Tuesday, November 14, 2017
Re Roy Moore
What does it take to get rid of a Republican candidate in deep-red Alabama? It appears that we are on the verge of finding out.
There is a lot not to like about Roy Moore. A LOT. Like (at age 32) picking up a 14-year-old girl while in the courthouse while her Mom was in a custody hearing. Then molesting her.
Now the New Yorker has a story that raises the gross-out value to a new high:
This past weekend, I spoke or messaged with more than a dozen
people—including a major political figure in the state—who told me that
they had heard, over the years, that Moore had been banned from the mall
because he repeatedly badgered teen-age girls. Some say that they heard
this at the time, others in the years since. These people include five
members of the local legal community, two cops who worked in the town,
several people who hung out at the mall in the early eighties, and a
number of former mall employees. (A request for comment from the Moore
campaign was not answered.) Several of them asked that I leave their
names out of this piece. The stories that they say they’ve heard for
years have been swirling online in the days since the Post published
its report. “Sources tell me Moore was actually banned from the Gadsden
Mall and the
YMCA for his inappropriate behavior of soliciting sex from young girls,” the
independent Alabama journalist Glynn Wilson wrote on his Web site on
Sunday. (Wilson declined to divulge his sources.) Teresa Jones, a deputy
district attorney for Etowah County in the early eighties, told CNN last
week that “it was common knowledge that Roy dated high-school
girls.”
Jones told me that she couldn’t confirm the alleged mall banning, but
said, “It’s a rumor I’ve heard for years.”
It's disappointing that the New Yorker piece is rooted in part in rumor. The story about child molestation is not rooted in rumor, though.
What does it take?
