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Candidate in crisis
Calls intensify for Senate candidate to quit Alabama race
GOP leaders threatened to expel Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore if he wins.
WASHINGTON — Amid new allegations that Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore molested teenage girls decades ago, GOP leaders intensified their calls Monday for him to quit the race, even threatening to expel Moore if he wins.
The accusations against Moore have thrown the GOP into a crisis, splintering the party and risking defeat in the Dec. 12 special election, for which polls show Democrat Doug Jones now has a narrow lead in the Deep South state.
On Monday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., called on Moore to withdraw from the race. The head of the Republican campaign committee, Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., said the Senate should vote to expel Moore if he is elected.
“I believe the women,” McConnell told reporters Monday in Kentucky. “I think he should step aside.”
Four women told The Washington Post that they had been pursued by Moore when they were in their teens — one as young as 14 — and he was in his 30s, in a report published last week.
Another Alabama woman stepped forward Monday, claiming Moore tried to force her into a sexual position when she was 16, after offering to give her a ride home from her waitress shift in the late 1970s.
Beverly Young Nelson, who turns 56 on Tuesday, said Moore, then a 30-yearold deputy district attorney in Etowah County, had been a regular customer at the restaurant and often complimented her on her looks.
A few days before Christmas in 1977, Nelson said, she brought her high school yearbook into the restaurant and Moore asked if he could sign it. She said yes, and he wrote, “To a sweeter more beautiful girl I could not say ‘Merry Christmas.’ ”
He signed it, “Love, Roy Moore D.A.,” according to photocopies of the page provided to reporters by attorney Gloria Allred, who is representing Nelson.
“I trusted Mr. Moore because he was the district attorney,” she said. “I thought that he was simply doing something nice.”
But instead of taking her home, Nelson said, Moore drove to the back of the restaurant and began to grope her, putting his hand on her breasts and later squeezing the back of her neck, attempting to force her head toward his crotch.
“I thought that he was going to rape me,” she said. “I was twisting and I was struggling and I was begging him to stop.”
Nelson said he eventually allowed her to open the car door and she either fell out or was pushed out. She said Moore told her that “no one will ever believe you” if she told anyone about what had happened.
This is the first time Nelson is disclosing the allegations publicly, though she said she had previously told her sister, mother and husband about her encounter with Moore.
Moore’s Senate campaign immediately dismissed the new allegations.
“Gloria Allred is a sensationalist leading a witch hunt, and she is only around to create a spectacle. Allred was the attorney who claims credit for giving us Roe vs. Wade, which has resulted in the murder of tens of millions of unborn babies,” campaign Chairman Bill Armistead said in a statement.
Moore has denied any sexual misconduct, though initially he acknowledged dating young women and said he only did so with the permission of their mothers. Asked last week if he recalled dating girls as young as 17 during that time, Moore told Fox News’s Sean Hannity: “Not generally, no. If I did, you know, I’m not going to dispute anything, but I don’t remember anything like that.”
That initially weak denial led several GOP senators to call for Moore to quit.
Moore so far is steadfastly refusing to step aside. He swiftly shot back that it’s McConnell who should go, echoing the views of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who has turned the Alabama Senate race into the marquee contest in his emerging battle to take down establishment Republicans he views as insufficiently loyal to President Donald Trump’s agenda.
“The person who should step aside is @SenateMajLdr Mitch McConnell. He has failed conservatives and must be replaced. #DrainTheSwamp,” Moore tweeted.
The former judge’s wife, Kayla, also went on the attack on Facebook, calling the allegations a “witchhunt.” The couple have said they plan to sue The Post.