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).
.. 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.
.. “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.”
.. 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.’ ”
.. “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
.. 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.”
.. “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?
Why Louis C.K.’s “I Love You, Daddy” Should Never Have Been Distributed in the First Place
Take Glen’s relationship with Grace. He’s the showrunner, doing the hiring and firing of actors; yet his sexual relationship with Grace is depicted as her idea, undertaken, she says, not for the good of her career but because of her desire for him. That relationship comes off not as him taking advantage of her but as a power move on her part. Grace is depicted from the start as a sex symbol: while Glen is on the phone with her agent
.. What Louis C.K. never does, in “I Love You, Daddy,” is consider in any practical or emotional detail the reasons why the relationship between a seventeen-year-old woman who hasn’t filled out a single college application and a sixty-eight-year-old man of wealth and accomplishment might be inadvisable—why the difference between them is more than a number.
.. the movie takes pains to put China and Leslie on equal footing.
.. China’s trip with Leslie and his retinue is her education, an education greater than college, and it’s also his artistic inspiration.
.. The result is, in effect, an act of cinematic gaslighting, an attempt to spin the tenets of modern liberal feminism into shiny objects of hypnotic paralysis.
.. The movie declares that depredation is liberation, morality is tyranny, judgment is narrow-mindedness, shamelessness is creativity, lechery is admiration, and public complaint is private vanity.
.. In scene after scene, “I Love You, Daddy” depicts or evokes women making decisions—in private life or in the professional realm—that men feel constrained to accept. In short, it says that whatever authority men have isn’t really worth much, but it’s all they have and they’re entitled to it.
.. There is no ambiguity, no ambivalence, no second level of meaning, no irony, no glimmer of self-doubt—nothing but the channelling of a revolting sense of entitlement, of rights exercised without responsibilities.
.. no responsible distributor should ever have decided to buy the rights to the movie from him
Will the Republican Party Fail Another Roy Moore Test?
Moore, then thirty-two, targeted one girl, Leigh Corfman, when she was fourteen years old and sitting outside a courtroom where her parents, who were in the process of divorcing, were having a custody hearing. Her mother was sitting with her when Moore, who was then an assistant district attorney, with an office down the hall, first approached; he offered to watch Leigh while her mother went before the judge, presenting himself, an officer of the court, as a respectable momentary guardian. “He said, ‘Oh, you don’t want her to go in there and hear all that. I’ll stay out here with her,’
.. because even a molesting Republican was better than a Democrat
.. because they weren’t really sure that it was bad for a man in his thirties to be sexually propositioning teen-agers.
.. the President also believes that if these allegations are true, Judge Moore will do the right thing and step aside.”
.. Hannity, who often acts as the id of the Trumpist wing of the Party, said, “How do you possibly tell, know, the truth?”
If You Refuse to Condemn Predators because of Politics, You’re Disgusting
These women aren’t props for your partisan gotcha tweets.
The allegations against Roy Moore are disgusting — and if you find yourself reluctant to say so because of your politics, then you’re pretty gross, too. The Leigh Corfman story, reported by the Washington Post, is about so much more than just some older guy having a relationship with some younger girl. That, of course, would be bad enough — many girls haven’t even had their f***ing periods at age 14 — but this is also about a man who abuses his power to prey on the powerless. It’s about a respected district attorney finding a girl in a vulnerable position (waiting with her mother outside of a child-support hearing) and relishing in the opportunity to take advantage of it.
.. As my colleague David French notes, there are a lot of reasons to believe these allegations:
- There are multiple accusers.
- These women didn’t come to the press seeking attention, they simply answered the questions when the press came to them.
- They have witnesses corroborating their stories.
- Finally, the woman with the most serious allegations, Leigh Corfman, voted for Donald Trump in 2016 — making the political-hit-job storyline laughable at best.
.. As my colleague David French notes, there are a lot of reasons to believe these allegations: There are multiple accusers. These women didn’t come to the press seeking attention, they simply answered the questions when the press came to them. They have witnesses corroborating their stories. Finally, the woman with the most serious allegations, Leigh Corfman, voted for Donald Trump in 2016 — making the political-hit-job storyline laughable at best.
It’s not that these people only care about victims if the abuser is a liberal, it’s that they don’t really care about victims at all. For them, the abused are nothing more than political pawns to further a partisan agenda.
.. Now, these comments actually are very important — just not for the reasons that the people making them think that they are. They’re important not as defenses, but because they’re perfect examples of an exact reason why these women may have been too afraid to come forward sooner: because they were afraid that they’d be ridiculed and doubted, and that no one would believe them.
I’d like someone to please give me some examples of women who have launched themselves to fame and fortune by falsely accusing men of sexual assault — because we all know that that’s not what happens. What does happen is their reputations are scrutinized harshly, and the allies of the powerful men they’ve accused comb through their pasts looking for evidence that they’re liars. People are afraid to employ them; men are afraid to speak to them; their lives are forever changed. Make no mistake: Speaking out publicly about your abuse is not a way to stardom; it’s a painful, harrowing experience and a sacrifice that so few are able to actually make given how brutal the consequences can be.