Police Were Told To Keep Roy Moore Away From Cheerleaders: Ex Cop

GADSDEN, AL — Police in Gadsden, Alabama, were routinely warned decades ago to “make sure” Roy Moore, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, “didn’t hang around” high school cheerleaders, former police officer Faye Gary said Tuesday. In her interview with MSNBC, Gary also confirmed reports that Moore, accused of sexual impropriety by at least seven women, was banned from a mall property in Gadsden because of predatory behavior toward teenage girls.

Gary, a juvenile detective who worked for 37 years for the Gadsden Police Department, didn’t say who issued the orders to her and her colleagues, but said they were “told to watch him at the ball games, and make sure that … he didn’t hang around the cheerleaders.”

“The rumor mill was that he liked young girls, and … we were advised that he was being suspended from the mall because he would hang around the young girls that worked in the stores and … really got into a place where they say he was harassing.”

Gary’s interview aired the same day President Trump came close to endorsing Moore for the Senate seat left vacant with Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ appointment to head the Justice Department. Trump has been silent on the Alabama Senate scandal for weeks, but on Tuesday told reporters, “We don’t need a liberal person in there. … We don’t need somebody who is soft on crime” like Doug Jones, his Democratic opponent.

Trump, who said he will announce next week whether he will campaign for Moore, stopped short of endorsing Moore while speaking with reporters as he was about to leave for Mar-a-Lago to spend Thanksgiving with his family.

But Trump did emphasize that Moore has denied the women’s accusations.

“Roy Moore denies it, that’s all I can say,” Trump said, also telling reporters the women’s accusations stem from behavior alleged to have occurred decades ago.

“Forty years is a long time,” Trump said, questioning why the women are just now coming forward.

Moore looked positioned to win the race earlier this month when The Washington Post published a bombshell report in which two women said they had been sexually assaulted by Moore decades ago, when they were 14 and 16 and he was in his 30s. Since the initial report, at least five other women have said Moore pursued romantic relationships with them when they were teenagers and he was a county prosecutor in Gadsden.

Moore has steadfastly denied the allegations and has said he won’t quit the race, despite pleas from Republican establishment leaders to drop out. Even if he did, his name would still appear on a Dec. 12 special election ballot.

Moore, 70, and Jones, 63, are locked in a tight contest. A polling average posted this week by Real Clear Politics shows Jones with a slight advantage of less than a percentage point. In October, some polls put Moore 9 percentage points ahead.

No one ever filed a complaint against Moore during the years Gary worked as a police officer, but “every day we were looking for a complaint to come in," she said in the MSNBC interview.

Until the recent allegations against Moore, Gary assumed comments that Moore “liked young girls” meant that he was attracted to “young ladies, you know, younger than him, maybe in their 20s," she told MSNBC.

“I had no idea, or we had no idea that we were talking about 14-year-olds,” she said. “But we never got a complaint of it.”

In an earlier interview with The New York Times, Gary said it was a “known fact” that Moore had a predilection for “young girls,” but said it was “treated like a joke.”

“That’s just the way it was,” she said.

Glenn Day, 64, a former manager of two stores at the mall, said a mall guard asked him to let the security staff know if he saw Moore approaching young women when he was the DA in Gadsden. "I can’t believe there’s such an outcry now about something everybody knew," Day told The New York Times.

Even before the sexual impropriety allegations surfaced, Moore built a reputation as a political lightning rod who was twice been elected to and twice kicked off the Alabama Supreme Court.

Moore was removed as chief justice in 2001 after refusing to dismantle a 5,280-pound granite monument of the Ten Commandments he installed in the state judicial building. He ran again, and was suspended last year for ordering the state’s probate judges not to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, in defiance of the June 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowing gay marriage in all 50 states.

Moore said his ouster last year “was a politically motivated effort by radical homosexual and transgender groups to remove me as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court because of outspoken opposition to their immoral agenda."

Those and other defiant statements made Moore — a West Point graduate who did a tour of duty in Vietnam before graduating from law school — a darling of religious conservatives.

Moore also has said “homosexual conduct should be illegal” and that Muslims should be banned from serving in Congress.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Photo by Brynn Anderson/Associated Press