Former Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore has filed a lawsuit saying he was the target of a political conspiracy during the state’s December special election.
Moore and his lawyers filed the lawsuit in Etowah County court. The complaint names as defendants Leigh Corfman, Tina Johnson, Beverly Young Nelson and Debbie Wesson Gibson, four women who accused Moore of sexual misconduct.
Richard Hagedorn, a friend of Corfman’s, is also named in the suit.
“The people of Alabama deserve to know the truth, that the accusations made against Judge Moore during the U.S. Senate campaign arose from a political conspiracy to destroy his personal reputation and defeat him in the special Senate election for United States Senate,” Melissa Isaak, Moore’s lawyer, said in a statement.
Accusations of sexual misconduct against Moore were first reported by the Washington Post just over a month before the special election. Three of the women named in Moore’s lawsuit said the former judge pursued romantic and sexual relations with them when they were teenagers and he was in his 30s. The fourth woman said Moore grabbed her inappropriately during a meeting in his law office in 1991.
Moore, a former judge, has denied the accusations.
The lawsuit filed Monday says Corfman, who said Moore tried to initiate sexual contact with her when she was 14 years old, was “rewarded financially” and claims her actions “were attended with such notoriety as to encourage her contact.”
Moore also says in the court filing that the defendants defamed Moore by “making statements which were false, malicious, and made with reckless disregard of the truth.”
“Those accusations involved events that supposedly occurred from 26 to 40 years ago. Yet they all coincidentally surfaced for the first time within a seven-day period, a mere 32 days before the Dec. 12 general election,” the lawsuit says.
Moore ran against now-Sen. Doug Jones, D-Ala., in the special election to fill the seat vacated by Jeff Sessions, who became Trump’s attorney general.
Jones defeated Moore in the election, marking the first time in 25 years a Democrat was elected to represent Alabama in the Senate.
