Latest accuser further roils Alabama race
US SENATE
WASHINGTON — A second woman emerged Monday to accuse Roy Moore of sexually assaulting her as a teenager in the late 1970s, this time in a locked car, further roiling the Alabama Republican’s candidacy for an open Senate seat. Leaders
of Moore’s own party intensified their efforts to push him out of the race.
Anticipating a tearful Beverly Young Nelson’s allegations at a New York news conference, Moore’s campaign ridiculed her attorney, Gloria Allred, beforehand as “a sensationalist leading a witch hunt.” The campaign said Moore “has never had any sexual misconduct with anyone,” and the candidate insisted he is in the race to stay.
“I can tell you without hesitation this is absolutely false,” Moore said at a news conference in Gallant, Alabama. “I never did what she said I did. I don’t even know the woman.”
He urged “Godfearing conservatives” to counter his abandonment by Washington Republicans.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and Moore essentially declared open war on each other. McConnell said the removed former judge should quit the race over a series of recent allegations of past improper relationships with teenage girls. No, said Moore, the Kentucky senator is the one who should get out.
Cory Gardner of Colorado, who heads the Senate GOP’s campaign organization, said not only should Moore step aside but if he should win “the Senate should vote to expel him because he does not meet the ethical and moral requirements of the United States Senate.”
McConnell took a remarkably personal swipe at his party’s candidate for a Senate seat that the GOP can ill afford to lose. “I believe the women,” he said, marking an intensified effort by leaders to ditch Moore before a Dec. 12 special election that has swung from an assured GOP victory to one that Democrat Doug Jones could conceivably swipe. Polls now show Jones has a narrow lead in the Deep South state.
Moore fired back at McConnell on Twitter.
“The person who should step aside is @ SenateMajLdr Mitch McConnell. He has failed conservatives and must be replaced. #DrainTheSwamp,” Moore wrote.
At her news conference, Nelson, 56, said Moore was a regular customer at the restaurant where she worked after school in Gadsden, Alabama. One night when she was 16, Moore offered to drive her home, she said, but instead parked behind the restaurant and touched her breasts and locked the door to keep her inside. She said he squeezed her neck while trying to push her head toward his crotch and tried to pull her shirt off.
“I thought that he was going to rape me,” she said.
Moore finally stopped and as she got out of the car, he warned that no one would believe her because he was a county prosecutor, Nelson said. She said her neck was “black and blue and purple” the next morning and she immediately quit her job.
Nelson said that shortly before that, she’d brought her high school yearbook to the restaurant and Moore signed it. A copy of her statement included a picture of what she said was his signature and a message saying, “To a sweeter more beautiful girl I could not say, ‘Merry Christmas.’”
Nelson said she told her younger sister about the incident two years later, told her mother four years ago and told her husband before they married. She said she and her husband supported Donald Trump for president.
Last Thursday, The Washington Post reported that in 1979, when Moore was 32, he had sexual contact with a 14-year-old girl and pursued romantic relationships with three other teenage girls around the same period. The women made their allegations on the record, and the Post cited two dozen other sources.
Moore has called the allegations “completely false and misleading.”
McConnell, speaking Monday in Louisville, said Moore “should step aside” and acknowledged that a write-in effort by another candidate was possible. He said, “We’ll see,” when asked if the alternative could be Sen. Luther Strange, whom Moore ousted in a September party primary despite McConnell’s support.
But Strange told reporters late Monday that “a write-in candidacy is highly unlikely.”
“I made my case during the election,” Strange said. “So now, it’s really going to be up to the people of our state to sort this out.”
“I thought that he was going to rape me.”
— Beverly Young Nelson