Roy Moore started dating wife while she was still legally married

Divorce records show Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore may have dated his wife while she was still married to her first husband, according to a report.

Moore seems to have courted his wife, Kayla, during her divorce proceedings, contradicting past statements, the Washington Examiner found.

"That was always an assumption," someone familiar with Kayla Moore's first marriage told the newspaper.

The former Alabama chief justice met his future wife at a church event just before Christmas 1984.

RELATED: Roy Moore and his wife, Kayla, through the years

"I was determined to get to know her, but Kayla, divorced and with a beautiful little girl, Heather, who was nearly a year old, was not interested in a relationship with anyone," he wrote in his 2005 memoir, "So Help Me God."

And his spokesman denied the couple was together before the ink on Kayla's divorce dried.

"Regardless of when they met, Judge and Kayla did not date while she was still with her ex-husband or legally married," Brett Doster, Moore's campaign spokesman, told the newspaper via email.

Records show Kayla Moore had just separated from then-husband John Charles Heald two weeks before she met Moore in December 1984.

She filed for divorce on Dec. 28, which was finalized roughly in April 1985, the Washington Examiner found.

Moore, in his book, said they started dating early on in 1985 after she went to his colleague's office. They'd dated "about a year" when they became engaged in mid-December 1985.

The timeline suggests they began dating while Kayla Moore was still legally married to Heald during the first few months of her courtship.

The person familiar with the first marriage told the Washington Examiner that Moore even got a puppy for her young daughter, Heather, for Valentine's Day 1985.

The differing accounts of when the dating began is the latest turn in the Republican's Senate bid to replace Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Multiple women have accused Moore of sexual misconduct while he was in his 30s and they were as young as 14. Moore has denied these allegations, and his campaign has picked apart details of their accounts. Among the skepticism was his team's questioning an alleged signature Moore made in the high school yearbook of Beverly Young Nelson.

President Trump continued to back Moore with less than a week to go before the Dec. 12 election, arguing the firebrand conservative has denied the allegations.

"The President has said the following: The allegations are troubling. Roy Moore has denied them," Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway told CNN's "New Day" on Wednesday. "The President said they are 40 years old."

Doster, the Moore spokesman, said Kayla Moore had a "difficult marriage," before coming back to Alabama in 1984.

She'd wed Heald in June 1982, the Washington Examiner reported, and split by the end of 1986 over "cruel treatment during the marriage."