DECEMBER 12 LOOMS as the date for Alabama’s special election to fill a vacant U.S. Senate seat. But Nov. 9 is when this event went nuclear.
Nov. 9 was the publication date of an extensively researched Washington Post report about Roy Moore, a disgraced former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama and the Republicans’ 70-year-old candidate for the Senate position. An investigative team had spent months on the ground in Alabama, talking to countless Alabamans, researching Alabama records and conducting multiple interviews with dozens of Alabama residents. What the team discovered added a deeply disturbing line to Moore's resumé: accused child molester.
The story described experiences that four women, speaking separately, said they had with Moore during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when they were teenagers and he was in his 30s.
Leigh Corfman, approximately 14 years old, with her mother, Nancy Wells, around 1979.
In the most distressing of these accounts, Leigh Corfman, 53, of Gadsden, Ala., said she was 14 years old in 1979 and with her mother, Nancy Wells, now 71, at the Etowah County courthouse for a custody hearing in connection with Wells’ divorce. Wells was waiting to be called into the courtroom when Moore approached the pair. He was an county assistant district attorney based in Gadsden, the county seat and his hometown. Corfman said Moore offered to watch her while Wells was in court. Wells confirmed her daughter’s description of Moore’s approach.
While Wells was in the courtroom, Corfman said, Moore asked her for the family's phone number and subsequently called her and arranged to pick her up a block or so from her home. On their second visit to his house, she said, he removed their outer clothing, fondled her over her bra and underpants and placed her hand on his genitals over his underwear. Then and now, such actions would be felonies under Alabama state law, although the statute of limitations has expired for offenses that allegedly occurred in 1979. Two friends from Corfman’s Alabama childhood, including Betsy Davis, confirmed that Corfman had told them of her meetings with Moore.
In the month since the original story broke, other news organizations have run stories of additional Alabama women who came forward with accusations of Moore having made unwanted advances to them as teenagers, some of which involved sexual contact. These stories, like Corfman’s, also have included corroborating comments by people who knew the women when they were teens or were familiar with Moore’s patterns of behavior during that period.
Cruising At The Mall
Several of the women, for example, said they were working at part-time jobs at the Gadsden Mall when Moore approached them. Moore was said to spend considerable amounts of time at the mall during this period, especially on weekend nights. Janet Reeves, now 57, remembers working at the Orange Julius at the mall at the time Moore frequented the shopping center. She said Moore asked a teenage girlfriend of hers for her phone number. “I just thought he was the creepy old guy,” Reeves told the New York Times.
Moore has consistently denied all accusations of sexually inappropriate contact. In a statement initially provided to the Washington Post, Moore said, “These allegations are completely false and are a desperate political attack by the National Democrat [cq] Party and the Washington Post on this campaign.”
But some of Moore’s explanations have changed, even as he has continued to deny any impropriety. For example, in a Nov. 10 radio interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Moore said he recognized the names of two women — Debbie Wesson Gibson and Gloria Thacker Deason — as people he had known.
Gibson said Moore, then a 30-something assistant district attorney, had given a presentation to her high school civics class and afterward approached her and asked for a date. Gibson was 17 at the time, she said, and ended up having several dates with Moore that included kissing but nothing physical beyond that. Deason said she was 18 and a cheerleader when she and Moore went on dates that included drinking wine, although the legal drinking age in Alabama was 19.
But on Nov. 29, in a campaign appearance at Magnolia Springs Baptist Church in Theodore, Ala., Moore denied knowing any of the women who have spoken about their contact with him. [Moore’s remarks begin about 15:30 into the recording.] "Let me state once again I do not know any of these women, did not date any of these women and have not engaged in any sexual misconduct with anyone," Moore said. He suggested that the accusations were part a conspiracy against him by "liberals ... lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender ... socialists [and] ... the Washington establishment...."
Gibson has countered Moore’s revised story by producing an old congratulatory high school graduation card she said Moore gave her. The card bears a personal message and Moore’s signature.
Incidents from a subsequent phase of Moore’s career suggest an attitude of someone who regards himself as above the law and beyond accepted standards of conduct. In 2004 and again in 2016, while serving two separate terms as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama, Moore got himself thrown out of office on ethical grounds for failing to obey orders and decisions of higher courts. In the latter instance, Moore disregarded a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court and tried to order other Alabama judges to ignore it, too.
The women speaking out about Moore and those corroborating their accounts aren’t outsiders. They’re not eastern elitists, smug L.A. show business types or snooty national reporters. They’re Alabamans — folks who grew up, went to high school and were teenagers in Alabama.
Whether the allegations of Moore pursuing and even assaulting Alabama teenage girls, which have been declared credible by many Republican and Democratic officials alike, will affect what Alabama voters do on Dec. 12 is an open question. Before the news broke, Moore held a comfortable lead in advance polls. After the stories began appearing, Moore's lead all but vanished.
The latest polls show Moore essentially tied with his Democratic opponent, Doug Jones, a 63-year-old former U.S. attorney for the northern district of Alabama who helped convict two Ku Klux Klan members for their roles in the notorious 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, which killed four African-American girls under the age of 15.
Some political players point out that Alabamans tend to be skeptical of information about their state that originates with national news groups and national officials. “The average voter in Alabama doesn’t pay much attention to outsiders, to out-of-state support,” Alabama State Auditor Jim Zeigler, a Moore supporter, told the New York Times last week.
But Moore’s accusers and the people who have corroborated aspects of their accounts — not to mention virtually all of the court officials who ordered him removed from office — aren’t outsiders. They’re not eastern elitists or smug L.A. show business types or snooty national reporters. They’re Alabamans. They’re folks who grew up in Alabama, were children in Alabama, went to high school in Alabama and made lives for themselves as adults in their home state. They were teenagers in Alabama when they say Moore came on to them or saw Moore cruising the Gadsden Mall for teenage girls.
Wendy Miller, 54, was 14 and playing a Santa's elf at Gadsden Mall during the Christmas season when she said Moore first approached her and complimented her appearance. Two years later, she was at the mall with her mother when Moore approached her again and asked for a date. Her mother, Martha Brackett, wouldn’t permit it. Brackett has echoed her daughter's account of the encounters.
Gena Richardson, 58, said she was 18 and working at the Sears store in the mall in 1977 when Moore approached and asked for her phone number. She did not give it to him. A few days later, she said she was pulled out of her high school trigonometry class to take a phone call in the school office. It was Moore, she said, asking again for a date, which she refused. After another approach by Moore at Sears, Richardson agreed to a date that ended in his car with "an unwanted, 'forceful' kiss that left her scared," she told the Washington Post. Becky Gray and Kayla McLaughlin, classmates and mall co-workers of Richardson's, have corroborated her descriptions.
Beverly Young Nelson, 56, said she was 16 in the late 1970s and working as a waitress at a Gadsden, Ala., restaurant when she accepted Moore’s offer of a ride home. Instead, she said, Moore drove to a secluded spot, sexually assaulted her and injured her while trying to prevent her from leaving the car.
And while Alabamans may be suspicious of the Washington Post, they might take a close look at the very tough reporting and editorial coverage Moore's actions have earned from their own homegrown news operations.
AL.com — an online collaboration of Alabama's Birmingham News, Huntsville Times and the Press-Register in Mobile and The Mississippi Press in Pascagoula, Miss. — has done aggressive reporting on Moore's activities in and around the Gadsden Mall in the 1970s and 1980s. For a Nov. 13 news story, AL.com reporters spoke to several Alabamans who were teenagers living in the area at the time — Blake Usry, Jason Nelms, Greg Legat and Sheryl Porter — who said they were well aware of the 30-plus-year-old Moore hanging around the mall and flirting with teenage girls. In a couple of instances, they recalled conversations with mall security officers who said their supervisors had instructed them to watch out for Moore.
The AL.com editorial board also has published at least three blistering editorials about Moore, including one on Nov. 13 with this passage:
"As a news organization, we have independently investigated as many of these claims as possible and have found no reason to doubt the accounts outlined in the Washington Post. If anything, the stories we've heard in Etowah County have only further corroborated them."
Alabamans who turn out to vote will get their say on Dec. 12. Will they listen to their fellow Alabamans?
A version of this column originally was published by the St. Louis Jewish Light.