The Washington Post’s Beth Reinhard, one of the reporters who broke the story Thursday about allegations of Roy Moore seeking sexual relations with teenage girls, pushed back against his claim that the piece was a political attack coordinated with the Democratic Party.
“We didn’t have any contact with the Democratic Party while we were reporting the story,” Reinhard said on CNN. “This story did not fall into our laps or our inbox.”
Moore, who won the Republican nomination for Alabama’s special election to fill Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ U.S. Senate seat, called the allegations in the Post story “completely false” and accused the reporters of being part of a political smear campaign.
“These allegations are completely false and are a desperate political attack by the national Democrat Party and the Washington Post on this campaign,” Moore said.
Roy Moore accused the Washington Post’s report of being a “desperate political attack.”
Reporter Beth Reinhard says, “We didn’t have any contact with the Democratic Party” while reporting the story https://t.co/IXdfwl5ZjE pic.twitter.com/muUVJJrhua— The Lead CNN (@TheLeadCNN) November 9, 2017
Among the allegations is one that Moore initiated a sexual encounter with a 14-year-old in the late 1970s.
Reinhard said the groundwork for the story began when a Washington Post reporter was in Alabama doing some reporting on Moore’s supporters. She said that’s when their attention was drawn towards “these rumors [that] were emerging that he had relationships with teenage girls.”
Reinhard said they spent weeks pursuing leads and that none of the women they spoke to were eager to go public but finally agreed to do so after multiple interviews.
“They did not seek out this attention,” Reinhard said. The Post report also said that according to campaign reports none of the women they interviewed donated or worked for the campaigns for Moore’s political rivals, including Democrat Doug Jones.
