Doug Jones’s Senate campaign called Roy Moore a sexual “abuser” in an advertisement released Wednesday, its bluntest attack yet against the Republican candidate’s alleged history of pursuing teenage girls sexually, some of them underage.
The commercial lists the accusers by name, beginning with Leigh Corfman, the woman at the center of a Washington Post story who said Moore touched her genitals over her undergarments during a sexual encounter when she was 14. The spot displays an accompanying photo of Corfman as a youth, and does the same for six additional women who have come forward.
“And the list is growing,” the narrator states. “They were girls when Roy Moore immorally purused them. Now they are women, witnesses to us all of his disturbing conduct. Will we make their abuser a U.S. senator?”
The claims against Moore have defined the Alabama Senate race without Jones’s help, as the local and national press have reported further on his behavior in his 30s, when he widely was said to check out a Gadsden, Ala., mall for high school-age girls. More women than Corfman and three others who were the subjects of the Post’s report have shared their own experiences with Moore since, including Beverly Young Nelson, who is represented by Gloria Allred.
Moore’s campaign has honed in on Nelson’s account and made an issue of Allred’s involvement, but has issued only blanket denials of the other allegations against him.
A strategist for Jones’s campaign told me last week that their side’s intention was “to stick with” a positive message moving forward, despite the release of a separate ad November 14 making points like, “Don’t decency and integrity matter anymore?”
The spot shared Wednesday is in a different class of “hard-hitting.” A Jones spokesman hadn’t returned a request for comment on the campaign’s approach to the accusations against Moore by the time of publication.
The race appears to be in the neighborhood of a dead heat. A WBRC/Strategy Research poll conducted Monday showed Moore with a two-point advantage, but surveys have been erratic and sometimes favored Jones in the wake of the mounting claims against the Republican. Read more from my colleague David Byler on how to interpret all the numbers and what to watch in advance of Election Day, Dec. 12.
