CULLMAN  – Roy Moore, the Republican nominee for Alabama’s open U. S. Senate seat, issued a news release Wednesday listing 13 county sheriffs who he said  had endorsed his candidacy.

Twenty-four hours later, two of those sheriffs said they did not endorse Moore and should not have been listed as doing so.

Sandwiched between the conflicting announcements, the Washington Post reported  a woman had accused Moore of initiating unwanted sexual contact in 1979 when she was 14  years old and he was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney.

Three other women said Moore pursued romantic involvement with them when they were between the ages of 16 and 18 and he was in his early 30s but the encounters did not involve sexual contact. 

The surprise development roiled the Alabama senate race, prompting Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to issue a statement in Washington saying Moore would have to step aside if the allegations were true.

Moore described the accusations as “fake news” and an “outlandish attack” by Democrats to deny him a seat in the Senate. He did not say what he was going to do about them.

Cullman County Sheriff Matt Gentry  told The Times of Cullman he did not endorse Moore and would not because of his policy to  not express preference for candidates for other elected public offices.

“I was never asked to endorse Ray Moore,” said Gentry. “That was inaccurate information put out by his campaign.”

Shelby County Sheriff John Samaniego, whose name also appeared on Moore’s list, told WBRC News in Birmingham he likewise did not provide an endorsement. He said Moore reached out to him at a Sheriff’s Association meeting earlier in the week, but never asked for, nor did he receive Samaniego’s endorsement.

Moore has been  favored to defeat Democrat Doug Jones, a former U.S. Attorney, in the December election to fill the senate seat Jeff Sessions gave up when  he became U.S. Attorney General in the Trump administration. Moore defeated the appointed  interim senator, Luther Strange, in the GOP primary.

Moore is widely known in Alabama and beyond as the former Alabama Supreme Court judge who defied a federal court order to remove a 5,280-pound granite Ten Commandments monument he had placed in the court building.

He was dismissed from  the court for resisting the order only to win re-election to the high court as chief justice. But he was removed from the bench a second time for instructing probate judges not to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

Details for this story were provided by the Cullman, Alabama, Times.