Herschel Walker entered Friday night’s Georgia Senate debate with his campaign reeling from the fallout of revelations he paid for a former girlfriend to get an abortion.
When it was over, Walker left the debate stage without ever having to answer meaningful questions about the credible allegations. The debate moderators asked Walker to respond to the story, he said it was a lie, and simply moved on.
“As I said, that is a lie,” Walker said. “I said, that’s a lie, on abortion. I’m a Christian, I believe in life.”
ADVERTISEMENT
“I’ll be a senator that protects life,” Walker insisted. “That was a lie, I’m not backing down.”
The debate moderators, anchors from Atlanta station Fox 5, were apparently satisfied, even though Walker’s story has been inconsistent and strains credulity.
Perhaps more notably, Walker’s opponent, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA), didn’t press the issue after the moderators declined to.
Instead, Warnock—who has so far declined to engage with the reporting on Walker’s abortion history—highlighted Walker’s support of hardline, no-exceptions abortion restrictions without noting that Walker allegedly supports an important exception: himself.
Friday night’s debate is the only scheduled meeting of Warnock and Walker before the Nov. 8 election. Even before the abortion bombshells rocked Walker’s campaign and sparked doubt about his ability to win, Republicans were worried about how the former football star would perform onstage.
But anticipation for the debate grew dramatically when it emerged as the only opportunity for Warnock, and moderators, to press Walker about his shifting and inconsistent denials of the stories.
Few expected that, ultimately, Warnock’s record on abortion would receive a greater airing than a candidate whose brand as a pro-life family man has been ruptured during the campaign.
A series of reports from The Daily Beast have revealed how Walker contradicted his own hardline, no-exceptions anti-abortion position by pushing a woman he was romantically involved with to terminate her pregnancy.
On Oct. 4, The Daily Beast first reported that in 2009, Walker paid a woman—whose identity was withheld due to privacy concerns—to get an abortion after they conceived a child. The woman corroborated her story with a $575 receipt from the abortion clinic, a bank image of a check Walker sent as reimbursement for the abortion, and photos of a card Walker sent her afterward saying, “pray you are feeling better.”
Walker’s campaign strenuously denied the story, and Walker himself claimed he didn’t know who the woman could be. But in response to Walker’s denials, the woman agreed to identify herself as the mother of one of Walker’s children. The next day, Walker still said he didn’t know who the woman was, but the day after, his wife texted the woman and tried to start a conversation.
Since The Daily Beast’s first stories, both The New York Times and The Washington Post have independently corroborated the reporting and added even more details about the abortion and Walker’s relationship with the woman.
The woman has also provided a much clearer picture of the ways in which Walker has been deficient as a father, and after offering an unconvincing defense that he didn’t know the identity of the woman, Walker has finally begun admitting that he does know who the woman is making these claims.
The reporting has rocked the Georgia race and sent Walker’s campaign into turmoil, both politically and personally. Not only was the Republican’s consistency on abortion—a key issue in the midterm election—questioned, so was his profile as a family man and father. That brand had already taken a hit after The Daily Beast revealed this summer that Walker had fathered at least two children that he’d never publicly acknowledged.
Immediately after The Daily Beast’s first report was published, Walker’s son Christian, an outspoken conservative activist, unleashed a remarkable and raw series of tweets revealing his views about his father.
“You’re not a ‘family man’ when you left us to bang a bunch of women, threatened to kill us, and had us move over 6 times in 6 months running from your violence,” Christian said in one tweet.
In Georgia, Christian leaders and voters appeared to rally behind Walker, casting the revelations as a smear and insisting that the most important factor was not Walker’s own conduct but his promise to be a vote for legislation curtailing abortion.
But the fallout from the story, particularly the allegations of abuse from Christian Walker, prompted Republicans to worry if Walker’s campaign had suffered a lethal blow. Days after The Daily Beast’s first report, the Republican fired a top staffer on his campaign.
