Hey, everyone. If you listen to the show every day, you already know how valuable it is.

Every weekday morning, what next is there for you? Reliable is your cup of coffee. We break down the news,

give you context and analysis, stuff that is more important than ever right now. But here's a little

secret. We rely on you too. Which is why I'm hoping that today I can convince you to pitch in and become a Slate Plus member.

When you sign up, you will help our show keep covering this historic election year and the pandemic too.

And you'll also get great benefits, unlimited access to slate.com and a special ad-free version of this show and all your other favorite Slate podcasts.

The way to become a member is to go on over to slate.com slash what next plus.

That is slate.com slash what next plus.

All right. On with the show. Quick word of warning here at the top.

This episode does describe an incident of sexual assault.

I heard that you have this file you keep of hate mail you've gotten over the last year or so.

Is that true?

Yes.

Lucy Flores knows what it means to accuse a powerful man of hurting you.

She knows what you can lose.

It gets filled almost.

Luckily not daily, but it was daily. What's in there?

It's a lot of it's a lot of hate. It's a lot of vitriol. It's a lot of cruelty and a couple that are scary. So I keep all of those because you just, frankly, never know when something terrible

could potentially happen to you. And you want there to be a record.

Last spring, before Joe Biden was officially even running for president, Lucy Flores accused him

of making her uncomfortable in such a

peculiar way that it seemed hard to have made up. The story goes like this. Lucy had been running for

...