Henagar, Alabama

Roy Moore—the Alabama GOP Senate candidate credibly accused of dating high-school-aged girls as a grown man, molesting a 14-year-old girl, and sexually assaulting a 16-year-old—emerged on November 27 to hold his first public campaign event in nearly two weeks. “Judge Moore will not field questions from the media or anybody else,” Tony Goolesby, the DeKalb County coordinator for Moore’s campaign, said at the beginning of the event. “We want to stay in control, we do have security and everything. So no questions, no outbursts from anybody.”

Moments earlier, Goolesby had pulled up in a car outside the event at the community center in the small town of Henagar in northeastern Alabama. After he got out, he began shoving a cameraman who happened to work for Fox News. “Follow our orders,” Goolesby barked. “Go. Now.”

“It’s not unusual for people to get bumped around a bit in the media scrum,” Fox News’s Jonathan Serrie reported on air later that night. “This was not a scrum, though. It’s highly unusual for members of a political campaign to physically engage in this manner with members of the press.”

What’s even more unusual is that the Moore campaign coordinator was shoving a Fox News cameraman to keep him away from a car that Roy Moore wasn’t even riding in. “That was a decoy car,” Rodney Ivey, a DeKalb County GOP official on the scene that night, told me. “They [the press] run over there wanting Roy Moore, and we had it already planned, and we slipped him in the back door while all that was going on.”

As the event in Henagar made clear, the Moore campaign and its supporters have taken their bunker mentality and war on the press to a whole new level—which is what you might expect from a Senate campaign in which the candidate faces multiple accusations of misconduct that ranges from merely disgusting to criminal.

Rodney Ivey, like most Moore supporters, says he simply doesn’t believe the allegations against Moore. “The way he looked when he talked about it tonight—the look in his eye—there’s no truth to none of that,” Ivey told me outside the community center in Henagar.

But didn’t he find the number of accusers troubling? “Five or six can come out just as easy as one or two if you get the right ones to come out,” Ivey said. “They’ve all worked for the Democrat party. They’ve all had their picture made with Hillary.” Asked where he read that all of Moore’s accusers worked for the Democratic party, Ivey said he wasn’t sure. (In fact, only one accuser worked for the Clinton campaign; at least two were Trump voters.) Had Ivey read the original Washington Post report? “I have not read it all, but my girlfriend reads them all and she tells me about them.”

Is there any good reason for anyone who has read the many allegations against Moore to doubt them? It’s worth taking the question seriously and making meaningful distinctions between the accusations.

Moore has been accused of dating or trying to date 16- and 17-year-old girls when he was in his thirties, and the evidence for these allegations is overwhelming.

There is the testimony of Gena Richardson, who told the Washington Post that Moore took her on a date when she was a 17- or 18-year-old high-school senior that ended with an “unwanted ‘forceful’ kiss.” A friend confirmed she had seen Moore frequently approach Richardson at the mall, and the two girls had discussed the incident at the time.

Wendy Miller told the Post that Moore took an interest in her when she was working as a “Santa’s helper” at the mall at age 14 and asked her out on a date when she was 16. Her mother told the Post that she forbade the date.

Kelly Harrison Thorp told AL.com that when she was a 17-year-old waitress at Red Lobster, Moore asked her on a date, which she rebuffed. When she told him her age, Moore allegedly replied: “I go out with girls your age all the time.”

Debbie Wesson Gibson told the Post that Moore asked her out after speaking at her high school civics class when she was 17 and he was 34. They dated with the approval of Gibson’s mother, and Gibson says physical contact never went beyond kissing.

Sean Hannity asked Moore on November 10 if he ever dated Gibson. “I remember her as a good girl,” Moore replied, claiming Gibson never accused him of “any inappropriate behavior.” Pressed again on whether they dated, Moore said: “I knew her as a friend. If we did go on dates then we did. But I do not remember that.” Debbie Wesson Gibson is the lone Moore accuser who did work for the Clinton campaign (and several other Democratic campaigns), as a sign language interpreter.

Asked by Hannity if he dated 17- or 18-year-old girls, Moore replied: “Not generally, no.” In Moore’s own telling, his wife of 32 years first caught his eye at a dance recital when she was 15 or 16. To disbelieve that Roy Moore dated high-schoolers as a man in his 30s, you not only have to disbelieve all the women and some of their friends and mothers—you must essentially disbelieve Roy Moore.

As creepy as Moore’s pursuit of high-school-aged girls may have been, the legal age of consent in Alabama, then as now, is 16. The allegations from Leigh Corfman, however, are of criminal misconduct. According to Corfman, at the age of 14 she met Moore outside of the courtroom where her own child-custody hearing was taking place. Corfman and Moore then met on two occasions without her mother’s knowledge. The Washington Post reported on November 9:

On a second visit, she says, he took off her shirt and pants and removed his clothes. He touched her over her bra and underpants, she says, and guided her hand to touch him over his underwear.

“I wanted it over with—I wanted out,” she remembers thinking. “Please just get this over with. Whatever this is, just get it over.” Corfman says she asked Moore to take her home, and he did.

One of Corfman’s childhood friends, Betsy Davis, told the Post that Corfman told her about the incident at the time. Another friend confirmed anonymously that she had heard a similar story, and Corfman’s mother says she was told the story in the 1990s. To disbelieve Leigh Corfman, you must either believe that her friends and mother were quickly roped into a vast conspiracy or that Corfman has been privately telling a fictitious story about Moore to friends and family for nearly four decades. None of the women interviewed by the Post knew each other.

The other criminal allegation against Roy Moore comes from Beverly Young Nelson, who said in a news conference alongside her lawyer Gloria Allred that when she was 16, Moore offered her a ride home, and without her consent groped her breasts, then grabbed her neck, and tried to force her head toward his crotch before she escaped from the car.

Nelson provided a yearbook inscription from Roy Moore as proof that she knew him. It reads: “To a sweeter more beautiful girl I could not say ‘Merry Christmas.’ Christmas 1977. Love, Roy Moore, D.A. 12-22-77 Olde Hickory House.” Moore’s campaign has cast doubt on the authenticity of the yearbook inscription because the characters “12-22-77 Olde Hickory House” appear in a different script. The Moore campaign also alleges that the signature was lifted from a court filing. Moore’s campaign claims the letters “D.A.” don’t stand for “district attorney” (Moore was assistant D.A. at the time), but for the initials of his assistant, Delbra Adams, who would stamp the judge’s name on court documents and write her initials.

The Moore campaign has called on Nelson to release the yearbook to independent experts for examination, and Nelson’s attorney Gloria Allred responded that she would release the yearbook and Nelson would testify if the Senate would hold a hearing investigating the case. But the Senate Ethics Committee would not have jurisdiction over the matter unless and until Moore wins election and takes his seat. The Constitution gives each house of Congress the authority to expel a member with a two-thirds vote; it does not give Congress the power to prevent a duly elected member from taking his seat. A message left by The Weekly Standard with Allred’s law firm was not returned.

While Nelson’s story has not been as thoroughly vetted by journalists as the other accounts, it has not been disproven. She says she told her sister within about two years of the alleged assault, and her sister has not disputed that. Both Nelson and Corfman have described themselves as Trump voters.

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Breitbart News, the website run by Steve Bannon, has sent reporters to Alabama to try to discredit Leigh Corfman’s story, but their efforts to poke holes in the account have been pathetic. In one story, Breitbart reported that although Corfman told the Post “she talked to Moore on her phone in her bedroom,” Corfman’s mother said she didn’t have a phone line in her bedroom. But her family did have a phone with a cord that could reach the bedroom. In another report, Breitbart suggested the meetings with Moore were implausible because there were only 12 days between Corfman’s child-custody hearing and when, according to the court order, she was scheduled to move to her father’s house 20 miles away. But that’s plenty of time for Corfman to have met Moore twice.

Corfman’s allegations—backed up by contemporaneous accounts, journalistic vetting, and her own willingness to defend the allegations in a public TV interview—are the most difficult for the Moore campaign to answer. In all those ways, Corfman’s story is as credible as the story of Juanita Broaddrick, who in 1999 went public in an NBC News interview with an allegation that Bill Clinton had raped her in a hotel room in 1978. Broaddrick gave contemporaneous accounts of the alleged rape to five people, including a colleague, whom she told immediately after the alleged assault.

When I asked Moore campaign chairman Bill Armistead if he believed Juanita Broaddrick, he replied: “I have no comment.” Asked the same question in a separate interview, Moore campaign strategist Brett Doster said: “I don’t want to start speculating about all of—or speaking for Clinton and all of his various dalliances.” Doster contrasted Moore’s character with Clinton’s adulterous marital history: “The principal reason why you should doubt those allegations is because Roy Moore has denied those allegations and because we have hundreds of credible character witnesses who say this is completely out of line with who he is now or who he was then.” Moore faces one allegation of sexual misconduct as a married man—that he grabbed the buttocks of a woman in his law office.

The Moore campaign has also asked: Why now, after nearly 40 years, are these allegations coming out, and not when Moore ran for state supreme court justice? Quin Hillyer, a veteran conservative journalist and activist based in Mobile who wrote his first profile of Moore back in 2000, says it makes perfect sense that the allegations didn’t come out until now. “This whole idea that it was just open, out there, and should’ve been easy to find out is nonsense,” he says. “He’d never been vetted before on anything other than his oddball interpretations of faith versus government.”

Corfman, for her part, says that one reason she didn’t publicly come forward sooner was because she didn’t want her children to have to endure attacks on her character. “There is no one here that doesn’t know that I’m not an angel,” Corfman told the Post. As if to prove Corfman’s point, Moore campaign chairman Bill Armistead threw a jab at her behavior as a child in an interview with The Weekly Standard on November 29. While trying to cast doubt on Corfman’s allegations, he garbled the Breitbart News report and falsely claimed that Corfman “wasn’t living with her mother at the time” she says she privately met Moore. “Custody had been given over to her father,” Armistead said. “That’s what this proceeding was all about. She went to court—the mother to turn the custody over to the father—because she was a problem child.”

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Despite the enormous moral cloud hanging over Moore’s head, polls suggest he is more likely than not to win. Two public surveys released at the end of November show Moore with a 5- to 6-point lead, which is about what internal Moore campaign polling shows. While Moore had trailed in several polls right after the scandal broke, his numbers have turned around for a few reasons, and the most important may be Donald Trump.

Within days of the Washington Post’s bombshell report, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell said that he believed Moore’s accusers, called on the candidate to drop out, and said he would support an expulsion hearing if Moore wins. Conservative senators Mike Lee and Ted Cruz rescinded their endorsements. The National Republican Senatorial Committee and the Republican National Committee cut off funding. Senior Alabama senator Richard Shelby cast an early write-in ballot for a Republican other than Moore. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whose open Senate seat is the one being contested in the December 12 special election, said he had no reason to doubt Moore’s accusers. “There is a special place in hell for people who prey on children,” Ivanka Trump said on November 15. “I’ve yet to see a valid explanation, and I have no reason to doubt the victims’ accounts.”

And then, just before the Thanksgiving holiday, the most influential Republican in America threw his support to Moore. “I can tell you one thing for sure: We don’t need a liberal person in there, a Democrat, [Doug] Jones,” Donald Trump said. “I’ve looked at his record. It’s terrible on crime. It’s terrible on the border. It’s terrible on the military.”

“I do have to say, 40 years is a long time,” the president said when asked about the Moore allegations. “[Moore has] run eight races, and this has never come up. So 40 years is a long time.” A poll conducted November 26 to 27 by Change Research asked Alabama voters who pulled the lever for Trump a year ago if they believed any of the allegations against Moore were true. Only 9 percent said yes, a drop from the 16 percent who said yes in a poll conducted in mid-November before Trump’s comments.

Trump is not usually known for letting logical consistency constrain him, but in this instance he did. If multiple credible accusations of women against Moore are enough to convict Moore in the court of public opinion, that standard should also apply to Trump. The New York Times speculated on November 25 that Trump “sees the calls for Mr. Moore to step aside as a version of the response to the now-famous ‘Access Hollywood’ tape, in which he boasted about grabbing women’s genitalia, and the flood of groping accusations against him that followed soon after.” Democrats have also given Moore an assist, both in their initial failure to call for Rep. John Conyers to step down despite credible accusations of sexual harassment against the senior member of their caucus and in their nomination of Doug Jones, an unalloyed liberal whose extreme stance on abortion is morally repulsive to most Alabama voters.

While Trump’s support may prove vital to Moore, the response of local Republicans may be almost as important. His base has stood by him and state and local officials have done the same. “There is intense suspicion, at least, at any story that is even remotely a last-minute story that is seen as [coming from] a liberal East Coast news source. The intense suspicion sometimes leads people to lose their willingness to analyze any particular story on its merits,” says Hillyer, the Mobile-based journalist, who believes the accusations in the Washington Post are quite credible. “I have not heard any sort of publicly political evangelical that had been expected to be with Moore back off because of these allegations.”

Perhaps the only public sign of GOP turmoil in Alabama came just before Thanksgiving, when Moore campaign communications director John Rogers resigned. “Unfortunately John just did not have the experience to deal with the press the last couple of weeks, and we’ve had to make a change,” Moore strategist Brett Doster said, suggesting the communications director had been fired. Moore campaign chairman Armistead then issued a contradictory statement: “John made the decision to leave the campaign last Friday—any representations to the contrary are false—and we wish him well.” All three men declined to comment for this story on Rogers’s reasons for leaving the campaign.

Meanwhile, Doster’s role in the Moore campaign has left many of his former colleagues puzzled. A veteran establishment consultant who’s worked for Jeb Bush, George Bush, and Mitt Romney, he seems an unlikely fit for the Moore campaign.

“It’s beyond befuddled. It’s WTF,” says Peter Schorsch, publisher of FloridaPolitics.com and a political consultant who has worked with Doster in the past. “I spoke to one consultant the other day who described this as political suicide.” Several of Doster’s former colleagues called him a good guy and principled conservative and were surprised that he hadn’t left. “Brett has always been a good person to me,” says Tim Miller, who was Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign communications director. “I’m not passing judgment on him. I also don’t understand why you wouldn’t walk away from somebody like Roy Moore.”

“There’s no constitutional right to having people spin lies for you in order for you to get into public office. This is not the same as having a constitutional right to a defense,” adds Miller. On the outside, at least, Doster appears to some like he’s trapped choosing between his dignity and his reputation for loyalty—an extreme case, sure, but a possible dilemma familiar to many Republicans in the current political environment. In his interview with The Weekly Standard, though, Doster gave no hint that he doubted Moore or was having any second thoughts about working for him.

While most Alabama Republicans disbelieve the accusations, or at least say they disbelieve them, a handful of high-profile Republicans have argued that even if Moore molested a 14-year-old girl, people should still vote for him. “I certainly have no reason to disbelieve any of them,” Alabama governor Kay Ivey said of Moore’s accusers. “I believe in the Republican party, what we stand for, and most important, we need to have a Republican in the United States Senate to vote on things like the Supreme Court justices, other appointments the Senate has to confirm, and make major decisions. .  .  . So that’s what I plan to do, vote for Republican nominee Roy Moore.”

Moore, a Christian fundamentalist, has long portrayed himself as a righteous leader who would restore the biblical values that this country lost following the sexual revolution. Win or lose, what his candidacy will most likely accomplish is the erosion of one of the few remaining moral norms almost universally accepted in the United States—that sexual assault by an adult on an underage minor is beyond the pale.

John McCormack is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.