Judge Roy Moore is the latest alleged sexual predator of self-proclaimed feminist lawyer Gloria Allred's alleged victims.  Allred has had years of experience perfecting the press conference format in which her teary-eyed victims sob their sometimes decades-old stories of victimization.

If the alleged perpetrator is a Republican candidate, the timing must be just right.  In the case of GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain, it happened as his campaign gained momentum.  In the case of Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, it must be after he won the Republican primary, not before.  One suspects that had Roy Moore lost his primary to establishment Republican Luther Strange, none of Allred's current parade of victims would have surfaced.

After Herman Cain abandoned his presidential run, Moore's accusers have yet to answer the question: after Moore's decades of public service, why now?  Allred's litany of Cain victims quickly left the public stage.  Their mission, and Allred's, was accomplished.

We have seen it all before. Accusations of being a sexual predator were leveled against President Trump during the campaign.  So there was Gloria Allred, the champion of allegedly abused women, making an appearance with one of Donald Trump's molestation victims, Summer Zervos:

A former contestant on Donald Trump's reality television show "The Apprentice" spoke out on Friday to accuse the Republican presidential nominee of sexually harassing her when she sought career advice from him after her time on the show.

Summer Zervos, who laid out her allegations at a tearful press conference with attorney Gloria Allred on Friday, said Trump pursued unwanted sexual advances toward her when she met with him at the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles to discuss employment opportunities in 2007.

Zervos said she had first met Trump when she was a candidate on the fifth season of "The Apprentice," which aired in 2006, and later reached out to him for career advice, with the hope of working for the Trump Organization.

It was Gloria Allred who showed up with a group of Herman Cain accusers in 2012 to similarly attempt to derail the presidential run of a powerful and successful Republican businessman.  In 2016, she was there to derail the candidacy of Donald Trump:

The accusations against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump from women claiming sexual assault aren't going away anytime soon and now, one of Hollywood's biggest legal names is getting involved. 

Attorney Gloria Allred, who represented women who accused Herman Cain of sexual infidelity in 2012, ending his presidential run, along with mistresses of professional golfer Tiger Woods, will hold a press conference with a new accuser today.

It doesn't matter if the charges are false.  Accusations make page one, while the truth later winds up at the bottom of the classifieds.  In the case of Cain, it derailed his campaign.  In the case of Trump, his campaign wobbled while the mainstream media gladly changed the subject from Hillary Clinton's record of failures and lies and her history of using her offices for self-enrichment while riding her husband's stained coattails to political power.

In many ways, the Trump "tale of the tape" and the bevy of women, some allegedly groped three decades earlier, are reminiscent of the campaign of smear and innuendo leveled at former GOP presidential candidate and successful black conservative businessman Herman Cain and the current campaign against Roy Moore.  Cain's candidacy derailed after repeated and unproven sexual harassment allegations by former employees.  As with Harry Reid's tax lies about Mitt Romney, the strategy worked.

It seems that when powerful Republican outsiders, successful businessmen, threaten the Democrats' hold on power, the liberal smear machine goes to work.

This time, however, almost immediately, the accusations against Donald Trump began unraveling, particularly the tall tale told by one Jessica Leeds of groping by The Donald in the first class section of a transatlantic flight.  The problem is that there were others on that flight, including one gentleman who portrayed Leeds as something between a groupie and a stalker who was rebuffed by Trump.

Donald Trump's campaign says a British man is countering claims that the GOP presidential nominee groped a woman on a cross-country flight more than three decades ago.

The man says he was sitting across from the accuser and contacted the Trump campaign because he was incensed by her account – which is at odds with what he witnessed.

"I have only met this accuser once and frankly cannot imagine why she is seeking to make out that Trump made sexual advances on her. Not only did he not do so (and I was present at all times) but it was she that was the one being flirtatious," Anthony Gilberthorpe said in a note provided to The Post by the Trump campaign[.]

Leeds's accusation was accepted as credible immediately, just like those against Roy Moore.  Smear first, prove later.  Guilty until proven innocent.  To various extents, it worked with Romney and Cain, so why not Judge Roy Moore?

But the rush to believe the claims of Moore's groping stand in contrast to the blind eye ignoring the claims of the likes of Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, Paula Jones, and others – claims backed up by contemporaneous witness testimony and a victorious lawsuit by and with a cash settlement to Jones.  Oddly, Gloria Allred has never offered these women her services.

The Trump women again retreated back into the woodwork once Trump was elected the 45th president of the United State.  This time, the mission failed.  But there would be other targets.  Two would be Fox News icon Bill O'Reilly and former Fox News host and ardent Trump-supporter Eric Bolling.  They would have a common accuser, one Caroline Heldman, who was a client of – wait for it – Gloria Allred.

Heldman was a far-left professor at Occidental College whom some have dubbed a "feminazi," who, in a tweet, said after O'Reilly's fall, "We can slay dragons."  As Yahoo News reported on her charges:

Caroline Heldman, an Associate Professor of Politics at Occidental College, has known the former O'Reilly Factor host for nearly 10 years, often appearing on his show as a political commentator from 2008 to 2011.

"The first time I met him, one of the first things, if not the first thing, out of his mouth was to the effect of, When I was in college, professors didn't look like you,' " Heldman, 44, exclusively tells PEOPLE. "That kind of set the tone of his, I would call it, sexist humiliation and bullying which was pretty typical for him," Heldman claims[.] ...

My upward trajectory slowed considerably," she says. "I continued to do other shows but being blacklisted from Bill O'Reilly's show is a big deal."

Having filed a sexual harassment complaint just hours before Fox News announced O'Reilly's departure, Heldman says she had thought about coming forward multiple times before, but the fear of ruining her career held her back.

Apparently, she was so traumatized by O'Reilly's alleged sexual harassment hurting her "upward trajectory" that she forgot at the time of her alleged harassment by Eric Bolling.  Or was she just waiting a decent interval before she chose her next dragon to slay, hoping nobody would connect the two very suspicious dots?  Since everybody is busy looking for Russians under his bed, why not take a shot at another 15 minutes of fame?

According to Philly.com's report:

Hours after Fox News announced it was suspending Bolling, Caroline Heldman, a politics professor at Occidental College and frequent guest on the network from 2008 to 2011, claimed the Fox News host made an unspecified number of unsolicited sexual advances to her.

"[Bolling] said he wanted to fly me out to New York for in-studio hits and to have 'fun.' He asked me to have meals with him on several occasions, but I found excuses not to go," Heldman wrote in a lengthy Facebook post. "Once, he took me up to his office in New York, showed me his baseball jerseys, and in the brief time I was there, let me know that his office was his favorite place to have sex."

Caroline Heldman gained fame as the woman who cried "harassment."  She is a far-left ideologue who showed up at President Trump's inauguration with a sign that read, "Good people don't vote for rapists."  She was a plaintiff  in a sexual assault case filed with others against Occidental, her school.  She and the others were represented by Gloria Allred.

Occidental College failed to address some sexual misconduct complaints promptly but did not otherwise violate federal civil rights laws and voluntarily agreed to reforms, U.S. education officials announced Thursday.

The long-awaited resolution of an investigation by the U.S. Department of Education's civil rights office came three years after about 50 students and faculty members filed federal complaints that administrators at the Eagle Rock liberal arts school had fostered a hostile environment for victims of sexual assault[.] ...

The complaints filed in 2013 drew national attention when they were announced at a high-profile news conference with several of the victims and prominent attorney Gloria Allred.

Gloria Allred and her tear-filled high-profile press conferences are a common thread in all these scandals.  Another common thread is the targets – Republican conservatives, conservative commentators, and successful GOP businessmen and threats to the GOP establishment.  Next to the words "character assassin" in the dictionary should be a picture of Gloria Allred.

One thing is certain.  If Roy Moore is defeated or otherwise kept out of office, his accusers will fade away, while Gloria Allred will look for the next Republican conservative to accuse.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor's Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.