The Moore campaign has also asked: Why now, after nearly 40 years, are these allegations coming out, and not when Moore ran for state supreme court justice? Quin Hillyer, a veteran conservative journalist and activist based in Mobile who wrote his first profile of Moore back in 2000, says it makes perfect sense that the allegations didn’t come out until now. “This whole idea that it was just open, out there, and should’ve been easy to find out is nonsense,” he says. “He’d never been vetted before on anything other than his oddball interpretations of faith versus government.”

Corfman, for her part, says that one reason she didn’t publicly come forward sooner was because she didn’t want her children to have to endure attacks on her character. “There is no one here that doesn’t know that I’m not an angel,” Corfman told the Post. As if to prove Corfman’s point, Moore campaign chairman Bill Armistead threw a jab at her behavior as a child in an interview with The Weekly Standard on November 29. While trying to cast doubt on Corfman’s allegations, he garbled the Breitbart News report and falsely claimed that Corfman “wasn’t living with her mother at the time” she says she privately met Moore. “Custody had been given over to her father,” Armistead said. “That’s what this proceeding was all about. She went to court—the mother to turn the custody over to the father—because she was a problem child.”