‘Never happened’

US presidential candidate Joe Biden on Friday emphatically denied sexually assaulting a former aide, saying the alleged incident 27 years ago "never happened."

The former vice president thus broke a month of silence on the most potentially damaging claims he has confronted since launching his White House bid a year ago.

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Republicans have tried to use them to damage his prospects against President Donald Trump in November's election.

"They aren't true. This never happened," Biden said in a statement addressing the accusations made by Tara Reade, a former staffer in his Senate office.

The campaign of the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee had forcefully denied the allegations, but Biden himself had yet to address them publicly until now.

Biden, 77, said Reade's then-supervisor and former senior staffers in his office "have said, unequivocally, that she never came to them and complained or raised issues."

Reade said on a podcast in March that then-senator Biden sexually assaulted her in a Capitol Hill corridor in 1993, when she was 29. Reade, now 56, alleged that Biden pinned her against a wall when she brought him a gym bag, put his hands "down my skirt" and violated her.

Reade's public account evolved over time. In early 2019, when Biden was preparing his presidential bid, she was among multiple women who accused Biden of touching them inappropriately, or in ways that made them feel uncomfortable. She has since presented a more serious claim of assault to media outlets, and filed an incident report with the Washington police in early April in which she did not name Biden.

Trump, who faces Biden in a presidential election, himself faced more than a dozen accusations of sexual harassment and assault before he became president.

He came out Friday on the side of Biden, telling a right-wing radio host: "I would just say to Joe Biden: Just go out and fight it. It's, you know, it's one of those things."

"I've been a total victim of this nonsense false accusations," he said.