Etowah County Circuit Judge Gregory Williams on Wednesday dismissed former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore’s defamation suit against a woman who accused him of sexual assault.
The lawsuit is the last in a series of suits launched by the former hopeful for U.S. Senate who saw his campaign derailed by a number of accusations of past sexual misconduct.
Moore had hoped to charge this accuser, Beverly Nelson, with defamation for a written statement she made in 2017 a month before the special election.
In that statement, Nelson accused Moore of groping her and attempting to sexually assault her when she was a 16-year-old waitress and Moore was in his 30s.
Williams wrote Wednesday that Moore failed to adequately challenge the veracity of Nelson’s claims and therefore fell short on proving his defamation claims.
“Moore’s responsive pleading is troublesome. It does not contain one single statement of fact that Moore did not commit a sexual transgression against Nelson,” Williams wrote. “The Court is flummoxed as to why if Moore wanted to contradict Nelson did he not execute an affidavit denying her statement as to the events in 1977. The argument may be that since he filed a defamation claim against Nelson then Moore is denying the truth of her statement. The problem is that relying only on the complaint is improper. A party may not rely on the allegations of his pleadings alone to support or oppose the motion for summary judgment but must instead provide the Court with at least one of the kinds of evidence called for by this rule, and that evidence must set out sufficient facts to indicate a genuine issue for trial.”
Instead, Williams said Moore asked the court to speculate on why Nelson waited decades to report the incident, or whether a young girl would be closing a restaurant alone.
“Moore attempts to provide a fact concerning Nelson’s propensity for telling the truth,” Williams said. “He cites Nelson’s stepson giving an interview to a news agency. In the interview, the stepson doubts Nelson’s truthfulness. The problem is that this “fact” is abject hearsay, meaning the statement of a third party offered for the truth of the matter asserted. Hearsay cannot be relied on to defeat a properly supported motion for a summary judgment.”
The ruling does not mean that Nelson proved the veracity of her allegations; merely that Moore could not provide facts to disprove her allegations.
Moore previously countersued Leigh Corfman, his primary accuser, for defamation and lost that case as well; but Corfman, too, failed to prove that Moore defamed her when he went on TV and called her a liar for the allegations against him.
