Roy Moore has called his accusers liars, but they refuse to be silenced.
Several women have said the U.S. Senate candidate pursued relationships with them when they were underage girls, and some have accused him of sexual assault. Debbie Wesson Gibson, one of the women who appeared in The Washington Post’s original story on the allegations, provided the newspaper with a high school scrapbook chronicling her time dating Moore.
Gibson said that as a teenage girl, she had written down dates she’d had with Moore in the scrapbook and listed him as her guest for her Etowah High School graduation. She says her relationship with Moore at the time was consensual, and prior to the allegations, she said she held Moore in “high esteem.” The pair stayed in touch over the years, and Gibson even worked on his circuit judge campaign in 1982, she said.
Moore has broadly denied knowing women in the Post article, and has accused them of lying to smear his campaign. “These allegations are completely false, they’re malicious; specifically, I do not know any of these women nor have I ever engaged in sexual misconduct with anyone,” Moore said at a rally in Alabama.
After Moore claimed not to know his accusers, Gibson said she realized he was a liar. She’d planned to keep her scrapbook to herself until she saw another accuser, Beverly Young Nelson, share that Moore had signed her high school yearbook. Nelson has accused Moore of driving her to a deserted area and physically assaulting her.
“I just couldn’t imagine him doing something like that,” Gibson told the Post. “And then when I saw the interview from Beverly, and I saw his handwriting in her yearbook, my heart just sank. And when I saw what I knew to be Roy Moore’s handwriting, I just began to sob openly.”
Gibson said that Moore’s attack on her integrity was another reason she decided to come forward with her scrapbook, despite receiving numerous death threats. The Post had a former FBI forensics expert authenticate that a graduation card in the scrapbook had not been altered.
“Happy graduation Debbie,” the card read. “I wanted to give you this card myself. I know that you’ll be a success in anything you do. Roy.”
“It takes what I thought was a very lovely part of my past, and it colors it, and it changes it irrevocably,” Gibson told the Post. “It changes it permanently.”
Leigh Corfman, the first woman to accuse Moore of misconduct, has also responded to his claims that his accusers are liars. Corfman penned an open letter to Moore published on AL.com, telling the world that her words were personal, not political.
“I am not getting paid for speaking up. I am not getting rewarded from your political opponents,” Corfman wrote. “What I am getting is stronger by refusing to blame myself and speaking the truth out loud.”