Kayla Moore: Roy Moore won't drop out of Senate race

Kayla Moore on Friday said her husband, Republican Senate nominee Roy Moore, would stay in a U.S. Senate race despite allegations he had inappropriate contact with women, mostly in the late 70s and 80s. 

Speaking at the end of a rally on the Alabama State Capitol steps, Kayla Moore and Republican and tea party activists attacked media reports about the accusations and those that raised questions about how Roy Moore was being paid out of the Foundation for Moral Law, a nonprofit he headed from 2003 to 2012. She said her husband would not quit the race. 

“After all the attacks against me, against my family against the Foundation and against my husband, he will not step down,” Kayla Moore said, before leaving the news conference without taking questions. 

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Other women who said they had worked with Moore in the past 20 years said they never experienced misconduct from him. One speaker, Suzelle Josey, a former campaign spokeswoman for Moore, went as far as accusing the eight women who have come forward of lying.

“I do not recognize the Roy Moore that these ladies are describing,” said Ann Eubank, a longtime tea party activist. “He has never been anything but respectful and polite to me.”

None of the speakers presented any new evidence or arguments supporting Moore, and some veered off into attacks on other targets, like Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Doug Jones or Republican leadership in Congress. Asked if any of the women knew Moore at the time the accusations were said to have taken place, organizer Becky Gerritson, a longtime tea party activist, said no. 

Paula Cobia, an attorney representing Gloria Deason, who said Moore dated her when she was 18 and he was in his early 30s, said Moore was “using religion as a shield against accountability for his sex crimes.” She also repeated a call for Moore to testify under oath. 

“Innocent people don’t run from the truth,” Cobia wrote. “Guilty people do by using all kinds of shiny objects to deflect and get the focus off of themselves. Moore’s shiny object is the Bible he thumps.”

A single counterprotestor, holding a sign that said “Roy Moore is a Pedophile,” stood across the street during the rally.

Eight women accuse Moore of a range of inappropriate conduct, ranging from unwanted attention to sexual misconduct and assault. Most of the incidents took place when Moore was assistant district attorney in Gadsden from 1977 to 1982.

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One woman, Leigh Corfman, said she was 14 when Moore, then 32, took her to his home, undressed her and guided her hand over his crotch. The legal age of consent, then and now, is 16.

Another woman, Beverly Nelson, said Moore offered her a ride home from a diner she frequented when she was 16. At a news conference Monday, Nelson said Moore groped her and grabbed her neck, trying to pull her head toward his crotch.

Another woman, Tina Johnson, said Moore grabbed her rear end in an office when she was concluding legal business with him in 1991. Other women say Moore, then in his 30s, pursued relationships with them when they were teenagers.

Moore has called the allegations false and tried to discredit the women, particularly Nelson, suggesting she forged Moore’s signature on a yearbook; Nelson said Moore signed the yearbook a few weeks before the alleged attack. Janet Porter, an anti-abortion activist from Ohio, attacked Allred for a recent appearance on MSNBC and demanded the yearbook be released. 

Allred says she will turn the yearbook over to an independent analysis if a U.S. Senate committee takes testimony from Moore and his accusers under oath.

At a news conference in Birmingham on Thursday, Moore called the charges “scurrilous” and “false.”

More:Roy Moore ducks questions about sexual misconduct allegations

“They’re not only untrue, but they have no evidence to support them,” he said. Moore left without taking questions from reporters.

The Alabama Republican Party has stood by Moore, and individual Republican county chairs and some politicians have expressed strong support for him. National Republicans have distanced themselves from Moore and pulled out of fundraising agreements with him.

The depth of support Moore enjoys from backers was evident from speakers like Jennifer Case, who called Moore “a man beyond reproach.”

“He is the closest thing to a Founding Father that we have seen in our lifetimes,” she said.

Speakers also warned that they would not abide by efforts to move the election date, ideas that Ivey to this point has thrown cold water on. Eubank said that if the date was moved without evidence of a crime, “conservatives will revolt, and it will be bad.”