AP Photo/Brynn Anderson
Former Alabama Chief Justice and U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore speaks at a revival, Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2017, in Jackson, Ala.
- Two new women said they received romantic overtures from Roy Moore when they were teenagers and he was in his 30s, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday evening.
- The report echoed previous accounts that Moore was a fixture at a local mall in Gadsden, Alabama, and frequently wandered from store to store approaching high school girls.
- One woman, Gena Richardson, said Moore first approached her while she worked at Sears and, days later, called her while she was in her high school trigonometry class to ask her out on a date.
- Days later, Richardson agreed, and Moore took her to a movie. According to the report, he forcibly kissed her afterward. "I got scared, then. I really did," Richardson told The Post.
- Richardson said after the encounter, she would hide from Moore whenever he returned to her store.
Two new women said they received romantic overtures from Roy Moore when they were teenagers and he was in his 30s. The women, Gena Richardson and Becky Gray, said in a Washington Post report published Wednesday night that Moore frequented the Gadsden Mall in Gadsden, Alabama, during the 1970s and 80s and often approached teenage girls.
The report echoed previous accounts that Moore was a fixture at the mall who wandered from store to store approaching high school girls.
At one point, the then-30-year-old attorney began focusing his attention on Richardson, The Post reported. Moore asked for her phone number while she worked at Sears in late 1977. Richardson, who told The Post the encounter happened around her 18th birthday, said she declined Moore's request.
"No, my dad is so strict," Richardson recounted, saying her father was a Southern Baptist minister and she knew he wouldn't have approved of her being romantically involved with someone nearly twice her age. Richardson said Moore asked what school she attended, and days later, Richardson was pulled out of her high school trigonometry class to receive a phone call in the school's office. Moore.was on the other line.
Richardson recalled the exchange: "He said, 'What are you doing? I said, 'I'm in trig class.'" She said Moore asked her out on a date on several occasions. Days later, she agreed, and they went to a movie. Afterward, Moore drove her back to her car and gave her a "forceful" kiss before she scrambled out of his car.
"I never wanted to see him again," Richardson said, remembering that she would hide whenever he walked into her store.
The report follows a growing theme surrounding Moore, who is now running for a Senate seat in Alabama; Moore allegedly pursued sexual encounters with teen girls, at least one of whom was 14, according to a Washington Post report published last week. Moore in the past week offered mixed explanations for the charges - at points denying he knew the women or reasoning that he did not "generally" date teens as an adult.
The scandal took another twist on Wednesday when Moore's lawyer fired back at Gloria Allred, the attorney for one of Moore's accusers. Moore has remained defiant to calls urging him to drop out of the Senate race, despite many top Republican figures and organizations publicly cutting ties with him.