'm drawing no conclusions as to whether any of these, or none of these, are what really happened. I want to believe someone who is a real victim, but pretty much everything I've ever heard about Biden, in the past four decades, makes the alleged behavior seem utterly unlike him.