A former Nevada politician published an essay Friday recalling a 2014 incident in which former Vice President Joe Biden made her feel “gross” when he grabbed her by the shoulders from behind and kissed her hair during an event for her campaign for office that year.
“He was there to promote me as the right person for the lieutenant governor job,” Lucy Flores wrote in a first-person piece in The Cut. “Instead, he made me feel uneasy, gross, and confused.”
The contact wasn’t violent, or overtly sexual, but she still found it “demeaning and disrespectful,” she wrote.
“I felt two hands on my shoulders. I froze,” she recalled of Biden approaching her in a holding area before a campaign event in Vegas. She was 35 at the time.
“Why is the vice-president of the United States touching me?” she asked herself.
“I felt him get closer to me from behind. He leaned further in and inhaled my hair. I was mortified. I thought to myself, ‘I didn’t wash my hair today and the vice-president of the United States is smelling it. And also, what in the actual f—?’”
Biden “proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head. My brain couldn’t process what was happening. I was embarrassed. I was shocked. I was confused. There is a Spanish saying, ‘tragame tierra,’ it means, ‘earth, swallow me whole’” she wrote.
“The vice-president of the United States of America had just touched me in an intimate way reserved for close friends, family, or romantic partners — and I felt powerless to do anything about it.”
Still, it didn’t rise to the level of a sexual assault, she said.
So she “did what most women do, and moved on with my life and my work.”