InfoSearched
A decades-old phone call to Larry King just became the center of the 2020 race.
The Intercept published a resurfaced clip on April 24, 2020, from CNN’s “Larry King Live” that appears to back up part of Tara Reade’s account against Joe Biden. The August 11, 1993 broadcast, titled “Washington: The Cruelest City on Earth?”, features a caller from San Luis Obispo, California, describing a daughter who had just left a job with “a prominent senator” and couldn’t get her problems addressed. Reade says the caller was her mother, Jeanette Altimus, and that the call happened right as Reade was leaving Biden’s Senate office.
- Reade worked as a staff assistant for then-Senator Biden from December 1992 to August 1993, and says her mother phoned into King’s show anonymously after Reade reported workplace problems.
- On the tape, the caller tells King: “My daughter has just left there, after working for a prominent senator, and could not get through with her problems at all, and the only thing she could have done was go to the press, and she chose not to do it out of respect for him.”
- Public records confirm Altimus lived in San Luis Obispo at the time of the broadcast, and the clip does not name Biden or mention sexual assault directly.
Evidence Revealed by the Recording
King introduces the caller, and after she describes her daughter’s situation, he asks for clarification: “So she had a story to tell but out of respect for the person she worked for she didn’t tell it?” The caller responds simply, “That’s true.” That exchange is the entirety of the substantive content — no senator is named, no assault is described, and the word “harassment” never comes up.
What makes the clip significant isn’t what’s said on air, it’s the timing. Reade had told reporters months earlier that her mother called into a cable news show around the time Reade left Biden’s office in 1993, seeking advice without naming him. The unearthed segment lines up with that account almost exactly — same year, same setup, same reluctance to go public “out of respect for him.”
“My daughter has just left there, after working for a prominent senator, and could not get through with her problems at all… she chose not to do it out of respect for him.”
Tape Supports Reade’s Stated Timeline
Reade has said she confided in her mother, brother, and a friend about her experience with Biden not long after it allegedly happened in 1993. Critics of her account have pointed to the lack of contemporaneous documentation as a reason for skepticism. The Larry King footage doesn’t prove the underlying allegation, but it does establish that someone matching Reade’s mother’s description and location called a national news program the same year Reade departed the Senate, describing a situation consistent with what Reade says she told her family at the time.
Fox News and CNN both picked up the clip within hours of The Intercept’s report, giving it reach well beyond the outlets that had been covering Reade’s allegations since she first went public. That crossover coverage is part of what turned a grainy 27-year-old cable segment into a genuine complication for a presidential campaign in its final nomination stretch.
The Political Timing
The tape surfaced just as Biden’s team was finalizing the paperwork to formally secure the Democratic nomination, a moment his campaign wanted to be about consolidating the party, not fielding questions about a 1993 Senate office. Biden has denied Reade’s allegations outright, but the corroborating detail from his own era in the Senate makes the denial harder to leave unchallenged, especially for Democrats who spent the previous two years insisting that women’s accounts of workplace harassment be taken seriously by default.
That tension has put a number of prominent Democratic supporters in an awkward spot, having built their backing of Biden partly on the argument that he represented a steadier, more scrutinized alternative to the incumbent. Coverage of the tape has followed closely on other Biden storylines this cycle, including the rollout detailed in Team Biden releases its plan for America and the running catalogue collected in Joe Biden’s Bloopers, Blunders, and Gaffes: The TOP 30 Countdown!.
Reade’s attorney has said she stands by her account and has no plans to walk it back. The next question is whether more corroborating material from 1993 turns up — friends, family, or former colleagues who say Reade told them the same story before Biden was a presidential candidate — because right now, a two-minute phone call to Larry King is the closest thing to a contemporaneous witness this story has.
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