Updated on November 10, 2017
Roy Moore, the controversial GOP nominee for a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama, had sexual contact with a 14-year-old in the 1970s, and pursued two other teenaged girls, according to a bombshell Washington Post report published early Thursday afternoon.
Leigh Corfman told the Post that she met Moore, then a 32-year-old district attorney, outside a courtroom in Etowah County, Alabama. Moore obtained her phone number, then made arrangements to pick her up near her house a few days later. She said that on a first date, he kissed her. On a second encounter, she said, he took off her pants and shirt and his own clothes, touched her over her bra and underwear, and guided her hand to touch his penis over his underwear.
“I wasn’t ready for that—I had never put my hand on a man’s penis, much less an erect one,” she said. Corfman, 53, said she had never made a public accusation for several reasons, but said it had weighed on her. A Trump voter, she’d prayed over the decision to speak out about Moore and decided to do it. She said she had considered confronting Moore previously, and vomited after seeing a story about him on Good Morning America.
The age of sexual consent in Alabama, then and now, is 16, so Moore’s alleged action would constitute second-degree sexual abuse, a misdemeanor. Enticing someone younger than 16 into a home for genital touching is a felony. The Post corroborated elements of Corfman’s account using court records and interviews with her mother and a friend to whom she recounted the events at the time.