Roy Moore Wanted to Date This Teenager So Much She Says He Called Her High School Principal’s Office to Talk to Her

‘I Realize That It Didn’t Just Happen to Me’

The Washington Post Wednesday night published more revelations about Roy Moore, including new details from two women who say he actively pursued them when they were high school seniors working at the local mall.

“Gena Richardson says she was a high school senior working in the men’s department of Sears at the Gadsden Mall when a man approached her and introduced himself as Roy Moore,” The Post reports.

“He said, ‘You can just call me Roy,’ ” says Richardson, who says this first encounter happened in the fall of 1977, just before or after her 18th birthday, as Moore, then a 30-year-old local attorney, was gaining a reputation for pursuing young women at the mall in Gadsden, Ala. His overtures caused one store manager to tell new hires to “watch out for this guy,” another young woman to complain to her supervisor and Richardson to eventually hide from him when he came in Sears, the women say.

After asking her for her phone number and being rebuffed, Moore tried to contact her a different way.

There were no cell phones in 1977, so Moore, Richardson says, called her high school to ask her out.

A few days after asking her for her phone number while she was at work, and being told no, Richardson says, “she was in trigonometry class at Gadsden High when she was summoned to the principal’s office over the intercom in her classroom. She had a phone call.”

“I said ‘Hello?’” Richardson recalls. “And the male on the other line said, ‘Gena, this is Roy Moore.’ I was like, ‘What?!’ He said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m in trig class.’ ”

Richardson says Moore asked her out again on the call. A few days later, after he asked her out at Sears, she relented and agreed, feeling both nervous and flattered. They met that night at a movie theater in the mall after she got off work, a date that ended with Moore driving her to her car in a dark parking lot behind Sears and giving her what she called an unwanted, “forceful” kiss that left her scared.

Richardson said after telling him in his car she couldn’t date him, “I thanked him and started to get out and he grabbed me and pulled me in and that’s when he kissed me.”

“It was a man kiss — like really deep tongue. Like very forceful tongue. It was a surprise. I’d never been kissed like that,” she says. “And the minute that happened, I got scared then. I really did. Something came over me that scared me. And so I said, ‘I’ve got to go, because my curfew is now.’ ” 

She says she got out of the car and into her own.

“I never wanted to see him again,” Richardson told The Post.

“All these years, I thought that was an isolated incident,” Richardson said. “Now, as a mother and a grandmother, it just makes me physically sick. I realize that it didn’t just happen to me.”

Her account vaguely echoes one by Beverly Young Nelson, who on Monday, with her attorney Gloria Allred, tearfully detailed how Moore, she says, asked her out when she was just 16, and sexually assaulted her in his car. “I thought he was going to rape me,” Nelson said.

The Post also reports Becky Gray in 1977 was 22 and working at the mall when Moore aggressively pursued her as well.

“It would always be on Friday or Saturday night,” Gray said. “Parents would drop kids off, let them roam the mall. Well, he started coming up to me.”

She repeatedly told Moore she was not interested in dating him.

Gray says he was persistent in a way that made her uncomfortable. She says he lingered in her section, or else by the bathroom area, and that she became so disturbed that she complained to the Pizitz manager, Maynard von Spiegelfeld. Gray says he told her that it was “not the first time he had a complaint about him hanging out at the mall.”

Earlier Wednesday Alabama’s largest newspaper, AL.com, revealed two women are accusing Moore of inappropriate behavior. One says he grabbed her buttocks while she was a client in his law office. The other says she was 17 when Moore tried to date her. She says he told her, “I go out with girls your age all the time.”

There are now at least nine women who have come forward to accuse Moore of a variety of behaviors, from trying to date teens 16 to 18 years old, to sexually assaulting a 14-year old girl, to attempted rape of a 16-year old girl.

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