"On 10 November 2017, the disreputable web site
GatewayPundit.com reported — without any evidence whatsoever beyond a single anonymous Twitter account — that investigative journalists from the
Washington Post had paid a woman to go on the record and
accuse Roy Moore, a Republican candidate running to fill Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ vacant U.S. Senate seat in Alabama, of sexually abusing her when she was 14 years old...
GatewayPundit.com
reported (in an article bearing the oddly-worded headline “Report: Alabama Woman Claims Reporter Offered Her $1000s to Accuse Roy Moore of Sexual Abuse?”) Indeed it would be big news — except for the inconvenient fact that it was not true and thus was not “HUGE.”
While the
Washington Post‘s story was based upon interviews with no fewer than thirty sources, the only source cited by GatewayPundit.com was hearsay from a
questionable Twitter account bearing the handle
@umpire43, which belonged to someone going by “Doug Lewis #MAGA” who claimed (again, with no sources offered other than a vague “friend of my wife’s”) that :
A family friend who lives in Alabama just told my wife that a WAPO reporter named Beth offered her 1000$ to accuse Roy Moore????
In follow-up tweets, “Doug” stated the a family friend (purportedly named “Jean”, but of course with no last name provided) recorded the conversation in which “Beth” (probably
Washington Post journalist Beth Reinhard, who co-wrote the Moore report) offered a source money to accuse Moore of sexual improprieties. The tape of that conversation was supposedly turned over to law enforcement, according to “Doug.”
We called the Etowah County district attorney’s office to check whether any such allegations had been brought to their attention, but as of yet we haven’t received a response.
Notably, however, the accusatory tweets from the “Doug Lewis #MAGA” were deleted, and then, a few hours later, the entire account was deleted as well.
The @umpire43 account was launched in 2011, and as of 11 November 2017 it had tweeted
17,000 messages to 18,300 followers. On 13 November 2017, the account was temporarily set to private, and when it was made
public again, its owner had deleted all but fifty posts — including the ones claiming that women had been paid off to accuse Moore.
According to
The Daily Beast, “Doug Lewis” was a
false identity co-opted from a real Navy veteran who died in 2007."