Republican Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore said in an interview during the summer that he first noticed his wife, Kayla Moore, when she was approximately 15 years old.
Moore—whom several women say engaged in various forms of sexual misconduct with them, including when they were underage–was 38 when he married his wife, who was 24 at the time.
In the July interview, Moore said he first saw Kayla Kisor, her last name at the time, at a dance recital eight years before he formally met her.
“When I was deputy district attorney, many years before we got married, I saw her at a dance recital and I was standing, oh, at the back of the auditorium and I saw her up front,” he said in the interview. “I remember her name, it was Kayla Kisor. KK. But I remember that, and I didn’t meet her there … it was, oh gosh, eight years later or something, I met her. And when she told me her name, I remembered.”
Moore also mentioned first seeing his future wife in his 2009 memoir So Help Me God: The Ten Commandments, Judicial Tyranny and the Battle For Religious Freedom, CNN reports.
There is no evidence Moore contacted Kayla Kisor when she was a teenager.
Several women have come forward in recent weeks and said Moore engaged in sexual misconduct with them when he was in his 30s and they were teenagers.
One woman said Moore sexually assaulted her when she was 14 years old in his home, and another woman said he attempted to rape her behind an Alabama restaurant after her shift ended when she was 16 years old.
Several other women have said he pursued romantic relationships when they were young or sexually harassed them.
The accusations against Moore have caused the Republican National Committee to pull its support of him and several prominent Republicans–including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell–have called for him to drop out of the Alabama Senate race.