The GOP’s favorite to win Alabama’s Senate race next month is being accused of inappropriate sexual conduct with a 14-year-old girl in 1979, according to an explosive new report in
The Washington Post.
Leigh Corfman, now 53, said she met GOP candidate Roy Moore when he offered to watch her during her mother’s child custody hearing. Moore, at the time, served as an assistant district attorney.
{mosads}Corfman said Moore asked for her phone number, and that the two met on two more occasions. On the first, the two kissed. During the second, she said Moore removed his clothes, took off her shirt and pants, and touched her over her bra and underpants, according to the account in the newspaper.
Corfman said the two did not have sexual intercourse.
The newspaper also found three other women who said that Moore had approached them around a similar time, when they were between the ages of 16 and 18.
All three of those women said that they never had any sexual contact with Moore outside of kissing. Gloria Thacker Deason said when she was an 18-year-old high schooler, Moore would bring bottles of wine to their dates, even though the legal drinking age was 19 in Alabama at the time.
One woman, Wendy Miller, told the newspaper that she first met Moore when she was a 14-year-old working as “Santa’s helper” at a mall. He began asking her out when she was 16 years old.
Another woman, Debbie Wesson Gibson, said that Moore asked her out after he spoke to her high school civics class when she was 17.
Moore and his campaign denied all of the allegations in a statement to The Washington Post.
“These allegations are completely false and are a desperate political attack by the National Democrat Party and the Washington Post on this campaign,” Moore, now 70, said.
His campaign added that “this garbage is the very definition of fake news” and that the accusations would have surfaced at an earlier point in his political career if true.
Moore is running to fill the Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions, who was tapped by President Trump to lead the Justice Department earlier this year. He’s running against former federal prosecutor Doug Jones, a Democrat, in the December special election.
The revelations threaten to cast a shadow over Moore’s campaign.
As of Thursday, Moore led the RealClearPolitics average of recent polls by a 6-point margin. The two most recent polls had Moore up by 11 percentage points, but the third most-recent, from Fox News, showed the race tied.
That smaller-than-usual margin has given Democrats some hope that the race could be competitive. But the party had so far bucked calls to flood the state with resources, arguing that Jones will be better off with conservative voters if Washington stays on the sideline.
