The woman, Amy Lappos, said in an interview with The Hartford Courant that Biden “put his hand around my neck and pulled me in to rub noses with me” at a fundraiser 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 that the encounter “wasn’t sexual” but that there was “a line of respect” and Biden had crossed it.
Her allegations follow a weekend in which Biden defended himself against a similar complaint from a former Nevada assemblywoman, Lucy Flores, who said in an essay published Friday that the former vice president had touched and kissed her inappropriately at a campaign event in 2014.
In a statement late Monday that Lappos sent to The New York Times, she said she was speaking out because she was disappointed in the way Flores has been treated in the aftermath of her allegations. “Uninvited affection is not okay. Objectifying women is not okay,” Lappos said.
“Referring to this type of behavior as ‘simply affection’ or ‘grandpalike’ 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.”
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 Biden’s past behavior, and seeking to link some of the attacks on him to Republicans.
Russo cited an image of Biden holding the shoulders of Stephanie Carter, the wife of former Defense Secretary Ash Carter, and another of Biden kissing the head of Sen. Chris Coons’ daughter, arguing that the criticism of the former vice president was rooted in inaccurate assumptions about what was occurring in the pictures.
Both Carter and Coons’ young daughter welcomed Biden’s embrace, Russo said, pointing to a Medium post Carter wrote and comments Coons made about how close his family is to the Bidens.
But Biden’s team of advisers is preparing for more criticism about his past behavior, acknowledging that, given Biden’s nearly 50-year career in politics, it’s inevitable that others will come forward to say he made them feel uncomfortable.
Russo pointed out that much of the criticism about 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 Biden is portrayed touching 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,” 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 NCAA basketball tournament.
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 Donald Trump. The aides spoke on condition of anonymity because the former vice president is not yet in the race.
But Biden’s inner circle is also deeply suspicious about the timing of Flores’ criticism, believing it is 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 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 Biden now, though, is that Flores is no longer alone in speaking out.
In her interview with the Courant, Lappos said the encounter that made her uncomfortable occurred at a fundraiser in 2009, when she was working as a congressional aide to Rep. 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 Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., confirmed Monday that the event described in the Courant article took place and that Murphy, who was a congressman at the time, attended it.
The recent scrutiny of Biden’s physical behavior began on Friday when Flores, a Democrat, published an essay in New York Magazine’s The Cut, which described an encounter with Biden in 2014 that she described as mortifying.
In the essay, she wrote that 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. Biden, in a statement Friday, said he did not believe he acted inappropriately, but pledged to listen to any accuser.
Since the essay published, Flores, 39, has praised Biden for being willing to listen to concerns and clarify his intentions. But she has said she finds it hard to believe that Biden could not have been aware of how he made her and other women feel and has called his behavior “completely inappropriate.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.