First Harvey Weinstein, then Kevin Spacey, Now Christo-Fascist Republican, Roy Moore?

Roy Moore, twice disgraced chief justice of Alabama and now Republican candidate for the US Senate, seems to be a bible-thumping magnet for controversy.

Roy, the US Army officer who slept on a bed of sandbags in Vietnam out of fear his men would roll a grenade under him if he slept on a standard cot, is now being accused of inappropriate relationships with young girls.

Leigh Corfman says she was 14 years old when an older man approached her outside a courtroom in Etowah County, Ala. She was sitting on a wooden bench with her mother, they both recall, when the man introduced himself as Roy Moore.

It was early 1979 and Moore — now the Republican nominee in Alabama for a U.S. Senate seat — was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney. He struck up a conversation, Corfman and her mother say, and offered to watch the girl while her mother went inside for a child custody hearing.

"He said, 'Oh, you don't want her to go in there and hear all that. I'll stay out here with her,' " says Corfman's mother, Nancy Wells, 71. "I thought, how nice for him to want to take care of my little girl."

Alone with Corfman, Moore chatted with her and asked for her phone number, she says. Days later, she says, he picked her up around the corner from her house in Gadsden, drove her about 30 minutes to his home in the woods, told her how pretty she was and kissed her. On a second visit, she says, he took off her shirt and pants and removed his clothes. He touched her over her bra and underpants, she says, and guided her hand to touch him over his underwear.

"I wanted it over with — I wanted out," she remembers thinking. "Please just get this over with. Whatever this is, just get it over." Corfman says she asked Moore to take her home, and he did.

Two of Corfman's childhood friends say she told them at the time that she was seeing an older man, and one says Corfman identified the man as Moore. Wells says her daughter told her about the encounter more than a decade later, as Moore was becoming more prominent as a local judge.

Aside from Corfman, three other women interviewed by The Washington Post in recent weeks say Moore pursued them when they were between the ages of 16 and 18 and he was in his early 30s, episodes they say they found flattering at the time, but troubling as they got older. None of the women say that Moore forced them into any sort of relationship or sexual contact.

Fake news, of course.

In a written statement, Moore denied the allegations. 

"These allegations are completely false and are a desperate political attack by the National Democrat Party and the Washington Post on this campaign," Moore, now 70, said.

The campaign said in a subsequent statement that if the allegations were true they would have surfaced during his previous campaigns, adding "this garbage is the very definition of fake news."

Update:

Republican Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, wasted no time getting his, establishment Republican views across on Moore's predicament. From The Atlantic.

The age of sexual consent in Alabama, then and now, is 16, so Moore’s alleged action would constitute second-degree sexual abuse, a misdemeanor. Enticing someone younger than 16 into a home for genital touching is a felony.

The Post corroborated elements of Corfman’s account using court records and interviews with her mother and a friend to whom she recounted the events at the time.

“If these allegations are true, he must step aside,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a statement. A string of other Republican officeholders, including Cory Gardner, who leads the GOP’s Senate campaign, made similar statements.

Senator John McCain, though, was unequivocal. “The allegations against Roy Moore are deeply disturbing and disqualifying,” he said. “He should immediately step aside and allow the people of Alabama to elect a candidate they can be proud of.”