Two more women on Wednesday came forward with allegations about Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore’s past misconduct. One said Moore asked her out when she was 17 years old, and another said he groped her when she was 28 years old, bringing the total number of women with allegations of sexual misconduct against Moore to seven, according to AL.com.
Kelly Harrison Thorp told AL.com that in 1982, when she was 17, she worked at a Red Lobster restaurant in Gadsden, Alabama, where Moore practiced law.
Thorp said that Moore came into the restaurant once and asked her out.
“I just kind of said, ‘Do you know how old I am?'” Thorp told AL.com. “And he said, ‘Yeah. I go out with girls your age all the time.'”
Thorp said she turned Moore down and told him she had a boyfriend, and said Moore walked away.
Moore last week claimed that he did “not generally” date women in their teens, and has denied the allegations brought against him by five women besides the two who came forward on Wednesday.
Thorp told AL.com that she knows one of the other women who has accused Moore of misconduct — Leigh Corfman, who told the Washington Post last week that Moore initiated a sexual encounter with her when she was 14 years old. The age of consent in Alabama is 16 years old.
Thorp said she was proud of Corfman, and said women with allegations against Moore did not come forward previously because of his local influence.
“Everybody knew it wouldn’t matter,” she told AL.com, “that he would get elected anyway because his supporters are never going to believe anything bad about him.”
Tina Johnson, also from Gadsden, told AL.com that Moore flirted with her in 1991, when she was 28 years old, while Johnson was at Moore’s office to give her mother custody of her 12-year-old son. Johnson said her mother was also at the meeting.
“He kept commenting on my looks, telling me how pretty I was, how nice I looked,” Johnson told AL.com. “He was saying that my eyes were beautiful.”
Johnson said that Moore came around his desk and sat on its edge, so close that she could smell his breath, and asked her questions about her two young daughters. According to Johnson, Moore asked whether they were as pretty as she was, and his line of questioning made her uncomfortable.
When she and her mother got up to leave, Johnson said, Moore came up behind her after her mother had already walked through the doorway and grabbed Johnson’s rear.
“He didn’t pinch it; he grabbed it,” Johnson told AL.com.
Johnson said she told her sister about the encounter years later, and Johnson’s sister told AL.com that she remembered the discussion.
Regarding the recent flood of accusations against Moore, Johnson said women did not come forward previously because “no one asked.”
“It’s because somebody asked,” she said. “If anybody had asked, we would have told it.”
