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On 10 November 2017, the disreputable web site GatewayPundit.com reported — without any evidence whatsoever beyond a single anonymous Twitter account — that investigative journalists from the Washington Post had paid a woman to go on the record and accuse Roy Moore, a Republican candidate running to fill Attorney General Jeff Sessions' vacant U.S. Senate seat in Alabama, of sexually abusing her when she was 14 years old. Leigh Corfman told the Post that she was 14 and Moore was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney when they met. Corfman said Moore picked her up around the corner from her home and took her to his residence, where he undressed and molested her. Three other women also went on the record and said Moore had made advances towards them when they were between the ages of 16 and 18 and he was in his thirties. After the Post story broke, a fifth woman, Beverly Young Nelson, came forward and said Moore had tried to rape her when she was 16. GatewayPundit.com reported (in an article bearing the oddly-worded headline Report: Alabama Woman Claims Reporter Offered Her $1000s to Accuse Roy Moore of Sexual Abuse?) that: Indeed it would be big news — except for the inconvenient fact that it was not true and thus was not HUGE. While the Washington Post's story was based upon interviews with no fewer than thirty sources, the only source cited by GatewayPundit.com was hearsay from a questionable Twitter account bearing the handle @umpire43, which belonged to someone going by Doug Lewis #MAGA who claimed (again, with no sources offered other than a vague friend of my wife's) that : In follow-up tweets, Doug stated the a family friend (purportedly named Jean, but of course with no last name provided) recorded the conversation in which Beth (probably Washington Post journalist Beth Reinhard, who co-wrote the Moore report) offered a source money to accuse Moore of sexual improprieties. The tape of that conversation was supposedly turned over to law enforcement, according to Doug. We contacted the Washington Post to ask whether there was any possibility the reporters on their story had paid their sources and received a flat denial from spokeswoman Molly Gannon Conway: We called the Etowah County district attorney's office to check whether any such allegations had been brought to their attention, but as of yet we haven't received a response. Notably, however, the accusatory tweets from the Doug Lewis #MAGA were deleted, and then, a few hours later, the entire account was deleted as well. The @umpire43 account was launched in 2011, and as of 11 November 2017 it had tweeted 17,000 messages to 18,300 followers. On 13 November 2017, the account was temporarily set to private, and when it was made public again, its owner had deleted all but fifty posts — including the ones claiming that women had been paid off to accuse Moore. As Washington Post political reporter Dave Weigel observed, the account's owner had trouble keeping key facts about even his own biography straight: The progressive nonprofit media watchdog Media Matters for America observed that the same Twitter account had been used to post a similar unfounded allegation in a now-deleted 2016 tweet, claiming: Later on 13 November 2017, the entire Twitter account was deleted. According to The Daily Beast, Doug Lewis was a false identity co-opted from a real Navy veteran who died in 2007. Despite the fact the GatewayPundit story was entirely unsourced, it gained traction among Moore's supporters. In an appearance on CNN with host Don Lemon, attorney Trenton Garmon, who represents a legal foundation headed by Moore's wife, said: Moore's wife Kayla, who heads the Foundation for Moral Law, also made a similar allegation on Facebook, writing: The GatewayPundit story now carries a disclaimer at the bottom of their article that reads, UPDATE: We have not been able to confirm these allegations by Doug Lewis. This is not the first time GatewayPundit.com has spread unfounded and misleading information. In the hours after a 1 October 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, the web site misidentified the gunman in that shooting, spreading the name and image of an innocent man far and wide, resulting in his (and his family's) being targeted for death threats. Moore, who was twice elected to, and removed from, the state Supreme Court of Alabama, has denied the allegations reported in the Washington Post.
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