Jill Biden said Wednesday that her husband, former Vice President Joe Biden, has heard the message from women about his touching “loud and clear” and expects he’ll change how he interacts with people going forward.
Speaking on ABC’s “The View,” Jill Biden defended her husband, describing his public displays of affection as a means of connecting with people on the campaign trail. But she also said that times have changed, and that Joe Biden would be more cognizant of how he approaches women going forward.
{mosads}”I think what you don’t realize is how many people approach Joe, men and women, looking for comfort or empathy,” Jill Biden said. “But going forward, I think he’s gonna have to judge — be a better judge — of when people approach him, how he’s going to react. That he maybe shouldn’t approach them.”
“Joe heard that message, he heard it loud and clear,” she added.
Several women have come forward to say that Joe Biden, the front-runner for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, had made them feel uncomfortable by publicly touching them at political events in the past.
Joe Biden has defended his behavior as innocent. He has not apologized directly to his accusers, but he has said he regrets if there was a misunderstanding about his “intentions.”
“I’m really sorry if what I did in talking to them, in trying to console, if, in fact, they took it in a different way,” Joe Biden said last month during his own appearance on “The View.” “It’s my responsibility to make sure that I bend over backwards to understand how not to do that.”
“So I invaded your space and I’m sorry this happened,” he added. “But I’m not sorry in the sense I think I did anything that was intentionally wrong or did anything inappropriate.”
Jill Biden has also defended her husband for how Anita Hill was treated by the Senate Judiciary Committee during her 1991 testimony about Justice Clarence Thomas.
Joe Biden reached out to Hill in the run-up to his presidential campaign launch to express regret for how she was treated during her 1991 testimony, when she accused then-Supreme Court nominee Thomas of sexual harassment. Biden was chairman of the committee at the time.
Hill rejected Biden’s apology, saying she wasn’t convinced that he accepts responsibility for how she was treated.
“We believed Anita Hill,” Jill Biden said. “He voted against Clarence Thomas. And as he has said, I mean, he’s called Anita Hill, they’ve talked, they’ve spoken, and he said, you know, he feels badly. He apologized for the way the hearings were run. And so now it’s kind of — it’s time to move on.”
Last month on the “The View,” Joe Biden apologized for the Senate Judiciary Committee’s treatment of Hill, but said he did not mistreat her himself.
“I’m sorry for the way she got treated,” Biden said. “Look at what I said and didn’t say; I don’t think I treated her badly.”