A second woman on Monday accused Joseph R. Biden Jr. of touching her in a way that made her feel uncomfortable, intensifying the scrutiny of the former vice president’s close physical interactions with women over the years as he prepares for a likely presidential bid.

The woman, Amy Lappos, said in an interview with The Hartford Courant that Mr. Biden “put his hand around my neck and pulled me in to rub noses with me” at a fund-raiser in Connecticut in 2009.

“When he was pulling me in, I thought he was going to kiss me on the mouth,” she said in the interview. She said the encounter “wasn’t sexual” but that there was “a line of respect’’ and Mr. Biden had crossed it.

[Joe Biden’s hugs and kisses were well-known in Washington. Now he faces a generational reckoning.]

Her allegations follow a weekend in which Mr. Biden defended himself against a similar complaint from a former Nevada assemblywoman, Lucy Flores, who said in an essay published on Friday that the former vice president had touched and kissed her inappropriately at a campaign event in 2014.

In a statement late Monday that Ms. Lappos sent to The New York Times, she said she was speaking out because she was disappointed in the way Ms. Flores has been treated in the aftermath of her allegations. “Uninvited affection is not okay. Objectifying women is not okay,’’ Ms. Lappos said.

“Referring to this type of behavior as ‘simply affection’ or ‘grandpa-like’ or ‘friendly’ is ridiculously dismissive and part of the problem,’’ she said in the statement. “Saying ‘but Trump….’ is dangerous and sets the bar for Democratic men far below where it should be.”

Mr. Biden’s team had already issued two statements trying to contain the damage. Earlier Monday, his spokesman, Bill Russo, sent a third, lengthy email to reporters criticizing what he said were misrepresentations of Mr. Biden’s past behavior, and seeking to link some of the attacks on him to Republicans.

Mr. Russo cited an image of Mr. Biden holding the shoulders of Stephanie Carter, the wife of former Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, and another of Mr. Biden kissing the head of Senator Chris Coons’s daughter, arguing that the criticism of the former vice president was rooted in inaccurate assumptions about what was occurring in the pictures.

Both Ms. Carter and Mr. Coons’s young daughter welcomed Mr. Biden’s embrace, Mr. Russo said, pointing to a Medium post Ms. Carter wrote and comments Mr. Coons made about how close his family is to the Bidens.

But Mr. Biden’s team of advisers is preparing for more criticism about his past behavior, acknowledging that, given Mr. Biden’s nearly 50-year career in politics, it’s inevitable that others will come forward to say he made them feel uncomfortable.

Mr. Russo pointed out that much of the criticism about Mr. Biden’s conduct has come from Republicans and that some of it has been manufactured entirely.

The aide pointed to photoshopped images, including one in which Mr. Biden is portrayed touching Ms. Carter’s breast, and another cropped photo of the former vice president comforting his grandson at the funeral of his son, Beau — which he called “most galling of all.’’

“These smears and forgeries have existed in the dark recesses of the internet for a while,” Mr. Russo said. “To this day, right-wing trolls and others continue to exploit them for their own gain,” he added, warning against a “cottage industry of lies.”

On Monday, the Drudge Report posted a collage of Biden photographs, including one that photoshopped him standing behind a crying piccolo player in the Villanova University band, a widely shared image from the 2015 N.C.A.A. basketball tournament.

Mr. Biden’s advisers believe that the more the right pushes images of him, real or fake, the more it will help them convince Democrats that Republicans are trying to derail a potential challenger who performs best in polls against President Trump. The aides spoke on condition of anonymity because the former vice president is not yet in the race.

But Mr. Biden’s inner circle is also deeply suspicious about the timing of Ms. Flores’s criticism, believing it’s part of a larger effort by hostile Democrats to undermine the former vice president’s candidacy before he even announces, the advisers said.

The aggressive response by Mr. Biden’s aides represents the latest indication of what they said over the weekend: that he will not be dissuaded by the allegations from entering the presidential race.

The challenge for Mr. Biden now, though, is that Ms. Flores is no longer alone in speaking out.

In her interview with the Courant, Ms. Lappos said the encounter that made her uncomfortable occurred at a fund-raiser in 2009, when she was working as a congressional aide to Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut.

“There’s absolutely a line of decency,” she told the Courant. “There’s a line of respect. Crossing that line is not grandfatherly. It’s not cultural. It’s not affection. It’s sexism or misogyny.”

She said she “never filed a complaint, to be honest, because he was the vice president. I was a nobody.”

The office of Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut confirmed Monday that the event described in the Courant article took place and that Mr. Murphy, who was a congressman at the time, attended it.

The recent scrutiny of Mr. Biden’s physical behavior began on Friday when Ms. Flores, a Democrat, published an essay in New York Magazine’s The Cut, which described an encounter with Mr. Biden in 2014 that she described as mortifying.

In the essay, she wrote that Mr. Biden had come to a rally to help her fledgling campaign for lieutenant governor of Nevada and had come up behind her, touched her and planted “a big slow kiss” on the back of her head. Mr. Biden, in a statement Friday, said he did not believe he acted inappropriately, but pledged to listen to any accuser.

Since the essay published, Ms. Flores, 39, has praised Mr. Biden for being willing to listen to concerns and clarify his intentions. But she has said she finds it hard to believe that Mr. Biden could not have been aware of how he made her and other women feel and has called his behavior “completely inappropriate.

Matt Stevens contributed reporting

Source: Read Full Article