Well, it looks like I was right a few days ago, when, channeling my inner Johnnie Cochran, I proclaimed, “Where there are four, you know there are more.” This afternoon, an Alabama woman by the name of Beverly Young-Nelson came forward to announce that she too had been sexually assaulted by Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore as a teenager, joining Leigh Corfman and the three other women who shared their stories late last week with the Washington Post. [Corfman was just 14 when the 32 year old District Attorney spotted her in a rural Alabama courthouse, where she and her mother were awaiting a child custody hearing, asked for her number, and eventually began seeing her, picking her up around the corner from her family’s home, and driving her to a house in the woods, where, on one occasion, according to her sworn statement, he undressed her, touched her over her bra and underpants, and guided her hand to touch his penis through his underwear.] Young-Nelson’s story, unlike those shared by the other women, however, involves being choked and thrown from a parked car after she refused the older man’s violent sexual advances. Here’s footage from the press conference, followed by an excerpt from the Washington Post.
"He said 'You're just a child.' And he said, 'I am the District Attorney of Etowah County. And if you tell anyone about this, no one will ever believe you," accuser Beverly Young-Nelson says Roy Moore told her after the alleged sexual assault. (via CBS) pic.twitter.com/3GZNQqIO0A
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) November 13, 2017
…Beverly Young Nelson, now 55, said Monday that she got to know Moore, now 70, in the late 1970s when she was a waitress at the Old Hickory House restaurant in the northeastern Alabama town of Gadsden, where Moore lived for much of his life.
Nelson said at a news conference at a New York hotel that Moore, then the district attorney of Etowah County, was a regular at the restaurant and would sometimes compliment her looks or touch her long red hair. She showed a copy of her high school yearbook that she said Moore signed Dec. 22, 1977, with the inscription: “To a sweeter more beautiful girl I could not say ‘Merry Christmas.’ ”
On a cold night about a week or two after that, Nelson alleges that Moore offered to give her a ride home from work after her shift ended at 10 p.m. Instead of taking her home, Nelson said that Moore pulled the two-door car into a dark and deserted area between a dumpster and the back of the restaurant.
When she asked what he was doing, Nelson alleges that Moore put his hands on her breasts and began groping her. When she tried to open the car door and leave, Nelson said he reached over and locked the door. When she yelled at him to stop and tried to fight him off, she alleges that he tightly squeezed the back of her neck and tried to force her head toward his lap. He also tried to pull her shirt off, she said.
“I was determined that I was not going to allow him to force me to have sex with him. I was terrified,” Nelson said during the news conference, often becoming emotional as she described the attack that she alleges occurred about 40 years ago. “I thought that he was going to rape me.”…
According to Young-Nelson, who was accompanied at this afternoon’s news conference by attorney Gloria Allred, Moore, after attacking her, said, “You’re just a child,” as he shoved her from the car, adding, “I am the District Attorney of Etowah County. And if you tell anyone about this, no one will ever believe you.”
Nelson, who cried as she read her prepared statement, said she quit her waitressing job the next day, so that she’d never have to see Moore again, covered the bruises on her neck with makeup, and didn’t speak about what had happened for two years, when she confided in her sister, who has since confirmed the account. [According to Nelson, she also told her husband of the assault before they were married, as well as her mother, who she told approximately four years ago.]
“Mr. Moore attacked me when I was a child,” Nelson told members of the press, adding that the District Attorney had begun flirting with her when she was just 15, lending considerable credence to the theory that Moore was actively grooming several young women during this period of his life. [The New Yorker is reporting today that, according to several sources, “Roy Moore was banned from the Gadsden Mall and the YMCA for his inappropriate behavior of soliciting sex from young girls.]
Here’s an excerpt from Nelson’s written statement, in which she discusses Moore’s attack.
In spite of this, some conservatives continue to support Moore. Alabama Republicans have, in recent days, both suggested that Moore’s infractions were not more serious than stealing a lawnmower, and biblically sanctioned, given that Joseph was an older man when he married Mary. And, of course, there are some suggesting that all of this is nothing more than a political hit job, ignoring the fact that both Corfman and Young-Nelson are conservatives who voted for Trump. [Young-Nelson said today, “My husband and I supported Donald Trump for president. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the Republicans or the Democrats. It has everything to do with Mr. Moore’s sexual assault when I was a teenager.”] Republican propagandist Dinesh D’Souza just said that Young-Nelson’s statement “seems crafted by someone who is very savvy about politics”, and Breitbart has apparently dispatched two of their “journalists” to Alabama to discredit the women who have come forward thus far. [Keep this in mind when people ask why it took so many years for these women to come forward. Not only, in Young-Nelson’s case, was she apparently choked and told that no one would believe her, but now Breitbart and others are actively trying to destroy her life.]
Thankfully, however, some on the right have begun to turn on the former Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court… Sure, they probably should have turned on him long ago, considering that he, among other things, has said that homosexuality should be illegal, that 9/11 was God’s punishment for sodomy and abortion, and that Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to serve in elected office, but better late than never, right? [Sadly, I suspect many of these folks are finally turning on Moore not because he’s a vile human being, but because they’ve done the political calculus, and know that, having him in the Senate, would be worse for the GOP than electing a Democrat. Still, though, I’ll take it.] Today, two of Moore’s biggest supporters in the Senate, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz both withdrew their endorsements, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell just came out to say that he believes the allegations and feels as though Moore “should step aside”. And, what’s more, the head of the Senate Republican Campaign Committee went on the record saying that, if Moore wins the race, he should be expelled from the Senate… Oh, and Senator Jeff Flake said that, given the choice between Moor and a Democrat, he’d “run to the polling place to vote for the Democrat.” But here are my two favorite conservative quotes of the day, from Republican Senators Claire McCaskill and Susan Collins.
As an experienced sex crimes prosecutor I recognize the shifts in Roy Moore’s “denials”. They completely undermine his credibility. I agree with many of my R colleagues. He doesn’t belong in the Senate. Period.
— Claire McCaskill (@clairecmc) November 13, 2017
I have now read Mr. Moore’s statement and listened to his radio interview in which he denies the charges. I did not find his denials to be convincing and believe that he should withdraw from the Senate race in Alabama.
— Sen. Susan Collins (@SenatorCollins) November 13, 2017
Moore, for what it’s worth, doesn’t seem to be backing down. While his story did evolve a bit over the past several days, with him now saying that, sure, he may have dated young girls, but he never did so without the permission of their mothers, he’s still sticking to his guns, and claiming that these charges aren’t legitimate… “These allegations are completely false, and are a desperate political attack by the National Democrat Party and the Washington Post on this campaign,” Moore said when the first allegations of child molestation were made public last Thursday. And Moore’s campaign chairman Bill Armistead added the following today. “Gloria Allred is a sensationalist leading a witch hunt,” he said, “and she is only around to create a spectacle.” He then went on to say, “Allred was the attorney who claims credit for giving us Roe v. Wade, which has resulted in the murder of tens of millions of unborn babies. We’ve said this before and we’ll say it again: Judge Moore is an innocent man and has never had any sexual misconduct with anyone. This is a witch hunt against a man who has had an impeccable career for over 30 years and has always been known as a man of high character.” Echoing Trump, Moore’s campaign also put out a statement calling the accusations “garbage” and “the very definition of fake news.”
Here’s Moore saying that he couldn’t have choked and thrown the 16 year old Young-Nelson out of his car, as he didn’t even know where the Old Hickory House was.
"I can tell you without hesitation, this is absolutely false. I never did what she said I did. I don't even know the woman," said Alabama GOP Senate nominee Roy Moore, who was responding to Beverly Young Nelson's allegations of sexual assault. pic.twitter.com/23DUsuvYkW
— CBS News (@CBSNews) November 14, 2017
I could go on about Moore’s hypocrisy, and what his continued support among conservatives tells us about the current state of the Republican party, but, as I don’t suspect I’d be telling you anything you didn’t already know, I’ll just say goodnight and pass along a link to the campaign page of Moore’s Democratic rival, Doug Jones, who, to my knowledge, is not only not a pedophile, but a damn fine man, who, as a U.S. attorney, successfully prosecuted the members of the KKK responsible for bombing a black church in Birmingham in 1963, killing four young girls. [Please, if you can, give his campaign a few dollars, so we can not only help put him in the Senate, but start building a grassroots Democratic infrastructure in Alabama.]
It’s hard to believe we’ve gotten to this point in American history. If you’d asked me ten years ago whether or not I thought it could be possible that, one day, we might have a considerable number of people that would rather see an accused child molester in office than a Democrat, I probably would have said that you were out of your mind. But here we are, one year after electing an admitted “pussy grabber,” with no end in site. We now live in a world where all that matters, it would seem, is winning at all costs, where, thanks to a constant diet of Fox News, the tribalism has grown so fierce that we have actual real human beings in Alabama saying things like, “(Moore) could have killed Obama, and we wouldn’t care.”
Child molestation doesn’t matter. Truth doesn’t matter. What matters is winning, and defeating our enemies. If people really cared about the safety of children, everyone who was so irate about Hillary Clinton’s imagined involvement in the “Pizzagate” child sex ring, would be in the streets right now, demanding that Moore be “locked up.” But they’re not. They knew the story about Clinton was bullshit. And, right now, they could care less what Moore did to this young girls. All that ever mattered was winning. Everything else was just a lie.
Maybe if Roy Moore molested children beneath a pizza shop, there would be more outrage on the right.
— Mark Maynard (@MarkAMaynard) November 14, 2017
I don’t know what the answer is, but I’m fairly certain that the first step is to end Moore’s political career right here, and right now. Because, if we can’t do that – if we can’t keep a child molester out of the United States Senate – what chance of we got of saving our country?
Earlier today, Beverly Young-Nelson said, “I want Mr. Moore to know that he no longer has any power over me.” Hopefully, as a nation, we’re getting to the point where we can collectively say the same thing to those on the far right, who, for far too long now, have been leading us down this path, to the point where we’re now openly supporting white nationalists, child molesters and con men, thinking that it’s completely normal to do so.
