Former Senate candidate Moore on underage accuser: ‘I don’t know her’
MONTGOMERY, ALA. >> Former U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore, testifying in a defamation case brought by a woman who said he sexually touched her decades ago when she was 14, maintained Monday that he never met his accuser.
“I don’t know her,” Moore testified under questioning from his attorney.
He disputed Leigh Corfman’s account that he molested her at his home after meeting her with her mother at the courthouse. “I never saw Ms. Corfman in Etowah County or any other place,” Moore said. adding at another point, “I never knew her. I never took her to my home.”
Corfman came forward during Moore’s 2017 Senate campaign and said Moore sexually touched her in 1979 when she was 14 and he was in his 30s and working as an assistant district attorney in Etowah County. Her story was first reported by The Washington Post. She was one of several women who said Moore pursued relationships with them when they were teens.
The allegations roiled Moore’s campaign and he ended up losing to Doug Jones, who became the first Alabama Democrat elected to the Senate in 25 years. Jones lost the next election to Republican Tommy Tuberville, who now holds the Senate seat.
Corfman filed suit alleging Moore defamed her by branding her as a liar when he denied the accusations. Moore countersued, claiming Corfman injured his reputation with false allegations meant to hurt him politically. Jurors in the trial are tasked with deciding both claims.
Trying to make a case for compensation, Moore attorney Julian McPhillips read crassly worded emails and social media messages to the Moore campaign in which people called the former state court judge a pedophile and a pervert.
Moore, reiterating a phrase he used during the 2017 Senate race, maintained the accusation was “false and malicious.”
“There was never any mention of any impropriety in my entire career until the end of the 2017 election, 32 days before the election,” Moore testified.