US social employee and daughter of the US president Ashley Biden speaks on stage through the Human Legal rights Campaign’s 2024 Los Angeles supper at the Fairmont Century Plaza in Los Angeles, March 23, 2024.
Michael Tran | AFP | Getty Photos
Ashley Biden, the daughter of President Joe Biden, wrote a choose to say she would not show up at the prison sentencing earlier this month of the woman who stole her diary because “it would only improve my pain.”
The very psychological letter was unsealed by U.S. District Decide Laura Taylor Swain a lot more than a few months after the judge sentenced Aimee Harris to a single thirty day period in federal jail and a few months of house detention.
“My purpose in asking Your Honor to impose a expression of incarceration is to guarantee that a different female is not bullied and shamed like this ever all over again,” Biden wrote. “The despair I have normally felt will by no means definitely go absent. But I inquire Your Honor to hold Ms. Harris accountable so that she thinks two times prior to performing it to someone else.”
Biden also requested Swain to sentence the Florida resident to jail followed by a lengthy probation time period, in accordance to the letter unsealed Thursday in Manhattan federal court docket.
The letter was unsealed at the ask for of The New York Situations, whose law firm David McCaw pointed out to Swain that Biden and prosecutors did not item to it staying built community, though Harris took no posture on the request.
Harris, 41, also was purchased to provide a few several years of probation and to forfeit the $20,000 she acquired for selling the stolen diary.
Harris pleaded responsible in August 2022 to conspiring two many years earlier with Robert Kurlander, 61, to steal Biden’s diary and other things from the Florida household the place Biden had beforehand lived, and to transportation them more than point out strains for sale to the proper-wing group Job Veritas.
Job Veritas did not publish the diary, but yet another suitable-wing outlet did, shortly prior to the 2020 presidential election, which Joe Biden gained.
U.S. President Joe Biden and his daughter Ashley Biden show up at a Juneteenth concert at the White Dwelling in Washington, U.S. June 13, 2023.
Jonathan Ernst | Reuters
Harris was inspired to steal the diary to hurt President Biden politically, a prosecutor said at her sentencing.
Kurlander, who also pleaded responsible in the situation, is scheduled to be sentenced on Oct. 25.
A lawyer for Biden attended Harris’ sentencing on April 9. The law firm experienced claimed they would not insert to what Biden reported in her letter to Sweeney.
“I am deeply saddened that I even have to produce this letter mainly because my personal non-public journal was stolen and offered for profit,” Biden wrote in that April 8 letter.
“The position of the theft, I suppose, was to be equipped to peddle grotesque lies by distorting my stream-of-consciousness ideas,” Biden wrote. “The reason I have decided to not show up at tomorrow’s sentencing in human being is for the reason that it would only enhance my agony. However, I publish to request Your Honor to sentence the defendant to time in jail.”
Biden claimed that Harris’ theft of her diary and other objects “represent just one of the most heinous forms of bullying, not to mention a comprehensive violation of my privacy and private dignity.”
“After getting the victim of a criminal offense in my early twenties, I designed PTSD,” Biden wrote, devoid of detailing the nature of that criminal offense.
“The journal that was stolen was element of my initiatives to mend. I am a non-public citizen, specific only mainly because my father occurred to be operating to be President. In other words, the considerable perform I have finished to move past my trauma was undone by Ms. Harris’s actions.”
U.S. President Joe Biden and his daughter Ashley Biden attend a Juneteenth concert at the White Residence in Washington, U.S. June 13, 2023.
Jonathan Ernst | Reuters
Biden also wrote, “The defendant’s steps have produced a consistent surroundings of stress and anxiety, anxiety, and intimidation in which my innermost feelings are consistently distorted and manipulated.”
She also wrote that in spite of the theft occurring far more than 3 several years in the past, when Joe Biden was functioning for president, “for the reason that of the publicity it drew — exactly as Ms. Harris supposed — I am constantly re-traumatized by it.”
“I will without end have to offer with the simple fact that my particular journal can be seen online,” Biden wrote. “Consistently, I listen to many others grossly misinterpret my the moment-non-public writings and lob false accusations that defame my character and all those of the people today I appreciate.”
“Her actions were being not only re-traumatizing to me, but constituted a horrific trauma in and of by themselves. This ongoing hurt is a immediate end result of Ms. Harris’s intentional steps,” the letter mentioned.
In inquiring Sweeney to sentence Harris to prison and a lengthy period of time of probation, Ashley wrote: “She really should be held accountable for what she has accomplished.”
“Not only did she display a complete lack of morality, but she lacks any respect for the rule of regulation as effectively,” Biden wrote. “I have used significantly of my lifestyle seeking to communicate up for those who can’t discover their voices. I am fortuitous more than enough to have identified mine, and I use it currently — and every day — to make confident that bullies are held accountable.”
“Last but not least, I get worried that a non-incarceratory sentence will deliver a message — to her and to other folks like her — that it is all right to violate and exploit other people for your personal personalized get, regardless of the humiliation and suffering it leads to,” Biden wrote. “Be sure to deliver a information that these forms of damaging prison actions will not be tolerated.”
