A woman says that Senate candidate Roy Moore (R-AL) started a sexual encounter with her when she was 14 and he was 32, the Washington Post reported Thursday.
Leigh Corfman says that in 1979, Moore started a conversation with her at an Alabama courthouse when she accompanied her mother to a child custody hearing. She was 14 years old at the time. Then a 32-year-old assistant district attorney, Moore offered to watch Corfman while her mother went into a courtroom and asked for her phone number, she says. A few days later, Corfman says he picked her up at her home and drove her to his house, where he touched her over her bra and panties and guided her hand to touch him over his underwear.
The Post says that three other women have come forward charging that Moore pursued them when they were between the ages of 16 and 18 and he was in his 30s. The women say he did not initiate sex and are troubled by the encounters.
On Thursday, Moore issued a statement saying the charges were untrue. “These allegations are completely false and are a desperate political attack by the National Democrat Party and the Washington Post on this campaign.”
If the allegations were true, they would have come out during Moore’s previous campaigns for Alabama judgeships, his campaign said in a statement, adding, “this garbage is the very definition of fake news.”
Moore is the former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court who professes very conservative views and is controversial within his home state.
Backed by Breitbart News’s chairman (and former presidential adviser) Steve Bannon, Moore won the Republican primary to fill the U.S. Senate seat of Tom Price. A special election will be held on Dec. 12.
Moore was removed as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court twice — once for refusing to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments he had installed in the state courthouse, later for barring clerks from issuing same-sex marriage certificates following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that legalized them.
Moore has said that homosexuality should be criminal, that Muslims should not be allowed to serve in Congress, that former President Obama was not born in the United States, that parts of the U.S. live under Sharia law and that the 9/11 attacks were due to gays and abortion.
