A woman's accusation.

"You're really well endowed for 14 year old."

      Eva Murry posts on Facebook, allegedly said to her by Biden.

     

It looked bad for Biden. Creepy.  Then the accusation fell apart.

Biden wasn't even at the event.  Oops.

The incident shows the problem with knee-jerk "believe the woman." Democrats primarily have themselves to blame.

Accusation dissolved

Shortly after the Tara Reade accusation evolved from Biden touching her hair to Biden digitally penetrated her vagina, the news world lit up with a second accusation. This one had the potential to serve as the confirmation, the second instance that would lend credibility to the original one by Reade. 

When probing the mist of unwitnessed, long ago events, investigators look for patterns.  One of the presumed verities of these stories is that there are no "isolated incidents." Perpetrators have patterns of repeated behaviors. They do creepy stuff because they like doing creepy stuff and can't stop themselves, so additional accusations are the evidence that any one incident was real.

This was it. The confirmation. Murry described the incident:

“He looked me up and down and hovered his eyes on my chest, so I had some clue [about] the notion of his comment but didn’t fully understand at the time. We quickly separated from his area after the encounter.”

And she attributed words to him: "You're very well endowed for 14 year old."

It seemed reminiscent of the Alabama Roy Moore accusation, and Democrats were stuck with a position on this having condemned him as a disgusting sex abuser. There could be no compromise on this one.

There was a problem with the accusation. The accuser is the niece of Christine O'Donnell, a former Republican candidate for US Senate. O'Donnell  was not just any unsuccessful Republican candidate. She was the one who needed to run television commercials saying that she did not believe in witchcraft and was not herself a witch, so she is famous for being wacky. Still, in the era of MeToo, we now had two voices, corroboration, a victim and an eyewitness.

Since deleted from Facebook

The incident got further credibility from Murry's specificity over the time and place. It was Delaware's "First State Gridiron Dinner", a formal event that took place on May 3, 2008. Naming the exact time and place differentiates this from accusations like that of Blasey Ford against Brett Kavanaugh. In that one the accuser didn't remember the place, didn't remember who was there, didn't remember what words or actions preceded the assault that she did remember. Here, we had specificity and clarity.

Pattern, creepiness, corroboration, and specificity. This could start a landslide of Democrats bailing on Biden, and there was movement. Tulsi Gabbard's former deputy policy coordinator tweeted a comment, commending Murry's “bravery, and for helping other women potentially come forward.”

Then Biden got lucky in a way that rarely happens in stories of long ago incidents: Biden had documentary evidence of where he was that evening twelve years prior. He wasn't at the event. He had had minor surgery on his nose and an aide attended in his place. As a senior US Senator, his official schedule of events of this kind is published contemporaneously and preserved. 

Not only did it not happen as Murry said, it could not have happened.

She and O'Donnell backtracked. We must have had the date wrong; it must have happened the year earlier, when Eva was 13, not 14, "even worse," since she was younger, so even creepier.  Biden could prove he didn't attend that year, either. 

The accusation did not just fade. It changed polarities. Instead of it being confirmation of Biden's misbehavior it became confirmation that old accusations are not necessarily credible, and indeed old memories by political opponents can be downright false. It turned Biden into the victim.  Even Fox News' reporting on it changed into description of her memories, not Biden's behavior. 

"I feel his comments were verbal sexual harassment. I think I was too naive to realize exactly what was meant at the time but I vividly remember the uncomfortable feeling I had in the pit of my stomach during the whole encounter. It wasn't Biden's words alone that made me so uncomfortable, it was the look, the tone, the whole general vibe was off."

This fits into another, more benign understanding of Murry and Biden, a teenage girl feeling awkward about her body. The incident now falls back into what Americans know about Joe Biden and have more or less accepted about him. He is old school, a hugger, tactile, in your face, jammed subway close, two handed handshake close. He gets read--misread--as creepy.

Eva Murry's accusation did him a favor. It is understood now that Biden gets false accusations. The COVID-19 virus does Biden a favor, too. He has to stop touching people.