A woman falsely claiming to have been impregnated by Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore as a teenager pushed The Washington Post to publish the story, and appears to have been working with conservative watchdog group Project Veritas, the paper reported Monday.
The Post said the woman, identified as Jaime T. Phillips, contacted the newspaper by email shortly after it published on Nov. 9 the initial allegations against Moore by Leigh Corfman.
Corfman has said Moore, then the 32-year-old assistant district attorney in Etowah County attempted to get her to have sex with him in 1979 when she was 14 years old. Moore says her story is not true, nor are those of other women who say he flirted with them when they were teenagers at about the same time.
Beverly Young Nelson also has accused Moore of attempting to force her to have sex when she was 16 in 1977. Moore denies that claim as well.
Phillips, meanwhile, told the Post through emails and telephone conversations that she and Moore had an ongoing sexual relationship in 1992 when she was 15.
"I knew it wasn't right, but I didn't care," Phillips, now 41, said.
She said she got pregnant by Moore, who talked her into having an abortion and drove her to Mississippi to get it.
She also questioned reporters over whether the story would get Moore out of the race. The Post reporter replied her story would have to be checked out and, even it ran, there were no guarantees about how it would affect the Senate race.
In a subsequent face-to-face interview at an Alexandria, Virginia, eatery, Phillips talked to another Post reporter who had worked on the original Moore story. The reporter confronted Phillips with inconsistencies in her story, and noted she set up a GoFundMe page in the spring to raise money for a move to New York to work "in the conservative media movement to combat the lies and deceipt [sic] of the liberal MSM."
Phillips told the Post she had interviewed for The Daily Caller, but the job ended up "falling through."
The Daily Caller said no one at the site had interviewed anyone named Jaime Phillips and that it employed no one by the name, Kathy Johnson, who Phillips said interviewed her there.
The Post suspected it was being set up by Project Veritas, and on Monday a reporter saw Phillips enter the group's headquarters in New York. The reporter waited for Project Veritas' founder James O'Keefe to leave the building and asked him if Phillips was part of a sting operation.
O'Keefe did not answer, saying he was late for a meeting and would be happy to talk to the Post if it set up an interview. Project Veritas had not responded to a request for comment to Newsmax on Monday evening.
Project Veritas specializes in undercover videos exposing what it believes to be lies and bias in liberal groups and the mainstream media. O'Keefe first came to prominence a decade ago when he secretly recorded ACORN chapters and has since recorded employees of Planned Parenthood.
He has been accused of selectively editing his videos, a charge he has denied.
"It is righteous when grownups catch children try to plant fake news in the real world," Chris Roberts, associate professor of journalism at The University of Alabama and a longtime Alabama journalist, told Newsmax.
"Watching the Veritas guy refuse to answer questions, and the conservative Daily Caller support The Post's reporting, is instructive for everyone," he said.
O'Keefe did not answer questions from the Post whether he was working with the Moore campaign, and the Moore campaign also did not respond to requests from the Post.
But the Post noted Phillips' initial email came the same day the Gateway Pundit ran a story from a dubious Twitter account claiming, "A family friend in Alabama just told my wife that a WAPO reporter named Beth offer her 1000$ to accuse Roy Moore."
An Alabama pastor also said he received a recorded phone call from a man claiming to be The Washington Post reporter offering money for stories damaging to Moore. Those stories would not be checked for accuracy the message promised.
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