Alabama Woman Accuses Roy Moore of Sexual Assault When She Was 16

Beverly Nelson Young said that Moore squeezed her neck, “attempting to force my head into his crotch.”

Beverly Young Nelson, left, the latest accuser of Alabama Republican Roy Moore, reads a prepared statement as attorney Gloria Allred looks on, at a news conference in New York on Monday.Richard Drew/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

An Alabama businesswoman, Beverly Nelson Young, says Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore sexually assaulted her when she was 16—making her the fifth woman to accuse the former Alabama state Supreme Court Chief Justice of unwanted advances or sexual misconduct when they were teenagers.

Young made the allegations during an emotional press conference in New York Monday afternoon, flanked by her lawyer, Gloria Allred. At the time of the alleged incident, Moore was serving as a district attorney for Etowah County, Alabama.

The new accusation comes in the wake of allegations detailed in an explosive Washington Post story last week that Moore once molested a 14-year-old girl and initiated inappropriate relationships with other teenagers. In a radio interview with Sean Hannity last Friday, Moore emphatically denied ever meeting the 14-year-old girl, but could not rule out the possibility he pursued teenage girls.

Reading from a prepared statement, Young said that Moore picked her up in his car from a restaurant where she worked as a waitress, and offered her a ride home. Instead, he pulled the car over in a darkened location and attacked her, Young said. He then “began squeezing my neck attempting to force my head into his crotch,” she said, adding she was prevented from escape when Moore locked the car door.

“I was twisting and struggling and begging him to stop,” Young said. “I had tears running down my face.” Before letting her leave the vehicle, she said that Moore told her not to tell anyone about the incident because no one would believe her. Young said she woke up the next day with bruises on her neck.

Allred, Young’s attorney, said that Young had previously only disclosed the alleged assault to close family members, including her mother, sister, and her now-husband.

“She did not, however, speak out publicly because she feared Mr. Moore and the power he had,” Allred said. “Today, however, inspired by Mr. Moore’s other accusers she has found the courage to break her silence.”

Shortly before the press conference Monday, Moore’s campaign chair dismissed Allred as a “sensationalist leading a witch hunt,” and Moore has attempted to discredit the Washington Post’s reporting as a politically motivated attack aimed at boosting Doug Jones, the Democratic candidate in next month’s special election to fill Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ Alabama Senate seat.

Republican calls for Moore to bow out of the race strengthened Monday, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell definitively saying he believed the women, and that Moore needed to “step aside.”

Moore defiantly shot back at McConnell’s statement by suggesting the majority leader resign instead.

https://twitter.com/MooreSenate/status/930128259035082756

Over the weekend, a former colleague who worked with Moore in the 1970’s and early 80’s told CNN that it was “common knowledge” that Moore dated high school girls as an adult man in his 30s. “Everyone we knew thought it was weird,”  Teresa Jones, a former deputy district attorney, said. “We wondered why someone his age would hang out at high school football games and at the mall, but you really wouldn’t say something to someone like that.”

Moore has vowed to sue the Post.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate