The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Allegations jolt Alabama Senate race
Moore denies sexual contact with teen in ’79, says he won’t quit race.
WASHINGTON — A month before Alabama’s special election, Repub- lican Senate candidate Roy Moore faced allegations Thursday of sexual misconduct with minors decades ago — and an immediate backlash from party leaders who demanded he get out of the race if the accusations prove true.
The fallout followed a Washington Post report in which an Alabama woman said that Moore, then a 32-year-old assistant district attorney, had sexual contact with her when she was 14.
Three other women interviewed by the Post said Moore, now 70, also approached them when they were between the ages of 16 and 18 and he was in his early 30s.
The Moore campaign called
the report “the very definition of fake news and intentional defamation.”
“Judge Roy Moore has endured the most outlandish attacks on any candidate in the modern political arena, but this story in today’s Washington Post alleging sexual impropriety takes the cake,” the campaign statement said, while noting that Moore has been married to the same woman for 33 years and has four children and five grandchildren.
Senior Republicans called for Moore to step aside if the allegations are shown to be true.
“The allegations against Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore are deeply troubling,” said Colorado Sen. Chairman Cory Gardner, who leads the Senate GOP campaign arm. “If these allegations are found to be true, Roy Moore must drop out of the Alabama special Senate election.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell added, “If these allegations are true, he must step aside.”
It’s too late for Moore’s name to be removed from the ballot for the Dec. 12 special election, even if he wants to withdraw from the race, according to John Bennett, a spokesman for the Alabama secretary of state.
“There is no process for Judge Moore to be removed from the ballot,” Bennett said. “The party and the candidate himself can remove their nomination, or revoke their nomination; however, the name will appear on the ballot regardless.”
In such a scenario, even if Moore earned more votes than the Democrat, the state canvassing board would not declare him the winner, Bennett said.
Alabama state law does allow write-in votes to be cast in general elections, as long as the names are for living people and written in without using a rubber stamp or stick-on label. Sen. Luther Strange, R-Ala., who lost in the primary to Moore, would be an eligible write-in candidate, Bennett said.
The incidents involving Moore are reported to have taken place when the 70-year-old former state Supreme Court judge was serving as an assistant district attorney in his early 30s, according to the Post.
The newspaper reported that Moore first approached 14-year-old Leigh Corfman in early 1979 outside a courtroom in Alabama’s Etowah County.
He struck up a conversation, Corfman and her mother said, and offered to watch the girl while her mother went inside for a child custody hearing.
“He said, ‘Oh, you don’t want her to go in there and hear all that. I’ll stay out here with her,’ “said Corfman’s mother, Nancy Wells, 71. “I thought, how nice for him to want to take care of my little girl.”
After phone calls and meetings, he drove her to his home some days later and kissed her, the Post quoted Corfman as saying. On a second visit, he took off her shirt and pants and removed his clothes except for his underwear before touching her over her bra and underpants, Corfman said. He also guided her hand to touch him over his underwear, she said. She said they did not have intercourse.
“I wanted it over with — I wanted out,” she told the Post. “Please just get this over with. Whatever this is, just get it over.”
Two of Corfman’s childhood friends said she told
them at the time that she was seeing an older man, and one said Corfman identified the man as Moore. Wells said her daughter told her about the encounter more than a decade later, as Moore was becoming more prominent as a local judge.
Alabama law lists the legal age of consent as 16. The statute of limitations for bringing felony charges involving sexual abuse of a minor in 1979 would have run out three years later. Corfman never filed a police report or a civil suit, the Post said.
Aside from Corfman, three other women interviewed by The Washington Post in recent weeks said Moore pursued them when they were between the ages of 16 and 18 and he was in his early 30s, episodes they say they found flattering at the time, but troubling as they got older. None of the three women said that Moore forced them into any sort of relationship or sexual contact.
Wendy Miller said she was 14 and working as a Santa’s helper at the Gadsden Mall when Moore first approached her, and 16 when he asked her on dates, which her mother forbade. Debbie Wesson Gibson said she was 17 when Moore spoke to her high school civics class and asked her out on the first of several dates that did not progress beyond kissing. Gloria Thacker Deason said she was an 18-year-old cheerleader when Moore began taking her on dates that included bottles of Mateus Rosé wine. The legal drinking age in Alabama was 19.
Of the four women, the youngest at the time was Corfman, who is the only one who said she had sexual contact with Moore that went beyond kissing.
Moore won the right to represent the GOP in the Dec. 12 special election after surviving a bruising primary election that divided the GOP, including President Donald Trump and his former chief strategist Steve Bannon. Trump backed Strange, the current senator, in the contest, while Bannon and much of the far-right portion of the party backed Moore.
None of the women making the allegations have donated to or worked for Strange or Moore’s Democratic opponent, Doug Jones, according to campaign reports.
Corfman, 53, who works as a customer service representative at a payday loan business, told the Post she had voted for Republicans in the past three presidential elections, including for Donald Trump in 2016. She saidshe thought of confronting Moore personally for years, and almost came forward publicly during his first campaign for state Supreme Court in 2000, but decided against it. Her two children were still in school then and she worried about how it would affect them. She also was concerned that her background — three divorces and a messy financial history — might undermine her credibility.
“There is no one here that doesn’t know that I’m not an angel,” Corfman said, referring to her home town of Gadsden.
Corfman described her story consistently in six interviews with the Post. The paper confirmed that her mother attended a hearing at the courthouse in February 1979 through divorce records. Moore’s office was down the hall from the courtroom.
Neither Corfman nor any of the other women sought out the Post to tell their stories. While reporting a story in Alabama about supporters of Moore’s Senate campaign, a Post reporter heard that Moore allegedly had sought relationships with teenage girls. Over the ensuing three weeks, two Post reporters contacted and interviewed the four women. All were initially reluctant to speak publicly but chose to do so after multiple interviews, saying they thought it was important for people to know about their interactions with Moore. The women said they don’t know one another.
“I have prayed over this,” Corfman said, explaining why she decided to tell her story now. “All I know is that I can’t sit back and let this continue, let him continue without the mask being removed.”
Moore was 30 and single when he joined the district attorney’s office, his first government job after attending the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, serving in Vietnam, graduating from law school and working briefly as a lawyer in private practice in Gadsden, the county seat.
By his account, chronicled in his book “So Help Me God,” Moore spent his time as a prosecutor convicting “murderers, rapists, thieves and drug pushers.” He writes that it was “around this time that I fashioned a plaque of The Ten Commandments on two redwood tablets.”
“I believed that many of the young criminals whom I had to prosecute would not have committed criminal acts if they had been taught these rules as children,” Moore writes.
By 1982, Moore was by his own account in his book causing a stir in the district attorney’s office for his willingness to criticize the workings of the local legal system. He convened a grand jury to look into what he alleged were funding problems in the sheriff ’s office. In response, Moore writes, the state bar association investigated him for going against the advice of the district attorney, an inquiry that was dismissed.
Soon after, Moore quit and began his first political campaign for the county’s circuit court judge position. He lost overwhelmingly, and left Alabama shortly thereafter, heading to Texas, where he says in his book that he trained as a kick boxer, and to Australia, where he says he lived on a ranch for a year wrangling cattle.
He returned to Gadsden in 1984 and went into private law practice. In 1985, at age 38, he married Kayla Kisor, who was 24. The two are still married.
A few years later, Moore began his rise in Alabama politics and into the national spotlight.
In 1992, he became a circuit court judge and hung the Ten Commandments plaque in his courtroom.
In 2000, he was elected chief justice of Alabama’s Supreme Court, and he soon installed a 5,280-pound granite Ten Commandments monument in the judicial building.
In 2003, he was dismissed from the bench for ignoring a federal court order to remove the monument, and became known nationally as “The Ten Commandments Judge.”
Moore was again elected chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court in 2012, and was again dismissed for ignoring a judicial order, this time for instructing probate judges not to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
All of this has made Moore a hero to many Alabama voters, who consider him a stalwart Christian willing to stand up for their values.
In its statement, his campaign pointed out Moore’s decades of public service, adding that “if any of these allegations were true, they would have been made public long before now.”