Roy Moore challenges sex assault claim
The Senate campaign of Roy Moore of Alabama sought Wednesday to discredit a woman’s accusation that he sexually assaulted her when she was 16, suggesting that what looks like his signature on her high school yearbook could be a forgery.
Moore’s attorney, Phillip L. Jauregui Jr., also disputed a statement by Beverly Young Nelson that she’d had no contact with Moore since the alleged assault took place in 1977 in Gadsden, Ala.
In fact, he said, Moore was the judge who presided over Nelson’s 1999 divorce case.
Jauregui demanded that Nelson, 55, and her lawyer, Gloria Allred, give the yearbook to a neutral custodian so that a handwriting expert can examine it.
“Is it genuine or is it a fraud?” he said of the signature.
The accusation came as another woman, Tina John- son of Gadsden, Ala., alleged that Moore grabbed her buttocks during a visit to his law office in 1991, according to AL. com, publisher of the Birmingham News and other Alabama newspapers. Moore’s campaign had no immediate comment.
Allred renewed her call for a Senate hearing on Moore’s conduct toward women, saying Nelson would testify under oath that he sexually assaulted her. If a hearing takes place, Nelson would turn over the yearbook to an independent handwriting expert, she said.
At a news conference in New York on Monday, Nelson, seated alongside Allred, said Moore, a 30- year- old prosecutor at the time, signed the yearbook: “Love, Roy Moore D. A.”
The encounter occurred at the Olde Hickory House restaurant in Gadsden, where she was a 16- year- old waitress and he was a frequent customer, she said.
A week or two after he signed the yearbook, she alleged, Moore offered her a ride home and she accepted. But instead of driving her there, he parked the car behind the restaurant, groped her breast, tried to shove her face into his crotch and bruised her neck before she stopped him, she said.
“I thought that he was going to rape me,” Nelson said.
Jauregui said Moore would never have put “D. A.” at the end of his signature in 1977 because he was only an assistant district attorney.
But when he was on the bench overseeing Nelson’s divorce case years later, the initials D. A. would appear at times after his name, Jauregui said. Moore had an assistant who sometimes used a stamp for the judge’s signature and then initialed the documents. The assistant’s initials were D. A., Jauregui said.
Nelson’s allegation is one of the more serious sexual assault accusations that have emerged in Moore’s Senate campaign. Another woman says that Moore molested her when she was 14 and he was 32.
Leaders of the national Republican Party have called on Moore to end his campaign and threatened to expel him from the Senate should he win the Dec. 12 special election against Democrat Doug Jones. Moore has vowed to stay in the race.
Alabama’s senior senator, Richard C. Shelby, said Wednesday that he planned to write in the name of another candidate on his ballot. The winner of the election will f ill the Senate seat vacated by Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions.
“I wish we had another candidate,” Shelby said, naming Sessions as the ideal contender.
But even as national Republican leaders continued pulling their support for Moore, most of Alabama’s GOP was sticking by him. A party committee for the 5th Congressional District in northern Alabama on Tuesday night adopted a resolution supporting Moore.
State party Chairwoman Terry Lathan warned over the weekend that any Republican official or candidate who publicly backs a Senate candidate other than Moore would be making “a serious error.”
Rush Limbaugh and other conservative media f igures have also stood by Moore. But with Moore’s f inancial support from national Republican groups drying up, Jones has now outspent him on television advertising by 11 to 1, according to Advertising Analytics.
Also troublesome for Moore: Fox News personalities began casting doubt on his denials of the sexual misconduct allegations.
Tucker Carlson faulted Moore for using his Christian faith as a shield against the women’s accusations by saying his adversaries were trying to stif le religious conservatives.
Sean Hannity, who interviewed Moore last week, issued an ultimatum giving him 24 hours to clear up “inconsistencies” in his denials.
Moore remained defiant. At a church rally Tuesday night in Jackson, Ala., he faulted the U. S. Supreme Court for banning prayer in public schools in 1962 and tapped into the state’s long history of racial conflict.
“They started to create new rights in 1965,” he said, an apparent reference to passage of the Civil Rights Act.