NEW SEXUAL ASSAULT ALLEGATION HITS MOORE

WASHINGTON— A second woman emerged on 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.

Moore strongly denied it, even as his own party’s leaders intensified their efforts to push him out of the race.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell took a remarkably personal swipe at his party’s candidate for a Senate seat the GOP cannot 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 Democrats could conceivably swipe.

Moore abruptly called a news conference in Gallant, Alabama, after a tearful Beverly Young Nelson detailed the new allegations to reporters in New York.

“I can tell you without hesitation this is absolutely false. I never did what she said I did. I don’t even know the woman,” Moore said.

He signaled he had no intention of ending his candidacy, calling the latest charges a “political maneuver.”

Nelson’s news conference came after that exchange and injected a new, sensational accusation in the story.

Regular customer

She 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 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.—