Former Moore colleague: ‘Common knowledge’ that he dated high school girls

The following article by Max Greenwood was posted on the Hill website November 11, 2017:

A former colleague of GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore said Saturday that it was “common knowledge” that the Alabama Republican dated high school girls when he worked in the Etowah County District Attorney’s Office in the 1980s.

In a statement to CNN, Teresa Jones, who served as deputy district attorney for Etowah County, Ala., from 1982 until 1985, said that multiple people thought it was unusual that Moore dated high school girls, but that no one ever raised the matter with him.

“It was common knowledge that Roy Moore dated high school girls, everyone we knew thought it was weird,” Jones told CNN. “We wondered why someone his age would hang out at high school football games and the mall … but you really wouldn’t say anything to someone like that.”

Moore, now 70, served as the assistant district attorney for Etowah County from 1977 until 1982.

Jones’s comments come two days after an explosive Washington Post report detailed allegations that Moore pursued sexual and romantic relationships with teenage girls when he was in his early 30s.

One of Moore’s accusers, Leigh Corfman, told the Post that the former Alabama Supreme Court justice initiated a sexual encounter with her in 1979, when she was just 14 and he was 32.

Moore has vehemently denied Corfman’s allegation. But in an interview on Sean Hannity’s radio program on Friday, he did not rule out that he dated girls in their late teens when he was in his 30s, saying that he did not remember doing so.

On Saturday, in his first public appearance since The Washington Post report was published, Moore said that the allegations were politically motivated, and that he had never engaged in any sort of sexual misconduct.

Still, the allegations have prompted condemnation from many Republican lawmakers and officials, who have called on Moore to step aside in Alabama’s special Senate election if the accounts are true.

View the post here.