The Washington Post on Thursday published a bombshell report chronicling allegations against U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore from multiple women.
The report relies on the accounts of four women, one of whom says Moore made inappropriate sexual advances on her when she was just 14-years-old and Moore was 32. The Washington Post interviewed three other women who said Moore pursued them while they were between 16 and 18 years old, but these three women stopped short of accusing Moore of any sexual contact.
The newspaper noted that none of these accusers sought out the Post to tell their stories. It further stated that “according to campaign reports, none of the women has donated to or worked for Moore’s Democratic opponent, Doug Jones, or his rivals in the Republican primary.”
But a separate report Friday by local media in Alabama seems to belie the Post’s claim that none of the accusers had a political vendetta against Moore. According to AL.com, at least one of the women, Deborah Wesson Gibson, worked as a sign language interpreter for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016. Although, as RedState’s Sarah Rumpf explained, that doesn’t necessarily mean Gibson actually supported Clinton for president.
The same report noted that Gibson worked for Florida Senators Patrick Murphy and Bill Nelson.
To its credit, the Post’s report does specify that none of the women “donated” to Democratic campaigns or to Moore’s Republican primary opponent. To date, there is no evidence to suggest that is false. However, it is curious why the Post did not include what AL.com was able to dig up just a day after the bombshell Post report. Was the Post aware that Gibson volunteered for Democratic campaigns? If the paper was not aware of this detail, then why not?
I’m not suggesting that this one question belies the entire Post report. What I am saying is that perhaps before we take 100 percent of the Post’s report at face value, assuming that its reporters did their due diligence to collect all of the relevant contextual details surrounding the claims, perhaps we should all do our own homework to test the newspaper’s reporting.
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