Another woman has come forward to say that Alabama Republican Roy Moore sexually pursued and assaulted her when she was a teenager. At a press conference with attorney Gloria Allred, Beverly Young Nelson described how Moore moved from flirting with her, to signing her yearbook in creepy fashion, to assaulting her when she was a teenager waitressing at a Gadsden, Alabama, restaurant where Moore was a regular.
Nelson read a statement describing how, one cold night when her boyfriend was late to pick her up from work, Moore offered her a ride, then parked between a dumpster and a building and “reached over and began groping me and putting his hands on my breasts.” When she tried to get out of the car, Moore locked the door, grabbed her by the neck, and tried to force her head down onto his crotch. When Nelson continued to struggle, Moore finally opened the door and, she says, she’s not sure if she fell out of the car or he pushed her out. He drove away leaving her on the ground, and Nelson quit her job at the restaurant the next day, covering the bruises on her neck with makeup.
Nelson told her younger sister about the attack two years later, told her husband before they were married, and also told her mother. She and her husband were Trump supporters, she says, and her decision to come forward “has nothing to do with Republicans or Democrats.” Rather, it “has everything to do with Mr. Moore’s sexual assault when I was a teenager.” She came forward because of the courage of other women in coming forward first, showing her that she wasn’t Moore’s only victim.
“Mr. Moore attacked me when I was a child. I did nothing to deserve this,” Nelson concluded, before Allred displayed Nelson’s yearbook signed by Moore with comments calling the then-teen “beautiful,” and a signature that matches recent signatures by Moore.
Allred anticipated and prebutted Moore’s response to Beverly Young Nelson by pointing out that although she, Gloria Allred, is a Democrat, she has not hesitated to go after Democrats who mistreated women, and that Nelson came to her rather than the reverse. Nevertheless, Moore went for the predictable move, issuing a statement calling Allred “a sensationalist leading a witch hunt” who is “only around to create a spectacle.” And also, “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,” because that’s relevant to Roy Moore’s habit of sexually assaulting teens when he was a man in his 30s.