A day after The Daily Beast broke the news that Herschel Walker had a secret 10-year-old son he fathered out of wedlock, the football star-turned-politician confirmed late Wednesday night that he has yet another son with a different woman that the public doesn’t know about—as well as a daughter that he had in college.
The revelations come in the middle of Walker’s competitive race to unseat Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) and after many public comments Walker has made about absent fathers in the Black community.
“I want to apologize to the African-American community, because the fatherless home is a major, major problem,” Walker said in a September 2020 interview, adding in a December 2019 interview with Diamond and Silk that men need to go into neighborhoods and become “fathers of those fatherless” children.
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The second of Walker’s previously undisclosed sons was born to a woman living in Texas and is now 13 years old. Walker’s other son is 10, and Christian Walker, who has played a major role in Herschel’s political efforts and public persona, is 22.
In Christian’s case, Walker has played an extremely active role in his life. In the case of Walker’s 10-year-old, the football star seems to have played very little role. In this latest case with his 13-year-old son, Walker seems to have been present on at least two occasions, according to social media photos. But it’s unclear how active he’s been beyond that.
(The Daily Beast is withholding the name of both younger sons and their mothers out of privacy concerns.)
"Herschel Walker throws a cap during a rally held by Donald Trump in Commerce, Georgia, on March 26.
Alyssa Pointer/ReutersIn a statement issued to The Daily Beast, Walker confirmed that the 13-year-old son is his child. The campaign also supplied a form that Walker filled out in 2018 in order to be appointed to President Donald Trump’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition. Walker listed the child’s name and age, as well as the names and ages for Christian, the 10-year-old son, and an adult daughter whom Walker fathered when he was around 20 years old.
“I have four children. Three sons and a daughter. They’re not ‘undisclosed’—they’re my kids,” Walker said in his statement. “I support them all and love them all. I’ve never denied my children, I confirmed this when I was appointed to the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition, I just chose not to use them as props to win a political campaign. What parent would want their child involved in garbage, gutter politics like this?”
Walker said any suggestion that he was hiding his children was outrageous. “I can take the heat, that’s politics,” Walker said, “but leave my kids alone.”
While Walker hasn’t openly discussed his 13-year-old son, there were a few public-facing traces of their relationship.
A photo series posted to the mother’s public Facebook page shows the two—Herschel Walker and his son—playing video games on a sofa. The series was posted in 2018, and includes a picture of a table ticket from a popular restaurant in the mother’s current city.
Another photo on the mother’s Facebook, this one from 2016, depicts Walker and the son on laptop computers at a living room table. Comments on the picture appear to reference Walker as the father.
“Like father like son” one person wrote in a comment, which the mother “liked.” Comments on an earlier picture of the boy with a football also appear to reference Walker as the father.
A post from this year identifies the child as bearing Walker’s last name. And a few years ago, the mother shared photos from a trip to the Dallas Cowboys Hall of Fame, including a 1986 team photo with Walker in it, and a display about his famous trade to the Minnesota Vikings. The mother has not tagged Walker in any of her pictures, however, nor mentioned him by name in her many dozens of public posts—a timeline which begins with posts about the final days of her pregnancy.
Despite Walker’s personal presence in the 13-year-old’s life, the campaign’s statement on Tuesday in regards to the 10-year-old referred multiple times to the candidate having just one child out of wedlock.
“Herschel had a child years ago when he wasn’t married,” the statement said. “He’s supported the child and continues to do so. He’s proud of his children. To suggest that Herschel is ‘hiding’ the child because he hasn’t used him in his political campaign is offensive and absurd.”
The 10-year-old’s mother went to court for a paternity declaration and child support. A document posted online by the law firm that represented her in that 2013 case, said she and Walker began a relationship on Nov. 1, 2008. That was only three months before the birth of the son who is now 13.
Walker was also reportedly involved with two other women around the same time—Julie Blanchard, the woman who would later become his second wife, and Myka Dean, who alleged a 20-year on-and-off affair, which ended in 2012 when Walker allegedly told her he would “blow your head off” in a dispute, according to previous reporting from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Dean filed that report in Irving, Texas, near Dallas, where Blanchard also resided. The Dallas area was also home to the mother of the 13-year-old. She kept an address in a condo building also tied to Walker, according to public records, though they don’t appear to have shared the same apartment.
The former Olympic bobsledder claimed in a 2010 interview with satellite radio host Howard Stern to have only slept with two women: his first wife, and a current unnamed girlfriend, who, he pointed out, had “a job.” Blanchard is identified as his “girlfriend” in a photo that same year.
Walker’s opponent, Warnock, is currently wrapped up in a custody dispute of his own. His ex-wife is “seeking changes to their child custody arrangement,” and has asked a family court in Georgia to adjust Warnock’s child support payments in light of the income bump he received upon his election to the Senate last year. The Republican National Committee has used the suit to attack Warnock, though a campaign spokesperson told The Daily Beast that Warnock plays an active role as a “devoted father.”
By contrast, Walker does not see his 10-year-old son, according to a person close to the boy’s family. About a year after he was born, the boy’s mother sued Walker for a paternity declaration and child support. Walker admitted to being the boy’s father in court, and pays child support and sends birthday and Christmas presents, the person close to the boy’s family told The Daily Beast.
Walker also appears to send presents to the 13-year-old son.
In a Facebook post from December 2021, the son’s mother shared a note Walker sent along with Christmas presents. The note, addressed to “Tiny One” from “Big One,” tells the boy how happy Walker was to have received a virtual reality set the prior year, and promises “a present that will hopefully live up to” that gift.
“Except, it will be over the years that have already happened,” Walker’s note says. “Also, all of these are paintings.”
As for Christian Walker—born to the former Pro-Bowler and his first wife, Cindy Grossman—Herschel has co-parented him with Grossman and his current wife, Julie Blanchard. As an adult, Christian has cultivated a large social media following, and currently hawks a range of products promoting his father’s Senate bid.
It’s unclear why Walker has such starkly different relationships with the mothers and his children—all of whom bear his last name.
The pattern belies a deep hypocrisy. As The Daily Beast reported, Walker has made a point over the years to criticize absentee fathers, beseeching parents in multiple addresses to “hug your child.”
He specifically singles out the Black community. As recently as 2020, he said “you can leave the wife, but don’t leave your child,” a sentiment he had previously shared in a separate interview.
Walker has also called on the Black community to prioritize the burden over other social causes, such as Black Lives Matter. In early August 2020, amid nationwide upheaval against police brutality, Walker chided professional athletes for giving money to the cause, saying “let’s not do that,” but “let’s become fathers of those fatherless child [sic].”
Walker also has a history of violence against women, according to numerous reports.
Grossman has accused Walker of being “physically abusive,” claiming Walker once threatened he would “blow my … brains out.” In 2005, a judge granted her a protective order against Walker pursuant to alleged threats, and temporarily revoked Walker’s right to carry a firearm, the Associated Press reported.
In his 2008 autobiography, Breaking Free, Walker revealed an ongoing battle with mental health, and the toll it took on his personal relationships. He said he had been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, and had multiple “alter” personalities.
The therapist who diagnosed Walker, Dr. Jerry Mungadze, claims that dissociative identity disorder is the product of satanic demons. He does not have a medical degree, but he does have a Ph.D. in educational counseling with a minor in psychology, as revealed in a 2018 Channel 4 documentary that critiqued Mengadze among a number of practitioners of so-called gay conversion therapy.
Mungadze claims to have diagnosed several patients with DID, a rare health condition that affects between 0.01 and 1 percent of the population, according to the Cleveland Clinic. The disorder is “often misdiagnosed” and often requires “multiple assessments” for accuracy, according to a New York University Medical School psychiatrist’s paper posted by the National Institutes for Health.
But Mungadze’s diagnostic approach includes bizarre, unsubstantiated “tests,” such as assigning patients to color in a line drawing of a brain with crayons of their choice, the documentary showed.
The drawings, he says, can reveal whether the patient is “demonized,” a theory he immortalized in an article titled “Is It Dissociation or Demonization?”, which appeared in a 2000 edition of Journal of Psychology and Christianity, the Associated Press reported. Mungadze diagnosed Walker the following year.
Will Bredderman contributed reporting.
