Two women’s accounts that Alabama Republican Roy Moore molested one as a 14-year-old and assaulted the other as a 16-year old—in both cases when he was in his 30s—have been bolstered by accounts of him pursuing many other teen girls during the same time period. It’s there that Moore hasn’t quite known how to answer. He knows he has to deny putting a 14-year-old’s hand on his underwear-clad erect penis and attempting to rape a 16-year-old, but when it comes to the 16- and 17-year-olds who say he asked them out or dated them without outright assault … his answers keep changing.
Moore originally called two such women “good girls” (who he did not date), then claimed that “The allegations are completely false. They are malicious. Specifically, I do not know any of these women” and “I do not know any of these women, did not date any of these women and have not engaged in any sexual misconduct with anyone.” All that “I didn’t know those malicious liars” business has made one of the previously “good girls,” Debbie Wesson Gibson, a little angry.
“He called me a liar,” said Gibson, who says she not only openly dated Moore when she was 17 but later joined him in passing out fliers during his campaign for circuit court judge in 1982 and exchanged Christmas cards with him over the years. “Roy Moore made an egregious mistake to attack that one thing — my integrity.”
Gibson has documentation, starting with a graduation card from Moore:
Gibson said she remembers Moore handing the card to her at the Etowah High School graduation ceremony in Attalla, Ala., where Gibson grew up about 10 miles from Moore’s home. She remembers reading the inscription and writing below it: “Roy Moore inspires me because he is such a successful man himself. Also, he is about the only person I know of who seriously believes in me. I appreciate that. He’s got to be one of the nicest people I know.”
As she flipped through the scrapbook last week, Gibson said, she realized it contained other indications of her relationship with Moore, which she says began in March 1981, after he came to speak to her high school civics class.
On a page titled “commencement,” under “My own guests,” she had written “Roy S. Moore,” just above “mom” and “dad.”
Gibson maintained a friendly relationship with Moore for years, only starting to shift her view as she realized that him having dated her when she was 17 wasn’t a one-off thing but part of a pattern of pursuing teenagers. And, of course, being called a liar seems to have alienated her pretty thoroughly. Moore might want to reconsider how he talks about women who have evidence in his own handwriting that he did indeed know them, and contemporary evidence that he dated them.
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