WITH ONE KEY DIFFERENCE:

So all in all, I would say the corroboration issue is a tie. Reade has witnesses who claim more contemporaneous disclosure, but they are either anonymous or not necessarily reliable and with a close personal connection to Reade; Ford has named witnesses claiming disclosure after 30+ years, and while Keyser's statements do not disprove her account, they certainly complicate things.

Here are a few other areas in which the two can be compared.

Plausibility of the alleged offense. Here, I think the Kavanaugh allegation is much more credible. Two very drunk teenage boys jumping a girl at a party in an isolated upstairs room? Quite possible, though not necessarily with the intent Ford has claimed (more on that later). A U.S. Senator sexually assaulting an aide -- pushing her against the wall, putting his hand under her skirt, and pushing his fingers inside her vagina -- in a supposedly secluded area of a public hallway in the Senate office building, steps away from where (according to Reade's account) she had just seen him talking to another person? And all this at a time of heightened attention to sexual harassment, when another Senator, Robert Packwood (R-Oregon) was embroiled in a sexual misconduct scandal involving staffers and lobbyists? Much more unlikely.

Accuser's conduct toward the accused, post-alleged incident. Reade has, on at least two occasions, written warmly about Biden (in a 2009 article about being a victim of domestic abuse and in a 2017 tweet) and has retweeted many more favorable tweets about him. This is not a situation in which she may have had to humor an abuser to protect her career or livelihood. Ford, who has never had any personal connection to Kavanaugh after high school, obviously has no such issues. This is not dispositive (while Reade claims that her high opinion of Biden was shattered after the assault, it may be that she struggled to hold on to her prior idealized image of Biden as a champion of women's rights). But it does detract from the plausibility of Reade's account.

Personal record of the accused. Interestingly, both Kavanaugh and Biden have had a very pro-woman image in their public lives. Biden has been a major advocate for laws and policies to protect women from domestic violence and sexual assault (whether those laws and policies were always good is another matter). Kavanaugh is a man with a long reputation of championing women in the legal profession and has often talked about his mother, pioneering female judge Martha Kavanaugh, as his role model. During his confirmation hearing he pledged to hire all-female law clerks (and made good on that pledge, making women the majority of Supreme Court clerks for the first time in history).

Unfortunately, as we know from past experience, advocacy for women's rights is not incompatible with sexual predation. Packwood, a socially progressive Republican, was also known as a supporter of feminist causes.

What about personal background? It seems fairly clear that young Kavanaugh was sometimes a rowdy drunk. However, there is nothing in his known history to suggest a propensity for attempted rape. A former Yale classmate, Deborah Ramirez, has claimed that he exposed himself and encouraged her to touch his penis at a drunken dorm-room party at Yale, letting her believe that she was touching a fake penis. Ramirez's story is an extremely murky one. She came forward in 2018, as The New Yorker reported, after "six days of carefully assessing her memories" until she felt confident enough to name Kavanaugh. Some other classmates vaguely recall hearing about such an incident but not about Kavanaugh as the culprit. Kavanaugh's former roommate Kenneth Appold has said that he distinctly remembers hearing the story from an eyewitness with a mention of Kavanaugh's name; but attempts to get further corroboration have failed, and Appold's story seems to have shifted over time. Ultimately, the Ramirez story has to be judged inconclusive.

Biden has a notorious history of being "handsy": squeezing women's (and girls') shoulders, arms or hands, hugging, kissing foreheads, cheeks and hair, and so on -- captured in dozens of "Creepy Uncle Joe" memes. Last year, eight women, including Reade, came forward to say that he had touched them in ways that made them uncomfortable. None of these incidents were alleged to have a sexual component. (Indeed, some have pointed out that Biden's caught-on-camera handsiness extends to males.) Some of the accusers have explicitly acknowledged that Biden's intent was to make a warm, supportive gesture.

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