Leigh Corfman, who accused failed Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore of molesting her when she was just 14 and he was 32, filed a defamation lawsuit against him on Thursday, Al.com reported.
Corfman told the Washington Post in November that in 1979, Moore picked her up and brought her to his house, where he removed her clothes and stripped to his underwear. He then proceeded to touch her over her undergarments and placed her hand over his underwear.
In the same report, other women accused Moore of pursuing sexual encounters with them when they were teenagers and he was in his early 30s.
The allegations rocked the Senate race, and Moore lost the reliably red state to Democrat Doug Jones last month. Moore refused to concede the race, although Jones’ margin of victory was too high for an automatic recount. Jones was sworn in as a senator on Wednesday.
On the campaign trail, Moore called the allegations false and his accusers liars. He claimed the allegations were an “effort by Mitch McConnell and his cronies to steal this election from the people of Alabama.”
During the campaign, Corfman wrote an open letter to Moore demanding that he stop attacking her character, but she said he continued to do so.
In a Thursday statement provided to Al.com, Corfman said, "The decision to sue Mr. Moore and his campaign committee was difficult, but they need to be held responsible for their actions."
"Mr. Moore sexually abused me when I was only 14 years old,” Corfman said. “Then he and his campaign called me a liar and immoral when I publicly disclosed his misconduct. They ignored my requests to stop attacking me and to acknowledge the truth. Just last week, after the election, they filed a lawsuit in which they once again called me a liar. By this lawsuit, I seek to do what I could not do as a 14-year-old — hold Mr. Moore and those who enable him accountable."
The lawsuit states that Moore and his campaign committee “defamed Ms. Corfman, repeatedly and in all forms of media, calling her a liar and questioning her motivation for publicly disclosing that Mr. Moore sexually abused her in 1979 when she was a 14-year-old high school freshman and he was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney."
In the lawsuit, Corfman said she wants Moore and his campaign to retract their defamatory statements about her, to offer her a public apology for those statements, and to refrain from making further statements about her. She also seeking the costs of the lawsuit and "further relief as permitted by law and as the court deems appropriate."
Leigh Corfman's suit against Roy Moore by Jeremy W. Gray on Scribd
