Ashley’s diary and Tara Reade

In 2020 Ashley Biden left belongings, including a handwritten journal, at a friend’s house in Delray Beach, Florida. Aimee Harris, who was staying there, and Robert Kurlander took them and sold them to Project Veritas for $40,000. Both pleaded guilty in August 2022 to conspiring to transport stolen property across state lines. [1][4]

Pages later circulated online, and some passages were read as evidence that her father had abused her. In her April 2024 victim-impact letter Ashley confirmed the diary was hers and described the publication as a deep violation of her privacy. Harris was sentenced to a month in prison. [2][3]

What the case proves is the theft and the sale. The prosecution did not test what any passage meant, and no court or agency has made a finding of abuse. Ashley has not described her father as having abused her. [1][3]

Tara Reade worked as a staff assistant in Biden’s Senate office in 1992–1993. In March 2020, as Biden was closing in on the nomination, she said he had pinned her to a wall in a Capitol Hill corridor in 1993 and assaulted her. In 2019 she had described unwanted touching but not an assault. [1]

Some corroboration exists. A friend said Reade told her about the assault at the time. A former neighbor, Lynda LaCasse, told NPR that Reade described it to her in the mid-1990s. Former Biden staffers said they had no memory of a complaint, and no copy of the personnel complaint Reade says she filed has been found. Biden said on 1 May 2020: “It is not true. This never happened.” [1][2][3][4]

In May 2023 Reade turned up in Moscow beside Maria Butina, once jailed in the United States as an unregistered Russian agent, and asked for citizenship, saying she feared for her safety. Putin granted it in September 2025, and she now works for the state broadcaster RT. Her move does not prove or disprove what she says happened in 1993. [5][6]