An Alabama woman accused Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore of sexually assaulting her decades ago when she was a teenager and he was in his 30s, the Washington Post reported Thursday.
Leigh Corfman said Moore introduced himself to her and her mother in 1979 when he saw them sitting on a bench outside a courtroom in Etowah County, Alabama.
She said Moore, then a 32-year-old assistant district attorney, got her phone number and called her several days later and they agreed to meet.
Corfman, then 14, told the newspaper that Moore picked her up around the corner from her home and took her to his place, where he told her she was pretty and began kissing her.
During a second visit, she said Moore took off his shirt and pants and removed her clothes. He then touched her over her bra and underpants and put her hand over his underwear, the report said.
“I wasn’t ready for that — I had never put my hand on a man’s penis, much less an erect one,” Corfman said.
“I wanted it over with — I wanted out,” she told the Washington Post about her reaction. “Please just get this over with. Whatever this is, just get it over.”
Corfman said she got dressed and asked Moore to drive her home. He did.
Her mother, Nancy Wells, 71, said her daughter told her about the encounter more than 10 years later, when Moore was rising in state politics.
Three other women confirmed to the newspaper that Moore romantically pursued them when he was in his 30s and they were teenagers. None of them said they had a sexual relationship with him.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said that “if these allegations are true, he must step aside.”
Now 53, Corfman, who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and Republican candidates in the past three presidential elections, said she thought about confronting Moore several times, especially when he first ran for the state Supreme Court in 2000, but decided against it.
She said her two children were in school and she feared they would be negatively affected.
Corfman also told the newspaper she worried she wouldn’t be believed because of her background, which included three divorces, arrests, drug and alcohol use and a chaotic financial history.
“There is no one here that doesn’t know that I’m not an angel,” Corfman about her hometown of
Gadsden.
In written statements, Moore, 70, and his campaign denied Corfman’s claims and called them “outlandish attacks.”
“These allegations are completely false and are a desperate political attack by the national Democrat Party and the Washington Post on this campaign,” he said.
A campaign statement called the story a “last ditch Hail Mary” to discredit Moore by the liberal media who back his Democratic opponent, Doug Jones.
Corfman said she decided to come forward this time because she couldn’t “let this continue.”
“I have prayed over this,” she said. “All I know is that I can’t sit back and let this continue, let him continue without the mask being removed.”
Moore has a long, controversial background in Alabama.
He has said homosexuals should face criminal charges and called Islam a false religion.
He once refused to remove a statue of the 10 Commandments from the lobby of the state judicial building. Moore was removed from his state Supreme Court post in 2003 for not removing the statue.
He was elected to the court again in 2012, only to be removed permanently the next year for urging state judges to not recognize the legality of same-sex marriage.
In his book “So Help Me God,” Moore said he spent his time as a prosecutor going after “murderers, rapists, thieves and drug pushers.”
“I believed that many of the young criminals whom I had to prosecute would not have committed criminal acts if they had been taught these rules as children,” Moore wrote in the book.