President adds pressure on candidate accused over under-age sex
US PRESIDENT Donald Trump would expect a Republican candidate for the Senate to withdraw from a forthcoming vote if allegations that he had a sexual encounter with a 14-yearold girl were true, the White House has said.
Senior Republicans are calling for the controversial Alabama Republican Roy Moore to pull out of the race to be elected to the Senate next month, after the ‘Washington Post’ reported that he initiated a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old girl when he was 32.
Mr Moore, now a 70-year-old judge, is hoping to take the seat vacated by Jeff Sessions, the attorney general.
He was backed by Steve Bannon, Mr Trump’s former chief strategist, and joined on the campaign trail by Nigel Farage former leader of Britain’s Ukip.
However, Mr Trump and the Republican establishment preferred his rival, Luther Strange.
A defiant Mr Moore emailed his supporters hours after the accusations were made and wrote: “I refuse to stand down.”
He said the accusations were from “the Obama-Clinton Machine’s liberal media lapdogs”.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters that Mr Trump believed Mr Moore should “do the right thing and step aside” if the allegations proved true.
“Like most Americans, the president believes we cannot allow a mere allegation, in this case one from many years ago, to destroy a person’s life,” Ms Sanders told reporters aboard Air Force One before Mr Trump arrived in Vietnam to attend an Asia-Pacific summit.
“However, the president also believes that if these allegations are true, Judge Moore will do the right thing and step aside.”
On Thursday, an Alabama woman, Leigh Corfman, now aged 53, alleged that Mr Moore approached her in 1979 outside a courtroom in Etowah County, Alabama, as she was sitting on a wooden bench with her mother.
As her mother went inside, he asked for her phone number and called twice to pick her up and take her to a house.
She recalled telling him she was 14 and they kissed before she asked to be taken home.
The second time they went to the same house.
She alleges that Mr Moore left the room and returned wearing only his underwear, then kissing her and taking off her trousers and shirt and
touching her through her clothes. He then guided her hand to his underwear, at which point she pulled her hand back and said she wanted to leave.
“I wasn’t ready for that,” she said. “I wanted it over with, I wanted out,” she recalled.
Two of Ms Corfman’s childhood friends say she told them at the time that she was seeing an older man and one said she identified the man as Mr Moore.
Nancy Wells, Ms Corfman’s mother, told the paper that her daughter told her about the encounter more than a decade later, when Mr Moore was becoming more prominent as a local judge.
Ms Corfman never went to the police and the statute of limitations has now expired.
Aside from Ms Corfman, three other women interviewed by the ‘Washington Post’ over the course of recent weeks claimed that Mr Moore pursued them when they were aged between 16 and 18 and he was in his early 30s.
None of them alleged that Mr Moore forced them into any sort of relationship or sexual contact.
In 1985, aged 38, he married Kayla Kisor, who was 24.
The couple are still married and now have four children and five grandchildren.