Another woman has accused former vice-president Joe Biden of unwanted touching, just days after former Nevada lieutenant governor nominee Lucy Flores wrote on the Cut that he inappropriately kissed her head at a 2014 event. Speaking with the Hartford Courant on Monday, Amy Lappos said that Biden inappropriately touched and rubbed noses with her during a 2009 political fundraiser.
Lappos, now 43, told the Courant that the incident occurred in October 2009 during a Greenwich, Connecticut, fundraiser for U.S. representative Jim Himes. Lappos was working at the time as a congressional aide for Himes (who she says was not in the room when the incident occurred), and was volunteering at the event. “It wasn’t sexual, but he did grab me by the head,” Lappos told the Courant. “He put his hand around my neck and pulled me in to rub noses with me. When he was pulling me in, I thought he was going to kiss me on the mouth.”
Lappos, who is now a freelance nonprofit agency worker, further told the Courant:“I never filed a complaint, to be honest, because he was the vice president. I was a nobody. There’s absolutely a line of decency. 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.”
The Courant notes that Lappos originally made the allegation on Sunday in the Connecticut Women in Politics Facebook page, under the pseudonym Alice Paul, the name of a suffragette. Her post came two days after Flores published an essay for the Cut, in which she stated that Biden put his hands on her shoulders, inhaled her hair, and planted a “big slow kiss on the back” of her head at a campaign rally.