Senate candidate who thinks homosexuality should be illegal ‘sexually abused children’
Anti-gay Senate candidate Roy Moore has been accused by three more women of sexual misconduct.
In the past week, the disgraced former judge has been accused by eight girls and women, including one criminal allegation that he sexually assaulted a 14-year-old.
In these latest claims, it is alleged that the Alabama Republican – then a 30-year-old attorney – tried to force himself on 18-year-old Gena Richardson.
He allegedly called her high school to speak to her after she wouldn’t give him her number.
Richardson told The Washington Post that Moore approached her at the same mall which he was allegedly banned from after locals were troubled by his interactions with teenage girls.
When he rang her school, she said she was pulled from a trigonometry class to speak to him.
She said she accepted a date with him a few days later after the then-attorney asked again, because she was flattered.
But during their date, he drove her to an empty parking lot.
“I thanked him and started to get out and he grabbed me and pulled me in and that’s when he kissed me,” she said.
“It was a man kiss – like really deep tongue. Like very forceful tongue. It was a surprise. I’d never been kissed like that,” she added.
“And the minute that happened, I got scared then. I really did. Something came over me that scared me.”
Richardson never spoke to him again, and said that “all these years, I thought that was an isolated incident.
“Now, as a mother and a grandmother, it just makes me physically sick. I realise that it didn’t just happen to me.”
The alleged sexual assault is reminiscent to that of Beverly Young Nelson, who accused Moore earlier this week.
She said that when she was 16, Moore offered her a lift home from her job as a waitress, only to drive her to a dark, deserted area behind a restaurant and start groping her.
Nelson tried to leave, but Moore locked the door.
He then began squeezing her neck, forcing her head toward his crotch and trying to yank her shirt off, Nelson said.
“I thought he was going to rape me. I was twisting and struggling and begging him to stop,” she recalled, holding back tears.
The second new allegation came from Becky Gray, then 22, who said that Moore harangued her while she working at the local mall.
He repeatedly asked her out, she said, and “I’d always say no, I’m dating someone, no, I’m in a relationship,” Gray, now 62, said.
Gray said that Moore was persistent in a way that made her uncomfortable.
She added that he lingered near where she worked, leading her to become so disturbed that she complained to the shop’s manager.
Another new accuser told Alabama publication al.com that Moore groped her while she was in his law office in 1991, when he was married.
Tina Johnson, who said she was 28 at the time, was in the office with her mother on legal business.
“He kept commenting on my looks, telling me how pretty I was, how nice I looked,” Johnson said.
“He was saying that my eyes were beautiful.”
Moore then questioned Johnson about her young daughters, she said, including asking if they were as pretty as she was,
He grabbed her buttocks as she was leaving, she added.
Moore, who “doesn’t know” if gay people should be executed, is now neck-and-neck in the race against Democrat Doug Jones for the US Senate seat vacated by Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Moore has previously been accused of drawing a salary from the anti-LGBT Foundation for Moral Law, a non-profit he founded in 2002.
And a month before the special election, it was revealed that he allegedly sexually abused 14-year-old Leigh Corfman in 1979, when Moore, an assistant district attorney, was 32.
While at his home, she said he removed her shirt and trousers and stripped off his clothes, touching her over her bra and underpants.
He also guided her hand to touch him over his underwear and gave her alcohol, she alleged.
Enticing a child under 16 to enter a home with the purpose of proposing sexual intercourse or fondling of sexual and genital parts is – and was – a felony which means up to 10 years in prison.
Three other women also told The Washington Post that Moore pursued them sexually while they aged between 16 and 18 and he was in his early 30s.
Mitch McConnell, Majority Leader of the Senate, has called on Moore to step down.
He has been joined by 13 other senators and four congressmen from the Republican Party – plus Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush – in calling on Moore to drop out of the race.
Unlike these 18 lawmakers, Donald Trump has opted for the lesser option, stating through Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders that Moore should step aside “if these allegations are true”.
Moore was previously enthusiastically backed in the race by Trump, despite being the most homophobic candidate for the US Senate in recent history.
He has denied all claims put to him of sexual misconduct thus far.