Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore made his first public appearance in nearly two weeks Monday night, dodging press and refusing to take questions at a rally in Henagar, Alabama, as he railed against “malicious and false attacks which reflect the immorality of our time.”
Moore’s campaign has been rattled by accusations of sexual impropriety this month, including that he molested a 14-year-old girl and attempted to force sex on a 16-year-old while in his 30s. As his campaign hemorrhages support, Moore has opted to fight the allegations with a scorched-earth strategy: strenuously deny the accusations, allege they’re part of a conspiracy to keep God-fearing conservatives out of government, give the press as little access as possible to muffle the story, and count on Alabama’s overwhelmingly Republican citizenry to help him limp across the finish line.
“I’m going to take off the gloves and tell some truth,” Moore told the cheering crowd of around 200. “There is an established group in Washington that doesn’t want change. They’re aware of my past. I’m difficult to manage, which means I follow my own mind.”
Outside the event, organizers struggled to keep the cameras off their candidate, telling media he would enter through the front door, then attempting to smuggle him through a side entrance. Fox News reported that two Moore staffers had physically manhandled their camera crew as they attempted to get a shot of Moore entering the building, pushing them away and attempting to cover the cameras’ lenses with their hands.
“It’s not unusual for people to get bumped around a bit in the media scrum,” Fox News’s Jonathan Serrie said on Fox News Night. “This was not a scrum, though. It’s highly unusual for members of a political campaign to physically engage in this manner with members of the press.”
The White House indicated on Monday that President Donald Trump will not campaign for Roy Moore leading up to the election. But Trump and his surrogates have repeatedly railed against Moore’s Democratic opponent, Doug Jones, while declining to condemn Moore on the grounds that he denies the allegations against him.
