By Michael Scherer
Alabama senate candidate Roy Moore's campaign refused Wednesday to substantiate a key claim it made as part of an effort to raise doubts about one of the candidate's accusers.
The campaign has claimed to have found documents that show Leigh Corfman lived more than a mile from the intersection where she said Moore picked her up for dates in 1979, when she was 14 and he was 32. She says he took her to his house, and touched her inappropriately. Moore has denied knowing Corfman.
"According to records the media has not bothered to look at, we've been able to find that Corfman's supposed pickup place was almost a mile away from her mother's house and would have been across a major thoroughfare," Ben DuPre, a longtime aide to Moore, said at an event Tuesday in Montgomery. "This is yet another improbable fact in Leigh Corfman's own words and story that the media has not bothered to investigate."
Leigh Corfman and her mother Nancy told The Post that they lived at the time on Whittier Street in Gadsden, around the corner from Alcott Road and Riley Street, where Leigh says she met Moore.
Nancy Corfman said she kept that address from 1974 until February 1981, when she relocated with her new husband to a house on Dogwood Circle in Gadsden, which is about a mile away across a major thoroughfare. A police report about property theft published in the Gadsden Times on March 31, 1980 listed Nancy Corfman's address on Whittier Street.
The Post requested documentation to support DuPre's description of another address on Tuesday and a spokeswoman for the Moore campaign said she would try to respond. On Wednesday morning, following another request for the information, Brett Doster, a strategist for the Moore campaign, sent an email to The Post.
"The Washington Post is a worthless piece of crap that has gone out of its way to railroad Roy Moore," Doster wrote in an email he described as an "on the record" statement. "There is no need for anyone at the Washington Post to ever reach out to the Roy Moore campaign again because we will not respond to anyone from the Post now or in the future. Happy Thanksgiving."
DuPre claimed Tuesday that the news media had not reviewed the available legal filings at the Etowah County courthouse for the custody dispute that Corfman says led her to meet Moore in February of 1979. In fact, The Post obtained and reviewed the entire case file before publishing a story on Corfman.
DuPre described what he called four problems with Corfman's story, including the claim of a different address. The evidence he presented did not contradict what Corfman has told The Post.
First, DuPre said that court files showed that her parents were attempting to transfer custody of their daughter from the mother to the father. Second, he noted that her parents had described in legal filings concerns for their daughter's behavior following their separation. Neither fact is in dispute, and both were known to the Post before publication.
DuPre also pointed to a Breitbart story that quoted Corfman's mother saying there was no phone in her daughter's room in 1979. Both Leigh Corfman and her mother have said they had a phone on a long cord in the hallway that could be brought into the daughter's room, where the younger Corfman says she spoke with Moore.
"John Adams once said, 'Facts are stubborn things,'" DuPre said at the end of his remarks on Tuesday. "We urge the press to do its job."