New York Daily News

Roy Moore is a moral monster. And he could still wind up in the United States Senate.

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In the detailed and compelling recollecti­on of Beverly Young Nelson, Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore is a man who, in his 30s, not only wooed and groped teenage girls — but attempted violent rape, then used his status as a prosecutor to intimidate his victim. As if that weren’t enough, 12 people told the New Yorker that Moore had been banned from a local mall for badgering teenage girls.

This is a moral monster. And he could still wind up in the United States Senate.

The revealed truth of Moore’s character is finally forcing his would-be colleagues to disavow his candidacy and demand he withdraw from the race.

“I believe the women,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared Monday, “the women” being those who have stepped forward to describe, in detail and with corroborat­ing evidence, the predatory behavior of Moore toward teenage girls.

That, combined with McConnell’s demand that Moore “step aside,” marked a dramatic shift from the squishy “if true” formulatio­ns many Republican­s adopted last week as The Washington Post reported that Moore initiated sexual contact with then-14-year-old Leigh Corfman.

Just hours later, Nelson related her encounter. While in some ways her story echoed Corfman’s eerily, in her telling the then-thirtysome­thing prosecutor was even more brutal and predatory.

Nelson recounted how Moore, a regular customer at the restaurant where she began working as a 15-year-old waitress, flirted with her and touched her then-flowing red locks.

A month after she turned 16, around Christmas, Nelson had placed her yearbook on the counter. The grown man picked it up and wrote, “To a sweeter more beautiful girl I could not say ‘Merry Christmas,’ ” signing it, “Love, Roy Moore, DA.”

A week later, Nelson says, Moore offered her a ride home. He parked the car between the restaurant and a dumpster — and attacked her, trying to force her head into his lap and tear off her clothes.

Her words: “I was twisting and struggling and begging him to stop. I had tears running down my face.” After she resisted, she says, he opened the door, let her fall out and drove off — telling her he was a prosecutor and no one would believe her.

Moore’s rabid defenders call all this a coordinate­d liberal plot to smear their hero. But after Nelson’s account — and her offer to testify under oath — only hollow men and women can stand by him.

More than a dozen GOP senators have called for Moore to get out or pulled their endorsemen­t, without weaselly “if” words. It’s a catastroph­e that the rest, and Donald Trump, have yet to do so.

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