Tara Reade Is Now Being Investigated for Allegedly Lying on the Witness Stand

The district attorney’s office of Monterey County, California, has begun investigating whether Tara Reade lied under oath, an official told Politico.

Reade, who at the time went by Alexandra McCabe, spent at least 10 years testifying as a domestic violence expert for the California DA’s office. But recent media investigations into her background, spurred by attempts to verify whether she’s telling the truth about her claim that former Vice President Joe Biden sexually assaulted her, have raised questions about whether she lied about her educational background — relevant credentials for her qualification as an expert witness.

“We are investigating whether Ms. McCabe gave false testimony under oath,” Monterey County Chief Assistant District Attorney Berkley Brannon told Politico on Tuesday.

Reade spent years as an expert witness. But she long claimed to have graduated from Antioch University before attending law school at the University of Seattle. An Antioch official told CNN that she attended but didn’t graduate — and that her claim that she’d been a visiting professor there was false as well.

She did graduate law school, but the law school’s admission process required an undergraduate degree, raising questions about how she got in.

Reade’s high-powered attorney recently dropped her as a client, and several defense attorneys for people she testified against have said they’d seek to overturn their clients’ convictions with investigations into whether she lied under oath. They have called for the DA to subpoena her academic records to determine whether the credentials she presented to be an expert witness are credible.

According to Politico, Reade asserted she graduated from Antioch University during testimony in two separate cases — and that she testified that she’d never taken the California bar, even though she’d written on a personal blog in 2012 that she was planning to take it for the third time in hopes of passing.

Reade has accused Biden of sexually assaulting her when she was an employee of his Senate office in 1993. He has vehemently denied the allegations.

Cover: Tara Reade poses for a photo during an interview with The Associated Press in Nevada City, Calif., on April 4, 2019. (AP Photo/Donald Thompson)