“I thought she was telling the truth at the beginning,” Biden said, according to the Post. “I really did.”

Biden added that any woman’s public allegation of sexual assault should generally be presumed to be true.

“For a woman to come forward in the glaring lights of focus, nationally, you’ve got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real, whether or not she forgets facts, whether or not it’s been made worse or better over time,” Biden said. “But nobody fails to understand that this is like jumping into a cauldron.”