Beverly Young Nelson’s testimony today about the attempted rape she endured as a 16-year-old at the hands of Roy Moore does not tell us anything new about Moore’s character. He was clearly a serial predator of teenage girls, and even more accounts may well emerge. Nelson’s story does tell us something about Moore’s intelligence: He has even less of it than anybody could have imagined.
According to Nelson, Moore not only locked the car door and groped her, he signed her yearbook. Given that Moore apparently made a habit of attempting statutory rape, it would not require an abundance of caution for him to grasp that leaving behind a written record of his attraction to teen girls was inadvisable. And just to make it totally clear the perpetrator was himself, and not some other Roy Moore, he signed it, “Roy Moore, D.A.”
It had seemed for a while that Republicans might be able to defend Moore by insisting there was insufficient reason to believe his accusers. After all, in the pre-smartphone age, if you committed a crime like this, you had to go out of your way to leave evidence that would last. Moore, amazingly, seems to have done that.
