Way back in November 2017, former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore‘s campaign for Jeff Sessions’ former Senate seat was sunk when multiple women came forward to accuse him of sexual impropriety. The accusers were subject to harassment and attacks by right-wing media, but two Roy Moore accusers reportedly tried a tactic beyond doxxing or hate mail: attempting to pay off the woman’s attorney so that he would drop her as a client.
Days after Leigh Corfman made her allegations against Moore public, two of his supporters offered her attorney, Eddie Sexton, $10,000 to drop her as a client and make a public statement saying he didn’t believe her which would run as an exclusive on Breitbart News. In phone conversations recorded by Sexton and text messages obtained by the Washington Post, Moore supporter Gary Lantrip says the effort would be to “cloud” the allegations made by at least one of the accusers.
“What they’re saying, all they want to do is cloud something,” Lantrip said. “They said if they cloud, like, two of them, then that’s all they need.”
According to Sexton, he was reluctant to go public with the offer because the two men, Lantrip and Bert Davi, are actually his clients in an unrelated real estate case.
A spokesperson for Moore said the disgraced judge had no involvement with Lantrip and Davi’s scheme. When asked about the conservations by Post reporters, Davi said the money would have come from Lantrip. When reporters spoke to Lantrip, he said that it was Sexton he brought up money after Lantrip said he would get legal work for Breitbart News if he played ball. Lantrip denied any wrongdoing.
Sexton claims he reported Lantrip and Davi’s overture to a federal prosecutor in Alabama who told him it didn’t appear either men had committed a crime.
After an initial meeting between Sexton, Lantrip, and Davi, the three reconvened at Lantrip and Davi’s offices and were joined by Matt Boyle, Breitbart News’ Washington bureau chief as well as Aaron Klein, the organization’s Jerusalem bureau chief. At the meeting, Sexton was presented with a handwritten statement that he was expected to sign. After objecting that he would lose his law license if he signed it, the Breitbart writers said the tactic was meant to “[get] other information out there.”
Sexton quickly ended the meeting, but not before taking the paper the statement was written which he later provided to the Post.
Lantrip and Davi claim they now believe the allegations against Moore to be true.
(Via Washington Post)