From The Daily Beast:
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.
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.)
In 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.
Here’s some more context from Rolling Stone:
“I have four children. Three sons and a daughter. They’re not ‘undisclosed’ — they’re my kids,” Walker said. “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?”
After it was revealed earlier this week that Walker had a 10-year-old, his campaign’s statement in response made no mention of any other previously undisclosed children, including the daughter he had when he was in college. “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.”
Walker hasn’t been upfront with other parts of his life, either. The former University of Georgia football player lied about graduating from college in the top one percent of his class, and about being valedictorian of his high school. He also lied about owning the country’s largest minority-owned upholstery business and its largest minority-owned food company.
FYI:
The New Republic points out what makes Walker a unique liar:
Walker is, even by recent GOP standards, an absolute firehose of lies. He’s also, to put it bluntly, absolutely godawful at lying. His deceptions seem to arrive in the news pre-collapsed—they are easily uncovered and incredibly numerous; his falsehoods have been repeatedly revealed over the last several months. At this point the “False Statements” section of his Wikipedia page is longer than the one recounting his ongoing campaign to be Georgia’s next senator.
Walker has depicted himself as a successful entrepreneur and a worthy voice for Georgia’s business community. “Whenever Georgia needed somebody to speak up for their businesses, they called Herschel Walker,” he said at a rally earlier this year. But Walker has drastically inflated his success as a businessman over a period of decades while also obscuring a tidy number of disasters. He has described himself as the proprietor of a food service business that he compared to a “mini–Tyson Foods,” claiming that it employed more than 100 people across several plants and brought in nearly $100 million in sales. According to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the reality was very different: The company’s profits were less than $2 million; Walker meanwhile had simply licensed his name to the business. In documentation relating to Paycheck Protection Program loans, it revealed it had only eight employees.
In February, meanwhile, Walker boasted that “I still have about 250 people that sew drapery and bedspreads for me.” That sounds impressive! There’s just one problem: It isn’t. While Walker has claimed on his website that “[Herschel Walker Enterprises] and Renaissance Hospitality provides major hotels, restaurants and hospitals with custom fabric bedding, drapery and window treatments,” the truth is that Renaissance Hospitality doesn’t exist anymore—it dissolved a year ago. Moreover, Walker didn’t even own the business—a friend did.
This week, things got even worse—and weirder—for Walker. On Monday, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution revealed that Walker had, on several occasions, claimed he worked in law enforcement despite the fact that he had no such experience. In 2013, he told a group of people at a suicide prevention event that he had “worked in law enforcement, so I had a gun. I put this gun in my holster, and I said, ‘I’m gonna kill this dude.’” In 2017 he said, “I’ve been in criminal justice all my life.” Two years later he told a group of soldiers, “I spent time at Quantico at the FBI training school. Y’all didn’t know I was an agent?” There was, yet again, just one problem: Walker had never worked in law enforcement; while his campaign claims he did attend a one-week training course at Quantico, that doesn’t make you an “agent.” Walker just … made all of that up. His one discernible tie to law enforcement was an incident in 2001 in which he threatened to shoot at cops while in the midst of a mental health episode. (Walker attended treatment after the incident. I suppose that makes him a psychiatrist.)
U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock (D. GA), on the other hand, is a true, honest public servant who deserves a full term in the U.S. Senate. His New York Times op-ed piece about his father is a beautiful and touching tribute:
Jonathan Warnock was 52 years old when I was born, the same age I am now. As a young man, Dad was drafted in the U.S. Army during World War II and served about a year, all stateside. He experienced firsthand the indignities of that era’s Black military men, who served their country dutifully at a defining time in its history yet were treated as second-class citizens, particularly in the segregated South.
Dad headed back home to Savannah, Ga., on a public bus. He was dressed proudly in his Army uniform as the bus rolled through town, pulled to a stop and began filling with new passengers. The white bus driver pointed at my father and ordered him to get up and move farther back so a white teenager could sit. To the white driver and passengers, the skin he was wearing was more consequential than the U.S. Army uniform he was wearing.
Dad knew the grave consequences a Black man could face if he dared to disobey. Black men and boys had been dragged from their homes and lynched for less. He obliged but never forgot.
My dad always worked for himself, in part because of his own internal entrepreneurial drive but also because of his refusal to suffer the everyday indignities and economic vulnerabilities of working for people who refused to acknowledge his humanity in the Jim Crow South. His hauling business sometimes transported produce — peaches, cantaloupes, watermelons — or plates of glass or junk cars to area markets or factories.
Late one rainy evening in the early 1960s, he and one of my older brothers, Jonathan Emmanuel, were transporting a load of glass in the truck with two other teenage boys whom Dad had enlisted to assist. Suddenly a car appeared out of nowhere on the rural Georgia highway and rear-ended Dad’s truck. The car slammed hard into the truck and skidded partly underneath its chassis. When Dad and his stunned passengers climbed out of their vehicle, they saw blood and glass everywhere. They also saw a horrific scene inside the car, where the driver, a young white man, had been decapitated. A passenger, another young white man, had been thrown from the vehicle but miraculously survived the crash. White residents of the area heard the commotion and began gathering at the scene. Shattered lives and shards of glass spilled all over that rural Georgia highway.
Within minutes, the sheriff, also white, arrived with his lights flashing and sirens blaring. As Dad looked into the sea of white faces, a sense of foreboding filled him. Saddened by what had just happened and terrified by what appeared on the verge of happening, Dad inched close to the boys and whispered that they had to stick together. They might have to fight for their lives.
Dad began to pray. Not the long or eloquent prayer of a Sunday morning preacher, but the hushed sounds and urgent pleas of a man in trouble. As they would sometimes do in the late-night prayer services of the Holiness Church tradition in which I was raised, Dad simply called on the name of Jesus — repeatedly, silently, passionately. The sheriff approached and in his thick Georgia drawl questioned Dad and his passengers about the accident. Then, after taking his time to survey the scene, the sheriff turned to Dad with an unexpected question: “You boys need a ride home?” In shock, Dad and the teenagers glanced back and forth at one another. The sheriff added that he’d warned the young men in the car multiple times about driving drunk and flying so recklessly up and down those rural back roads.
Dad and his helpers all lived to tell the story. And tell it Dad did, after he entered parish ministry in his 40s — over and over in his sermons, recounting God’s grace and mercy.
And Warnock also has a great piece Literary Hub that talks about the moment that inspired his activism:
On February 4 of that year four New York City police officers in plain clothes shot a Black man, a twenty-three-year-old Guinean immigrant named Amadou Diallo, at about 12:40 am in the vestibule of his own apartment building in the Bronx. The officers later said they mistook him for a serial rape suspect who had last struck about a year prior and thought he was going for a gun when he reached into his pocket. The officers fired forty-one shots, striking Diallo nineteen times. He had no weapon. He was trying to pull out his wallet.
Just a year and a half before that in August 1997, a thirty-year-old Haitian immigrant named Abner Louima had been arrested outside a Brooklyn nightclub and then taken to a police precinct, where he was brutally beaten and sodomized with a broken broomstick or the handle of a toilet plunger. The attack left injuries so severe that Louima needed multiple corrective surgeries. New Yorkers took to the streets, with demonstrators marching to city hall and the precinct where the torture had taken place.
Before the officers even went to trial in the Louima case, Diallo was shot. The shooting was like lighter fluid tossed into a burning flame. Once again, the city exploded. Outraged New Yorkers poured back into the city streets daily and, in recurring waves, made their way to 1 Police Plaza in downtown Manhattan, where they crossed a threshold that assured their arrests. And there were droves of arrests.
As I watched the protests, something inside me clicked this time. I knew I had to go. It wasn’t just that Diallo looked like me. But seeing his merciless killing, after all the other incidents, underscored the vulnerability of navigating the world in Black skin. He could have been me; I could have been him. He was just a hardworking young Black man, saving up money to go to college. I hurt for his heartbroken mother, who had watched her son travel to America with such hope. I hurt for his interrupted dreams and for my people whose skin alone made us such targets of hatred and violence.
Health and Democracy are on the ballot and we need to be ready to keep Georgia Blue. Click below to donate and get involved with Warnock and his fellow Georgia Democrats campaigns:
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