Reasons to question her credibility: In the past she was convicted of writing bad checks and third-degree theft. Reasons not to question it: Her sister recalls the accuser, Tina Johnson, telling her about the incident years ago. The Alabama paper Johnson spoke to found proof that Moore did represent Johnson’s mother in a custody proceeding in 1991, just as she claims. And … what reason would anyone have to falsely accuse Moore at this point given the media heat? By speaking up Johnson will have instantly made an enemy of most Republicans in Alabama. Her name will be dragged through the mud on the Internet. And there are enough accusers already that her story doesn’t add much to the case against Moore.

She claims to be apolitical.

According to Johnson, he asked questions about her young daughters, including what color eyes they had and if they were as pretty as she was. She said that made her feel uncomfortable, too.

Once the papers were signed, she and her mother got up to leave. After her mother walked through the door first, she said, Moore came up behind her.

It was at that point, she recalled, he grabbed her buttocks.

“He didn’t pinch it; he grabbed it,” said Johnson. She was so surprised she didn’t say anything. She didn’t tell her mother.

Johnson was 28 at the time. But the same Alabama paper found another woman who claims Moore would flirt with her at the restaurant where she worked as a hostess — when she was 17. “I just kind of said, ‘Do you know how old I am?'” she claims, to which Moore allegedly replied, “Yeah. I go out with girls your age all the time.” This was in the early 1980s, when Moore would have been in his mid-30s. The paper also asked the woman, Kelly Thorp, why she and Moore’s other accusers didn’t speak up until now. According to Thorp, it’s because Moore was a powerful man and they didn’t think they’d be believed. Quote: “Everybody knew it wouldn’t matter, that he would get elected anyway because his supporters are never going to believe anything bad about him.”

We’ll find out next month if that’s still true. I bet it is.

Say, aren’t we creeping up on that 24-hour deadline Sean Hannity gave Moore to challenge the allegations against him or else withdraw? Indeed we are, which explains the clip you’re about to watch below: A lawyer for Moore held a press conference this afternoon to push back on some of the charges made by Beverly Young Nelson, the accuser who claims Moore signed her high-school yearbook and later sexually assaulted her in his car after offering her a ride home from work. He notes that Nelson claimed she never had contact with Moore after that incident when in fact Moore approved her divorce as a judge in 1999. Duly noted, but a party to a divorce doesn’t always come face to face with a judge; in some states, in an uncontested divorce, only the petitioner is required to come to court for the perfunctory judicial signature on the decree. His role in her divorce doesn’t prove that they had personal contact later. The lawyer also wants Gloria Allred to release Nelson’s yearbook so that a handwriting analyst can examine it, which is a fair request (and which seems to have pleased Hannity). He claims that Moore has never signed “D.A.” after his name and in fact wasn’t a full-fledged D.A. at the time. It does look as though the “D.A.,” the date, and the “Olde Hickory House” in the inscription were written in a different hand…

https://twitter.com/jbarro/status/930164286143565830

…but maybe that’s just a function of them being printed instead of written in cursive, as the rest of the inscription was. The 1977 signature looks startlingly similar to Moore’s signature now, as Josh Barro noted with the side-by-side comparison. And although Moore may not have routinely added “D.A.” after his name when signing things, it’s possible he did so on that occasion to impress the high-school girl by reminding her that he was a person of importance, not just some teenaged friend scrawling in her yearbook. Remember, according to Nelson, Moore allegedly told her after the assault that no one would believe her because he was the D.A. and she was just a kid. If she’s telling the truth, the “D.A.” flourish makes sense as an attempt to impress his authority upon a child, possibly with an eye to making her more compliant with his advances.

If you watch carefully, you’ll see the lawyer never flatly claims that Nelson’s allegations are false. And if Johnson’s account about an incident in 1991 is accurate, this would be the first case we know about in which Moore behaved inappropriately after he was married.