As allegations have begun to mount against Joe Biden, former second lady Jill Biden has reportedly broken her silence about her husband’s history of intimately touching and hugging women.
According to Jill Biden, the former vice president’s actions were initially “strange and uncomfortable” until she became more familiar with him and his family upbringing. Over the years, she has grown more accustom to them.
“He was always holding my hand, putting his arm around me, or brushing the hair from my face,” Biden said in her new memoir due out next month, “Where the Light Enters: Building a Family, Discovering Myself” via DailyMailTV.
Here’s more:
She admits that being thrust into a family of ‘huggers’ made her feel ‘strange and uncomfortable’, writing that Joe and his two young sons ‘never wanted to miss a chance to hold a hand, wrap their arms around each other, or give a kiss’.
She says that as an introvert, she ‘sometimes found all that affection draining’, but knew that it was the death of his first wife Neilia and their baby daughter Naomi that gave the family an understanding of ‘how precious every second could be’, which was displayed by ‘constantly touching’ and ‘being connected to each other’.
But it’s those same displays of affection that have led to eight women coming forward with their accounts of how Biden made them uncomfortable by squeezing their shoulders, touching their thighs, smelling their hair or kissing their head.
“I realized that physical affection played an important role in his entire family,” Jill continues in her memoir, per DailyMailTV. “Val [Joe’s sister] couldn’t walk by the boys without reaching out to touch their shoulders or brush their heads. Their parents stopped by often to shower the boys with kisses.”
And:
Jills tells of Joe’s nighttime ritual with the boys where he’d gently scratch their backs and arms as they settled in to sleep. ‘With your fingernails!’, the boys would insist.
‘He did the same at Mass as a way of keeping them still,’ she writes.
That affection, as many of his supporters and defenders have said, is what makes Joe the politician he is.
Jill says: ‘He connects with people so easily and he never hesitates when a stranger wants to tell him something personal or give him a hug.
‘When Joe loves, he loves hard; he’s all in.’
Former Vice President Biden has not officially declared a run for the presidency in 2020, but a prospective run is already being eclipsed by a slew of allegations that he acted inappropriately towards women.
The former vice president has more than a half-dozen allegations against him and a new allegation surfaced on Thursday when Sofie Karasek, a sexual assault survivors advocate, penned her interaction in an op-ed, Politico reports.
In the Washington Post op-ed, Karasek said she felt “shame and belittlement” when a photo of her and Biden at the 2016 Oscars began to go viral. She went on to describe her interaction as “unwelcome, uncomfortable and strange”