In yet another explosive exclusive from The Daily Beast, a former girlfriend of Republican senate candidate Herschel Walker has come forward to tell the truth about the five hellish years she spent in a relationship with the former NFL running back.
Cheryl Parsa of Dallas, Texas, told the outlet that not long after his divorce in the 2000s, she began dating Walker and found him to have “little to no control” of his mental health when not in treatment. She believes he uses his mental health as an “alibi” to “justify lying, cheating, and ultimately destroying families.”
Parsa told The Daily Beast simply that Walker is “a pathological liar” who understands “how to manipulate his disease in order to manipulate people, while at times being simultaneously completely out of control.”
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Parsa, along with five other women, explained that they were openly speaking to the outlet because they saw the hypocrisy of the man running for Senate versus the real person they dated.
“He is not well,” Parsa said. “And I say that as someone who knows exactly what this looks like because I have lived through it and seen what it does to him and to other people. He cannot be a senator. He cannot have control over a state when he has little to no control of his mind.”
Here’s the thing: No one should criticize Walker for having a mental health issue. He’s been open about his dissociative identity disorder (DID), writing about it in his 2008 memoir Breaking Free: My Life with Dissociative Disorder. But the issue is that if you’re violent—whether to property or people—it’s irresponsible not to remain in treatment. Walker, on the other hand, has said he’s “overcome” his illness. “I don’t need any help. I’m doing well,” he said during his only debate with his opponent, Democratic incumbent Sen. Raphael Walker.
The Daily Beast reports that Walker did seek therapy from Dr. Jerry Mungadze, a specialist in “conversion” therapy, who in 2014 told televangelist Benny Hinn that demonic possession could be revealed by a patient’s crayon color choice. Mungadze diagnosed Walker with DID in 2001, Axios reported.
Parsa told The Daily Beast that during therapy with Walker, “Jerry told me that he had treated dozens of people with DID, but that Herschel’s was ‘the worst case I’d ever seen.’ He said the only thing worse than having DID is Herschel Walker having DID.” Parsa added that Walker’s “alters” or alternate personalities, many of whom he discusses in his memoir, were “competing all the time,” like children in a room together, “chaotic and unpredictable.”
Parsa says seeing Walker on the campaign trail is “sad to watch, and even more scary for our country.”
But it’s Parsa’s story of confronting him with another woman that is really the most frightening.
She says she saw him turn from loving to violent.
“His massive hands were on my chest and throat … I thought he was going to beat me.” Adding, “I saw a fist flying toward me. As I ducked down, he hit the wall beside my head and staggered backwards toward the bedroom, saying, ‘COME ON! I’M GONNA SHOW YOU WHAT A MAN IS!’ And I heard him from the bedroom beating himself up against the wall repeatedly and with force.”
As Daily Kos has reported, Walker did hold a gun to his now ex-wife Cindy DeAngelis Grossman’s head and a knife to her throat and tried to choke her. He’s admitted to the incidents. But often, as he did in an interview with host Christal Jordan of the YouTube show, From Christal with Love XO, he pivots to his Christian faith and then tries to turn the topic to Warnock.
Since the day Walker announced his candidacy, lie upon lie has been revealed about Walker, from a lie about graduating from the University of Georgia, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported, to hiding the fact that he had any children other than his one 22-year-old son Christian, to the mammoth exaggerations about his business acumen, to the tall tale about the time he founded (or co-founded) the veteran's organization Patriot Support—which he did not. He recently tried to deny that former President Donald Trump ever said the 2020 election was stolen and lied about his companies’ alleged charitable donations, of which nearly none could be verified by The Washington Post.
Then there’s his virulently anti-abortion stance.
We know that despite what he may have said during a debate, he also supports a federal abortion ban. And it hasn’t mattered one iota that several women have come out publicly and said he paid for them to have abortions. He’s denied it even when hard evidence has been handed to him.
Walker is the trope every Black American detests, thus the perfect pick from the Republican Party. Walker is what the GOP thinks Black people are: violent liars who abandon their children, can barely string a sentence together, and even though he’s completely ill-prepared to hold office, he will remain loyal and obedient to a party that sees him simply as a pawn in a chess game of white supremacy.
Now Walker is facing Warnock in a run for his life. His campaign slogan is “Run Herschel, Run”—a slogan that connotes some of the most degrading images imaginable: Enslaved people running for their lives and a white society watching an athlete in the same way they might watch a chicken fight, animals inhumanely battling against one another.
And yet with all of this, the runoff is still extremely close. Why? Because the only thing running faster than Walker from a journalist is the Republican Party from their own self-described values.
Raphael Warnock needs all the support he can get to help our Democratic majority in the Senate. Chip in $5 today to his runoff campaign.
Why did Democrats do so surprisingly well in the midterms? It turns out they ran really good campaigns, as strategist Josh Wolf tells us on this week's episode of The Downballot. That means they defined their opponents aggressively, spent efficiently, and stayed the course despite endless second-guessing in the press. Wolf gives us an inside picture of how exactly these factors played out in the Arizona governor's race, one of the most important Democratic wins of the year. He also shines a light on an unsexy but crucial aspect of every campaign: how to manage a multi-million budget for an enterprise designed to spend down to zero by Election Day.
