Four More Women Describe Advances by Roy Moore as Campaign Pushes Back

GADSDEN, Ala. — Alabama’s increasingly bizarre Senate race was convulsed again as four more women came forward on Wednesday to describe encounters with the Republican candidate, Roy S. Moore, and Mr. Moore’s campaign sharply questioned the credibility of another accuser.

The newest accusations came from women who ranged in age from about 18 to 28 at the time. They complained of being groped, forcibly kissed or subjected to unwanted advances.

One of them, Becky Gray, now 62, a retired teacher living in Gadsden, Ala., said in an interview that she was puzzled by Mr. Moore’s repeated overtures when she worked in the Gadsden Mall.

“I just couldn’t figure out why a man of his age spent every Friday and Saturday at the mall,” said Ms. Gray, who was then in her late teens or early 20s.

She said she frequently saw Mr. Moore, then in his 30s, talking with young women and did her best to avoid him. Ms. Gray said she eventually complained to her manager that he would not leave her alone and was later told that Mr. Moore had been banned from the mall.

Nine women have now come forward with accusations, and state Republican leaders were pondering increasingly baroque mechanisms that have the potential to deny their own candidate a Senate seat. Party leaders met Wednesday evening, but no decision was announced.

Also quiet was President Trump, who ignored questions about Mr. Moore’s increasingly imperiled candidacy, which has been repudiated by much of his party’s leadership.

And so a head-spinning afternoon and evening unfolded. A series of new allegations surfaced, Republican leaders met behind closed doors before slipping away from reporters, and a lawyer for Mr. Moore raised an idea probably never before raised in a Senate race — that handwriting experts analyze a scrawled inscription in a woman’s high school yearbook to see if she had fabricated the signature of a man now running for the Senate.

But as Mr. Moore’s supporters struck an aggressive posture, the candidate’s troubles mounted when the Alabama Media Group and The Washington Post each published accounts from women who said they had interacted with Mr. Moore years ago. One of the women, Tina Johnson, said that Mr. Moore had groped her buttocks in 1991, when she was 28.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/15/us/roy-moore-alabama-republicans.html?hpw&rref=us&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well