Roy “Bible Thumper” Moore has been a bit of a sinner. Well more than a bit of a sinner, according to WaPo, which has four different woman stating on the record that Yon Blessed One made sexual advances or dating endeavors towards them when they were between the ages of 14 and 18, and Moore was in his early 30s, working at the prosecuting attorney’s office.
I won’t repeat the details of the abuse from the article, but they are really quite disgusting in the case of the then fourteen year old.
Let me say this: it’s been my misfortune to have prosecuted child sexual predators in earlier years of my career, and I can say definitely two things are true about these events.
1. You cannot predict who will victimize children. Stereotypes of the trench-coated stranger are just that. It is far more likely someone who has a recognized reason to have access to the child, such as a teacher or a family member, who will be the perpetrator.
2. You can predict which children, or the general class of children, are more likely to become victims of sexual offenses. Typically these will be children who have been abandoned or neglected by one or both parents. They may have been exposed to drug or alcohol use at an early age. They will often come from backgrounds of poverty. Jerry Sandusky was an example of a perpetrator who preyed on this sort of victim, who were even more vulnerable because they were younger than those apparently preferred by Moore.
Now, let’s look at Roy Moore. According to the Washington Post, here’s how he met the 14 year-old:
Leigh Corfman says she was 14 years old when an older man approached her outside a courtroom in Etowah County, Ala. She was sitting on a wooden bench with her mother, they both recall, when the man introduced himself as Roy Moore.
It was early 1979 and Moore — now the Republican nominee in Alabama for a U.S. Senate seat — was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney. He struck up a conversation, Corfman and her mother say, and offered to watch the girl while her mother went inside for a child custody hearing.
“He said, ‘Oh, you don’t want her to go in there and hear all that. I’ll stay out here with her,’ ” says Corfman’s mother, Nancy Wells, 71. “I thought, how nice for him to want to take care of my little girl.”
This is of course the classic scenario of the vulnerable child. It makes me wonder if this was the only time that Moore had ever done this. Given the three other women (that were slightly older) that described similar but less extreme interactions with Moore, it seems likely that there were others.
This whole thing reminds me of Neil Goldschmidt, the disgraced former governor of Oregon, who carried on what he later called an “affair” with a 14 or 15 year old girl while he was in his thirties and Mayor of Portland.
And of course the rodentia are rapidly jumping off the sinking ship. Alabama’s other senator, Richard Shelby, was quick to remind people that he had supported Big Luther Strange in the primary.
In other words, don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos.
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