Democrat President Joe Biden praised former Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) during an event on Friday and suggested that Dodd is someone who treats waitstaff well, despite a report from 1990 that said Dodd had been accused of being a party to an alleged sexual assault of a waitress by former Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) in 1985.
“Chris and I have known each other for a long time, but if you’ll excuse a point of personal privilege, as we used to say in the Senate, I saw up close how he fought for human rights and human dignity in the Senate,” Biden said. “But do you know my measure? Madam Ambassador, Ambassador Kennedy, do you know what my measure is? People who tell me they care about people and then disrespect the waitress or a waiter. People who tell me they care about how, in fact, people are entitled to be treated with dignity, and walk by someone at a shoeshine stand and doesn’t say ‘Hello.’ People who do not do the just simply decent things for ordinary people. That’s the real measure.”
“I’ve never seen Chris, figuratively or — speaking, walk by anybody,” Biden said. “I’ve never seen him ignore his wife, ignore his two brilliant, beautiful daughters.”
Biden claims Chris Dodd, who has been accused of sexually assaulting a waitress, would never "disrespect a waitress" pic.twitter.com/oorUNllgCJ
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) October 15, 2021
A 1990 profile in GQ Magazine on former Democrat Senator Ted Kennedy outlined the sexual assault allegations made against Dodd and Kennedy:
In December 1985, just before he announced he would run for president in 1988, Kennedy allegedly manhandled a pretty young woman employed as a Brasserie waitress. The woman, Carla Gaviglio, declined to be quoted in this article, but says the following account, a similar version of which first appeared in Penthouse last year, is full and accurate:
It is after midnight and Kennedy and Dodd are just finishing up a long dinner in a private room on the first floor of the restaurant’s annex. They are drunk. Their dates, two very young blondes, leave the table to go to the bathroom. (The dates are drunk too. “They’d always get their girls very, very drunk,” says a former Brasserie waitress.) Betty Loh, who served the foursome, also leaves the room. Raymond Campet, the co-owner of La Brasserie, tells Gaviglio the senators want to see her.
As Gaviglio enters the room, the six-foot-two, 225-plus-pound Kennedy grabs the five-foot-three, 103-pound waitress and throws her on the table. She lands on her back, scattering crystal, plates and cutlery and the lit candles. Several glasses and a crystal candlestick are broken. Kennedy then picks her up from the table and throws her on Dodd, who is sprawled in a chair. With Gaviglio on Dodd’s lap, Kennedy jumps on top and begins rubbing his genital area against hers, supporting his weight on the arms of the chair. As he is doing this, Loh enters the room. She and Gaviglio both scream, drawing one or two dishwashers. Startled, Kennedy leaps up. He laughs. Bruised, shaken and angry over what she considered a sexual assault, Gaviglio runs from the room. Kennedy, Dodd and their dates leave shortly thereafter, following a friendly argument between the senators over the check.
Eyewitness Betty Loh told me that Kennedy had “three or four” cocktails in his first half hour at the restaurant and wine with dinner. When she walked into the room after Gaviglio had gone in, she says, “what I saw was Senator Kennedy on top of Carla, who was on top of Senator Dodd’s lap, and the tablecloth was sort of slid off the table ’cause the table was knocked over—not completely, but just on Senator Dodd’s lap a little bit, and of course the glasses and the candlesticks were totally spilled and everything. And right when I walked in, Senator Kelly jumped off…and he leaped up, composed himself and got up. And Carla jumped up and ran out of the room.”
According to Loh, Kennedy “was sort of leaning” on Gaviglio, “not really straddling but sort of off-balance so it was like he might have accidentally fallen…He was partially on and off…pushing himself off her to get up.” Dodd, she adds, “said ‘It’s not my fault.'” Kennedy said something similar and added, jokingly, “Makes you wonder about the leaders of this country.”
Fox News, the New York Post, and The Washington Examiner also picked up Biden’s remarks about Dodd and the past incident involving the waitress.