Roy Moore was Banned from a Mall for Preying on Young Girls

[DemoMan]

 

 

Locals Were Troubled by Roy Moore’s Interactions with Teen Girls at the Gadsden Mall

 

 

The Gadsden Mall opened in 1974. It has two department stores, Belk and Sears, one on each end. Between them, on Sunday night, I walked past Books-A-Million, Cellular Solutions, a Japanese steak house, Great American Cookies, Blacklight Mini-Golf, KnockerBall Gadsden, an eyebrow-styling kiosk, and a clothing store for young girls, called Justice. A diverse assortment of families wandered around the place, which felt trapped in time. Two young security guards made their rounds. “It gets rough in here on Saturday nights,” one of them told me, mentioning fighting, stealing, and gun-toting. “We still have an active ban list,” the other said, referencing a list of chronic rule-breakers not allowed on mall property. “But it doesn’t go back that far.”

 

He meant back to the early eighties, when Roy Moore was, many people say, a regular visitor to the mall. On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that, when Moore was a thirty-two-year-old assistant district attorney in Etowah County, he brought Leigh Corfman, who was fourteen years old at the time, to his home and sexually molested her. Three additional women told the Post that Moore had pursued them when they were in their teens and he was in his early thirties. (On Monday, another woman, Beverly Young Nelson, said that Moore assaulted her when she was sixteen years old. At a press conference, she held up a high-school yearbook that she said Moore signed before the alleged assault.) Two of the women say that they first met Moore at the Gadsden Mall, and the Post reports that several other women who used to work there remembered Moore’s frequent presence—“usually alone” and “well-dressed in slacks and a button-down shirt.”

 

This past weekend, I spoke or messaged with more than a dozen people—including a major political figure in the state—who told me that they had heard, over the years, that Moore had been banned from the mall because he repeatedly badgered teen-age girls. Some say that they heard this at the time, others in the years since. These people include five members of the local legal community, two cops who worked in the town, several people who hung out at the mall in the early eighties, and a number of former mall employees. (A request for comment from the Moore campaign was not answered.) Several of them asked that I leave their names out of this piece. The stories that they say they’ve heard for years have been swirling online in the days since the Post published its report. “Sources tell me Moore was actually banned from the Gadsden Mall and the YMCA for his inappropriate behavior of soliciting sex from young girls,” the independent Alabama journalist Glynn Wilson wrote on his Web site on Sunday. (Wilson declined to divulge his sources.) Teresa Jones, a deputy district attorney for Etowah County in the early eighties, told CNN last week that “it was common knowledge that Roy dated high-school girls.” Jones told me that she couldn’t confirm the alleged mall banning, but said, “It’s a rumor I’ve heard for years.”

(...)

 

Legat says that he saw Moore there a few times, even though his understanding then was that he had already been banned. “It started around 1979, I think,” Legat said. “I know the ban was still in place when I got there.” Legat recalled a Gadsden police officer named J. D. Thomas, now retired, who worked security at the mall. “J. D. was a fixture there, when I was working at the store,” Legat said. “He really looked after the kids there. He was a good guy. J. D. told me, ‘If you see Roy, let me know. He’s banned from the mall.’ ” Legat recalled Thomas telling him, “If you see Moore here, tell me. I’ll take care of him.’ ” Legat said that his boss, Eddie Hill, also told him to look for Moore. A phone call to Hill’s number was not returned.

Reached by phone on Saturday, Thomas, who lives in the nearby town of Southside, declined to discuss the existence of a ban on Moore at the Gadsden Mall. “I don’t have anything to say about that,” he said. A former manager of the mall, who began working there in the late eighties, confirmed the existence of a ban list, but did not recall Moore being on the list during the manager’s tenure there. Barnes Boyle, who is eighty-six, also managed the mall, from 1981 to 1998. His wife, Brenda, told me that Moore was a longtime acquaintance of his—they went to the Y.M.C.A. together often—and that he planned to vote for him. The recent allegations against Moore, the Boyles thought, are likely liberal propaganda and, as Brenda put it, “a sign of the times.”

Jason Nelms, an I.T. worker who grew up in nearby Southside and now lives in Tennessee, regularly visited the Gadsden Mall as a teen-ager, in the early eighties. “It was a joke from one of the managers/assistant managers that they couldn’t keep an eye on their theater and an eye on the kids outside,” he explained to me via Facebook Messenger. “Us kids would congregate outside on the sidewalk near the theater after the mall closed on Friday and Saturday nights. Anyway, when asked why they had to keep an eye outside, they said that some older guy had been trying to pick up younger girls. They didn’t go beyond that but one of the concession workers whispered to us later that it was Roy Moore he was talking about.”

Gadsden’s current law-enforcement community could not confirm the existence of a mall ban on Moore. But two officers I spoke to this weekend, both of whom asked to remain unnamed, told me that they have long heard stories about Moore and the mall. “The general knowledge at the time when I moved here was that this guy is a lawyer cruising the mall for high-school dates,” one of the officers said. The legal age of consent in Alabama is sixteen, so it would not be illegal there for a man in his early thirties to date a girl who was, say, a senior in high school. But these officers, along with the other people I spoke to, said that Moore’s presence at the mall was regarded as a problem. “I was told by a girl who worked at the mall that he’d been run off from there, from a number of stores. Maybe not legally banned, but run off,” one officer told me. He also said, “I heard from one girl who had to tell the manager of a store at the mall to get Moore to leave her alone.”

 

The second officer went further. “A friend of mine told me he was banned from there,” he said. He added, “I actually voted for Moore. I liked him at one time. But I’m basically disgusted now, to be honest with you. Some of the things he’s said recently, I’ve changed my tune completely about this guy.” He went on, explaining why Moore no longer appeals to him. “When I heard what he said on ‘Hannity’ the other night,” he said, referring to an appearance Moore made on Sean Hannity’s radio show last Friday, “I almost stood straight up. The thing about how he’s never dated anybody without their mother’s permission, that appalled me. That made me want to throw up. Why would you need someone’s permission to date somebody? I’m probably gonna write in Luther Strange.”

 

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/locals-were-troubled-by-roy-moores-interactions-with-teen-girls-at-the-gadsden-mall

[Zaro]

Like a shoplifter

 

Lol

[XavierOnassis]

Again, Alabama Republicans nominated this guy. That entitles them to have the opportunity to send him to the Senate, to write in a name or to vote for Doug Jones.

Democracy in action

[MidnightMax]

5 minutes ago, XavierOnassis said:

Again, Alabama Republicans nominated this guy. That entitles them to have the opportunity to send him to the Senate, to write in a name or to vote for Doug Jones.

Democracy in action

 

MAYBE NOW you shitstains will understand WHY the ORIGINAL INTENT of the writers of the Constitution called for the APPOINTMENT of US Senators, NOT THEIR ELECTION!!!!
 

Time to REPEAL the 17th Amendment!!

 

 

[king of the county]

Young putang very powerful stuff 

[XavierOnassis]

Perhaps some Alabamians might conclude that at age 70, his days of pedophily are over, and perhaps they would see his election as a chance to erect a huge 10 Commandments Monument on the Washington Mall where the president can ser=e it daily.

Give the ex-pedophiles and Bible-thumpers of Alabama a chance to elect one of their own, I say!

[Zaro]

Alabama's reputation is on the line.

[XavierOnassis]

Will McConnell save the people of Alabama from disgracing themselves by electing a former pedophile, or will he be seen as a violator of the election laws, including the rules of his own party?

 

I do not think he will emerge from this covered in glory.

 

[Zaro]

It's a real opportunity for Alabama. Might wanna shake off the image of snake charming, moonshine guzzling and cousin fucking

[shintao]

42 minutes ago, MidnightMax said:

 

MAYBE NOW you shitstains will understand WHY the ORIGINAL INTENT of the writers of the Constitution called for the APPOINTMENT of US Senators, NOT THEIR ELECTION!!!!
 

Time to REPEAL the 17th Amendment!!

 

 

Time for you to stay out of the malls.

[Scout]

Republicans have been hiding Moore's secrets for a long time.  OOOOOOH, the irony of the conservatives chasing after Bill Clinton for sexual crimes, but giving a pass FOR DECADES to Moore. 

[benson13]

Moore....what a Great Christian!!

[theLion]

Maybe he just misunderstood and misspelled "pray".

[benson13]

 

Zaro

It's a real opportunity for Alabama. Might wanna shake off the image of snake charming, moonshine guzzling and cousin fucking

 

 

 

LMAO!!!!!

[DemoMan]

2 hours ago, dontlooknow said:

He is a pedo. 

 

Yes, he is - and a conscious, deliberate one. He deliberately stalked areas where he knew young girls were most likely to be without parental protection, he lied to one girl's mother at the courthouse to trick her into letting her daughter be alone, exploiting his official status, he "badgered" girls at the mall, trying to get one alone, and we have evidence that he was sexually physically aggressive with them, even when they resisted.

 

As has been reported, it was AN OPEN SECRET that you could not trust him around young girls.

[DemoMan]

2 hours ago, king of the county said:

Young putang very powerful stuff 

 

Why?

[DemoMan]

41 minutes ago, theLion said:

Maybe he just misunderstood and misspelled "pray".

 

Damn it, I was waiting to spring that one.

 

[benson13]

so many phonies in the gop....all lying assholes

[XavierOnassis]

  2 hours ago, king of the county said:

Young putang very powerful stuff 

 

Why?
Just see what it has done to poor Kingaroo.

He is compelled to demand that women show him their tits online, though to no avail, so far as we know. He feels obliged to comment on how hot random women are. Women in pantsuits terrify him.

A powerful god is the Great God Horn.

 

[king of the county]

1 hour ago, DemoMan said:

 

Why?

Because with it females can get whatever they want 

[Middl3]

Amazing how a perv is kicked out of a mall in a public space but and get a career in law enforcement..unreal. Guess those backgroud checks also failed.

[king of the county]

No one spoke up 

[DemoMan]

9 minutes ago, king of the county said:

Because with it females can get whatever they want 

 

And what is it that you are suggesting that young girls "want' that they should trade sex for?

[king of the county]

2 minutes ago, DemoMan said:

 

And what is it that you are suggesting that young girls "want' that they should trade sex for?

Whatever they want ......money, job, cash, diamonds, movie role, tv gig, talk show, car, trips, drugs, singing contract

[DemoMan]

Just now, king of the county said:

Whatever they want ......money, job, cash, diamonds, movie role, tv gig, talk show, car, trips, drugs, singing contract

 

So all young girls are prostitutes.

 

No wonder you are so desperately lonely.