A bombshell report jolted the Senate race in Alabama yesterday as a woman accused GOP candidate Roy Moore of asking her out when she was only 14 years old and then kissing and touching her during two meetings at his house.
‘I wanted it over with — I wanted out,’ the woman, Leigh Corfman, told the Washington Post as she recalled the experience. ‘Please just get this over with. Whatever this is, just get it over.’
‘If these allegations are true, he must step aside,’ said Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who had backed Sen. Luther Strange in the primary he lost to Moore.
According to her account, Moore, who was then a local prosecutor, met Coffman when she accompanied her mother to a custody hearing at the county courthouse in Gadsden, Alabama
She says Moore took an interest in her and got her phone number. Later, he called and picked her up at her home, taking the then-14 year old Coffman to his house in the woods.
Judge Roy Moore is running to fill the seat vacated by Jeff Sessions in the Senate
‘I remember the further I got from my house, the more nervous I got,’ Corfman said. By her account, Moore kissed her on a first date. At a subsequent meeting, also at his home, he touched her over her bra and underwear, then removed his clothes and had her touch him over his ‘tight white’ underwear, according to the account in the Post.
Moore called the allegations ‘completely false’ and vigorously denied them in a statement.
Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell said Moore should withdraw from the race ‘if these allegations are true.’
Coffman, who now works as a customer service rep at payday lender, was approached by the paper, which was following up leads on rumors of Moore having pursued relationships with young girls early in his career.
‘I have prayed over this,’ Corfman said. ‘All I know is that I can’t sit back and let this continue, let him continue without the mask being removed.’
She said of Moore at the time: ‘He was charming and smiley.’ After both meetings, she says she asked Moore to take her home and he did.
Roy Moore, Republican nominee for Senate, speaks at an endorsement event on Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2017, in Montgomery, Ala. Thirteen Alabama Sheriff’s endorsed Moore
Former White House chief strategist backed Moore in the GOP primary. Donald Trump backed Sen. Luther Strange but issued some conflicting statements
When they first met, ‘I was kind of giddy, excited, you know? An older guy, you know?’ Corfman said.
‘This was a new experience, and it was exciting and fun and scary,’ Corfman recalled. ‘It was just like this roller-coaster ride you’ve not been on.’
But she expressed clear discomfort about the physical interactions she says happened. ‘I wasn’t ready for that — I had never put my hand on a man’s penis, much less an erect one,’ Corfman said.
She thought: ‘I don’t want to do this’ and ‘I need to get out of here.’
‘I felt responsible,’ she says. ‘I felt like I had done something bad. And it kind of set the course for me doing other things that were bad
Friends from the time corroborated elements of her story. ‘I remember talking to her and telling her it’s not a good idea,’ said Betsy Davis, who remembers her friend seeing an older man named Roy Moore. ‘Because we were so young.’
Moore blasted the charges as a ‘desperate political attack.’
‘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 in a statement.
The campaign said later if the claims were true they would have come up in Moore’s earlier races. He ran in high-profile contests to become the state’s chief judge, and appeared regularly in the media for his crusade to display the Ten Commandments at the courthouse.
‘This garbage is the very definition of fake news,’ according to the statement.
The paper tracked down other women who say Moore hit on them when they were young girls. In Alabama, the age of consent is 16, and the statute of limitations on the alleged offenses has passed.
Gloria Thacker Deason says she met Moore at the Gadsden mall when she was 18, and that they saw each other for several months, in a relationship that never got beyond kissing and hugging. The college cheerleader would change out of her uniform when they went on dates.
Wendy Miller says she was just 14 and dressed as an Elf who was a ‘Santa’s helper’ at the mall. She met Moore again when she was 16 and at a jewelry counter in 1979.
Miller says she was ‘flattered by the attentio’ but now that she is older, ‘the idea that a grown man would want to take out a teenager, that’s disgusting to me.’ She says her mom wouldn’t let her date Moore.
‘I’d say, ‘You’re too old for her … let’s not rob the cradle,’ ‘ Martha Brackett remembers telling Moore.
Debbie Wesson Gibson says she was 17 when Moore spoke to her high school class, when he was assistant district attorney, and when he would have been 34, or twice her age.
She said Moore kissed her once in his bedroom and once at a local country club pool.
‘Looking back, I’m glad nothing bad happened,’ Gibson told the paper. ‘As a mother of daughters, I realize that our age difference at that time made our dating inappropriate.’
Moore defeated GOP Sen. Luther Strange in a primary and faces Democrat Doug Jones in December race to fill attorney general Jeff Sessions seat.