A second woman has come forward to say Herschel Walker urged her to abort their child, claiming that the football star turned GOP Senate candidate personally drove her to a clinic in the 1990s to have an abortion against her wishes.
The woman, identifying herself as “Jane Doe,” said that after she first went to an abortion clinic in Dallas, Texas, she left in tears because she was unable to move forward with the procedure.
But, according to the woman, Walker was unmoved. He drove the woman back to the clinic and pressured her to get the abortion. She had the procedure while he sat in the parking lot. He then drove her to a pharmacy to get the medication prescribed afterwards.
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Walker, speaking to reporters on Wednesday afternoon, called her story “foolishness.”
“Well, I’ll just say right now you know guys I’m done with this foolishness. I’ve already told people this is a lie and I'm not going to entertain and continue to carry a lie alone,” Walker said.
“And I also want to let you know I didn’t kill JFK either,” he added.
The woman came forward Wednesday during a shocking virtual press conference hosted by her attorney, Gloria Allred, during which she read a statement detailing their yearslong romantic relationship and saying that she was protecting her identity not because she was “a coward,” but “to protect the ones I love.”
“Herschel Walker is a hypocrite, and he is unfit to be a U.S. Senator,” the unnamed woman said.
“Herschel Walker says he is against women having abortions but he pressured me to have one,” she said. The woman explained she was motivated to come forward after watching Walker deny previous allegations by another woman who claimed that he had paid for her abortion in 2009.
“And particularly, I saw him state that the woman’s claims were not true because he never signed any cards using the letter ‘H.’ I knew that was not true because he had often signed letters to me using ‘H,’” she said. Allred provided three love notes Walker had signed with an “H.”
To bolster the woman’s claims, Allred played a voicemail message that she said was from Walker, and showed some love letters to the woman allegedly from Walker. She also displayed a photograph the woman says she took of Walker in a hotel room bed during the affair.
As The Daily Beast previously reported, a woman said Walker paid for her to have an abortion in 2009. And to substantiate her claim, she supplied The Daily Beast with a ‘Get Well’ card signed by ‘H.’
That’s significant because this new woman supplied a love letter that she says was from Walker and signed ‘H.’ As Allred noted, Walker recently said on Fox News that, “I have never signed anything with just an ‘H.’”
After the press conference, Rachel Petri, deputy campaign manager for Walker’s Democratic opponent, Sen. Raphael Warnock, issued a statement saying the woman’s claims show that Walker has “a problem taking responsibility for his actions.”
“We know Herschel Walker has a problem with the truth, a problem answering questions, and a problem taking responsibility for his actions. Today’s new report is just the latest example of a troubling pattern we have seen play out again and again and again. Herschel Walker shouldn’t be representing Georgians in the U.S. Senate.”
The woman, who did not reveal her face in the press conference, told reporters that she and Walker, an anti-abortion absolutist who has said there should be no legal exceptions for the procedure, conceived the child during a longterm, intimate extramarital affair. She said she was motivated by Walker’s hypocrisy on the issue, not politics, claiming to be a registered independent who had voted for former President Donald Trump in both elections.
“He has publicly taken the position that he is ‘about life’ and against abortion under any circumstances when in fact he pressured me to have an abortion and personally ensured that it occurred by driving me to the clinic and paying for it,” she said.
The woman said she was “surprised” to learn she was pregnant, because she had been on birth control “during my entire relationship” with Walker.
“I didn’t really know what to do. I was confused, uncertain, and scared. After discussing the pregnancy with Herschel several times, he encouraged me to have an abortion and gave me the money to do so.” But after she went to the clinic, she said, she “simply couldn’t go through with it” and “left the clinic in tears.”
When she told Walker what had happened, she said, “he was upset and said he was going to go back to the clinic the next day for me to have the abortion. He then drove me to the clinic the following day and then waited for hours in the parking lot until I came out. He then drove me to get medication as prescribed and then drove me home.”
“I was devastated because I felt I had been pressured into having the abortion,” she said.
After the abortion, she continued, she felt Walker began to distance himself from her. She said that she left Dallas, traumatized, and didn’t return for 15 years.
The woman said her relationship with Walker “was never about money”—he never gave her expensive gifts, she said, and she insisted on paying half of her travel expenses when she went to see him. However, after she left Dallas, Walker sent her his Rolex watch.
“I sent the watch back to him,” she said.
“He took advantage of my love for him and he made false promises to me, always giving the impression that he was on the cusp of leaving his wife but never following through.”
As evidence of that relationship, Allred shared love letters from Walker. The woman ended the affair after the abortion, she said, recalling that the experience of the abortion was so painful that she relocated to a new town.
The romantic relationship allegedly began in November 1987, while the woman was living in Dallas “a few miles from where Herschel resided.” Walker came to her home “several times a week, where we engaged in an intimate relationship,” she said. The woman also attended Dallas Cowboys games, both at home and on the road, and “spoke on the phone for hours at a time, several times a week.”
“He told me that he had problems with his marriage and wanted to end his marriage,” she said, reiterating his promises to leave his wife for her several times during the press conference, saying “there was always some reason why he wasn’t quite ready to do so.”
The development comes two weeks after The Daily Beast reported that Walker—who claims to be ferociously anti-abortion—paid for a different lover’s abortion. And that revelation came months after The Daily Beast reported that Walker, a loud critic of absentee dads, fathered several secret children out of wedlock.
Walker's campaign has been hampered by reports of the abortion, which he adamantly denied. Walker claimed he had no idea who the woman could be, only to have the woman come forward and reveal that she's actually the mother of one of Walker's children. Miraculously, Walker still claimed for more than a day that he didn't know the identity of the woman. But that story strained credulity after Walker’s wife contacted the woman over text and the woman asked Walker’s wife, Julie Blanchard, if she had known about the abortion. Blanchard did not answer.
A request for comment from Walker's campaign was not immediately returned on Wednesday, but Walker has continued to deny the first woman’s claims as “lies.”
In an Oct. 11 interview with ABC News’ Linsey Davis, Walker said, “I know nothing about an abortion. I knew it was a lie and I said it was a lie—and I just move on … it’s sad that people say October surprise, but you’re destroying families.”
Under pressure after the first abortion story, Walker has tried to shift his position on the issue. In his first and only debate with opponent Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA), Walker falsely claimed that he does support exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother, citing his approval of Georgia’s so-called “heartbeat” bill.
However, Walker, a professed devout Christian, has repeatedly compared abortion to murder, and has emphasized that he does not support any exceptions, at one point dismissing them as “excuses.”
“There’s no exception in my mind,” Walker told reporters in May. “Like I say, I believe in life. I believe in life.”
