Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called for Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore to withdraw from the race if allegations are substantiated that he initiated a sexual encounter with a 14-year-old girl almost four decades ago.
“If these allegations are true, Roy Moore should step aside for all the obvious reasons,” McConnell, who backed Moore’s opponent in the Republican primary, told reporters. He said the allegations are “very disturbing.”
Several other Republicans, already reluctant to back the controversial former state supreme court judge, echoed McConnell or distanced from Moore, who denied the allegations in a statement to Breitbart News.
The Washington Post reported on Thursday that four women said Moore asked them on dates when they were between ages 14 and 18 and he was in his early 30s. One of them told the newspaper that he forced her into sexual contact after taking her to his home. The three others said their encounters didn’t go that far.
Moore won the Alabama GOP nomination to fill Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s former Senate seat and will face a Democrat in the December election. Moore beat incumbent Senator Luther Strange in a Sept. 26 run-off vote for the Republican nomination.
During the primary, Strange had the backing of the Republican establishment, including a super-political action committee allied with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, whom Moore says he wants to replace. Moore will face off against Democrat Doug Jones in on Dec. 12 to fill the seat.
Moore is known outside Alabama mostly for being removed twice as chief justice of the state Supreme Court -- in 2003 for refusing to take down a Ten Commandments monument from the Alabama judicial building, and in 2016 for telling state judges not to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized gay marriage.
The 14-year-old, identified by the Post as Leigh Corfman, said Moore initially approached her outside a courtroom in Etowah County, Alabama, when he was an assistant district attorney. He began a conversation and offered to watch the girl while her mother went into the courtroom for a child custody hearing, the Post said.
Corfman told the Post that Moore spent time alone with her. He drove her to his house and kisser her, she told the newspaper. On a second visit, he took off his clothes, along with her shirt and pants, she told the Post. Moore touched her through her bra and underpants and “guided her hand to touch him over his underwear,” according to the Post.