Locals Were Troubled by Roy Moore’s Interactions with Teen Girls at the Gadsden Mall
Rumors
have swirled for years that, in the early eighties, the Alabama Senate
candidate Roy Moore was banned from a shopping mall for bothering
teen-age girls.
Roy Moore, the Republican Senate candidate and former chief justice of
the Alabama Supreme Court, was born in Gadsden, a small city flanked by
Interstate 59 and the Coosa River, an hour northeast of Birmingham.
Gadsden is hilly, woodsy, blue-collar, and religious. “LEGAL OR NOT, SIN
IS SIN,” a sign in front of a church announced yesterday. I saw it as I
drove around, crisscrossing George Wallace Drive. I also saw Trump
posters, Confederate flags, and dozens of signs for Doug Jones, the
Democrat tied with Moore in recent Senate-race
polls.
Gadsden is the seat of Etowah County, which is a conservative place;
Donald Trump received three times as many votes in the county as Hillary
Clinton did. (Statewide, he received twice as many.) But I didn’t, in
all my driving, see a single yard sign for Moore, the home-town son.
Even the parking lot of the one mall in town had more bumper stickers
for Luther Strange (four), Moore’s opponent in the Republican primary, than for Moore himself (one).
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.”
Greg
Legat, who is now fifty-nine and living in East Gadsden, was, from
1981 to 1985, an employee at the Record Bar, a store that was in the
Gadsden Mall. By the early eighties, Legat told me, the mall was
“the place to be. There were no empty stores. And lots of kids came
around. Lots of teen-agers. You went there to see and be seen.” Legat
met his wife, Jo Anne, there. She worked at a restaurant called Orange
Bowl. Legat remembers that parents dropped their kids off at the mall,
typically unchaperoned. Teens filled the place.
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.”
Moore has mounted various defenses since the Post story appeared.
Among these is his “special concern for the protection of young ladies,”
as he put it to Hannity. The Fox News host pressed for specifics. “I
don’t know Ms. Corfman from anybody,” Moore went on. “I never talked to
her, never had any contact with her. Allegations of sexual misconduct
with her are completely false. I believe they are politically motivated.
I believe they are brought only to stop a very successful campaign, and
that’s what they are doing. I’ve never known this woman.” When
questioned about the other women cited in the Post story, he said that
he couldn’t be expected to remember every woman he’d ever dated. “After
my return from the military,” he said, “I dated a lot of young ladies.”
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