Republican senatorial candidate Herschel Walker on Thursday responded to new allegations from the woman who claims he reimbursed her abortion and now says he fathered another currently-living child with her.
Walker, a pro-life Republican, was interviewed by conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Thursday morning when he was asked about the latest updates in the allegations that he paid for his girlfriend’s abortion more than a decade ago.
“The Daily Beast has updated the story about your paying for a woman’s abortion. The anonymous woman has now also alleged that she had a child by you. Your response?” Hewitt asked.
“I say the same thing I said, that you know, I know this is untrue. I know it’s untrue, and they keep telling me things like that, and it’s totally, totally untrue,” Walker said, denying any knowledge of the woman who made the allegations.
The U.S. Senate race in Georgia was rocked Monday after the Daily Beast published allegations from an anonymous woman who claimed to have conceived a child with Walker in 2009. The woman, who admitted to being a registered Democrat, says she aborted their child at Walker’s urging and that he reimbursed her for the cost.
The Daily Beast published an update to the story on Thursday after Walker had denied the allegations and threatened to sue the publication for defamation. The woman made new claims of being in a years-long relationship with the football legend and said they had another child together. She claimed that he seemed “pretty pro-choice to me” when they were in the alleged relationship and questioned the genuineness of his professed Christian faith.
“I don’t think there’s anywhere in the Bible where it says ‘Have four kids with four different women while you’re with another woman.’ Or where it praises not being a present parent. Or that an abortion is an OK thing to do when it’s not the right time for you, but a terrible thing for anyone else to do when you are running for Senate. He picks and chooses where it’s convenient for him to use that religious crutch,” the woman told the Daily Beast.
Walker said Thursday that the allegations were a “distraction” and that he has “already been forgiven” for any wrongdoings in his past.
Hewitt pointed out that Walker shouldn’t need to be forgiven if he didn’t do what he’s accused of.
“Is there anything you need to be forgiven for vis-à-vis a woman whose name we do not know? Do you know who this woman is? And do you need to be forgiven?” the radio host asked.
“No. Well, that’s what’s so funny,” Walker replied. “And I’m saying I’ve been forgiven because of all of the things I did when I went to my, the thing with my ex-wife and all that, and things I did I don’t know how many years ago that I wrote in my book. I forgot. I wasn’t perfect. I had my problem with mental health. And I was, I’ve been, I hate to say I’ve been born again, but I have a new life. And I’ve been moving forward, and had that happened, I would have said it, because it’s nothing to be ashamed of there. You know, people have done that, but I know nothing about it. And if I knew about it, I would be honest and talk about it, but I know nothing about that.”
When Hewitt pressed, Walker again denied knowing the identity of the woman making the allegations.
“I have no idea at all, and that’s the problem, is you know, when they said I had a kid that I was hiding, a lot of people don’t know that this same reporter found out that this was not true, never wrote a retraction, never said anything. They just let it go and went on,” Walker said.
“In this case here, they’re saying oh, some alleged woman, and now it’s somebody that you used to know or you know so well and this and that, and I said yeah, they can say a lot of things, but I know for a fact no one has ever told me, or I paid for an abortion,” he added. “That never happened.”