Heisman Trophy winner and Republican candidate for US Senate Herschel Walker speaks at a rally on May 23, 2022 in Athens, Georgia. Tomorrow is the Primary Election Day in the state of Georgia.
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A woman who last week anonymously accused Republican Senate hopeful Herschel Walker of pressuring her to have an abortion said she decided to show her face after the anti-abortion candidate called her a liar.
“I’ve kept this to myself for 30 years,” the woman, who still chose to be referred to as “Jane Doe,” said in an on-camera interview that aired Tuesday on ABC News’ “Good Morning America.”
“I protected him. And I wanted this to remain private, for obvious reasons,” the woman said.
Doe is the second woman to allege that Walker, a former pro football player running to unseat incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock in Georgia, had pressured and paid for her to get an abortion when they were in a relationship years earlier.
The two candidates appear to be in a dead heat in the final sprint to the Nov. 8 midterms.
Weeks earlier, a different woman had accused Walker of paying for her abortion in 2009 and then urging her to get a second one two years later. That woman, who also kept her identity private, told The New York Times and The Daily Beast that she did not terminate the second pregnancy and has raised the son she had with Walker largely without his help.
Walker, a critic of absentee fathers who has expressed support for an abortion ban without exceptions, has denied the allegations from both women.
The second woman’s allegations came to light Wednesday at a press conference led by famed women’s rights attorney Gloria Allred. Reporters at that Los Angeles event heard from the accuser but did not see her face.
She said she decided to come forward after hearing Walker deny the first woman’s accusations, in part by claiming he never signed letters with an “H.”
“I knew I had many cards from him where he signed the letter ‘H.’ And so I believed then that she was telling the truth,” Doe said in the televised interview.
Walker, in a statement responding to Doe’s new interview, told NBC News, “This was a lie a week ago and it is a lie today.”
“Seven days before an election, the Democrats trot out Gloria Allred and some woman I do not know,” Walker’s statement said. “My opponents will do and say anything to win this election. The entire Democrat machine is coming after me and the people of Georgia. I am not intimidated. Once again, they messed with the wrong Georgian.”
The woman, who says she is a registered independent who voted for former President Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020, said she was motivated by the truth, not politics, to come forward with her accusation.
“I think honesty matters,” she said when asked why she believes Walker is not fit to serve in the U.S. Senate.
She showed cards allegedly written by Walker, as well as hotel receipts from when they stayed together during their six-year affair that began in the late 1980s, when Walker was playing for the Dallas Cowboys and was married to his then-wife, Cindy DeAngelis Grossman. Allred in last week’s press conference had also played audio from a 1992 voicemail that Walker allegedly left for the woman while he was competing on the U.S. bobsled team in the Winter Olympics in France.
The woman said that in 1993 she unexpectedly became pregnant, despite being on birth control. She went to an abortion clinic in Dallas, but at first became overwhelmed and did not go through with it. She said Walker then drove her back to the clinic, then waited in the car while she went in alone.
Walker gave her cash to get the abortion, she said, and she has no receipts or other records to show she got the procedure.
Walker “was very clear that he did not want me to have the child,” Doe said. “He said that, because of his wife’s family and powerful people around him, that I would not be safe and that the child would not be safe.”
It was “very menacing,” she added. “And I felt threatened, and I thought I had no choice.”
After she got the abortion, she said, Walker began distancing himself from her. She left Dallas soon after. Walker has occasionally reached out to her, according to the interview. The segment also included a 2019 photo showing the woman and Walker standing together and smiling.
“I told my parents I had a miscarriage,” the visibly emotional woman said, “because I couldn’t tell them the truth. And I told a few friends the same thing, because I couldn’t tell them the truth.”
“It just was very shameful, and I felt like I had been manipulated,” she said.