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. 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. The Gadsden Mall opened in It has two department stores, Belk and Sears, one on each end. A diverse assortment of families wandered around the place, which felt trapped in time. Two young security guards made their rounds. 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.
