Roy Moore

Roy Stewart Moore (born February 11, 1947) is an American politician, lawyer, and jurist who served as chief justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama from 2001 to 2003 and again from 2013 to 2017, each time being removed from office for judicial misconduct by the Alabama Court of the Judiciary. He was the Republican Party nominee in the 2017 U.S. Senate special election in Alabama to fill the seat vacated by Jeff Sessions, but was accused by several women of sexually assaulting them while they were underage and lost to Democratic candidate Doug Jones. Moore ran for the same Senate seat again in 2020 and lost the Republican primary.

Moore attended West Point and served as a company commander in the Military Police Corps during the Vietnam War. After graduating from the University of Alabama Law School, he joined the Etowah County district attorney's office, serving as an assistant district attorney from 1977 to 1982. In 1992, he was appointed as a circuit judge by Governor Guy Hunt to fill a vacancy, and was elected to the position at the next term. In 2001, Moore was elected to the position of chief justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama. Moore was removed from his position in November 2003 by the Alabama Court of the Judiciary for refusing a federal court's order to remove a marble monument of the Ten Commandments that he had placed in the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building.

Moore sought the Republican nomination for the governorship of Alabama in 2006 and 2010, but lost in the primaries. Moore was elected again as chief justice in 2013, but he was suspended in May 2016, for defying a U.S. Supreme Court decision about same-sex marriage (''Obergefell v. Hodges''), and resigned in April 2017. On September 26, 2017, he won a primary runoff to become the Republican candidate in a special election for a U.S. Senate seat that had been vacated by Jeff Sessions.

In November 2017, during his special election campaign for U.S. Senate, several public allegations of sexual misconduct were made against Moore. Three women stated that he had sexually assaulted them when they were at the respective ages of 14, 16 and 28; six other women reported that Moore – then in his 30s – pursued sexual relationships with them while they were as young as 16. Moore acknowledged that he may have approached and dated teenagers while he was in his 30s, but denied sexually assaulting anyone. President Donald Trump endorsed Moore a week before the election, after which some Republicans withdrew their opposition to Moore. Democrat Doug Jones won the election, becoming the first Democrat since 1992 to win a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama.

Moore's political views have been characterized as far-right and Christian nationalist. He has attracted national media attention and controversy over his views on race, homosexuality, transgender people, and Islam, his belief that Christianity should dictate public policy, and his past ties to neo-Confederate and white-nationalist groups. Moore was a leading voice in the "birther" movement, which promoted the false claim that president Barack Obama was not born in the United States. He founded the Foundation for Moral Law, a non-profit legal organization from which he collected more than $1 million over five years. On its tax filings, the organization indicated a much lesser amount of pay to Moore. Provided by Wikipedia