The final day to cast ballots in the special election for Georgia’s Senate seat is Tuesday, Dec. 6. Early voting has been open since Nov. 28, and already over a million Georgians have cast their ballots.
With less than a week until officials begin tabulating the final ballots, new allegations are surfacing against Republican candidate Herschel Walker.
An article from The Daily Beast published Thursday alleges five women who were once romantically involved with Walker told the outlet the former football star is “unstable,” adding that most were afraid of Walker as well.
Only one woman agreed to be identified by name for the article: Cheryl Parsa, who said she dated Walker over five years between 2004 to 2009. Parsa recalled a number of incidents over the course of their relationship in which Walker exhibited violent tendencies, including once when she thought he was “going to beat me” after she caught him with another woman, and ran in fear of her life.
Parsa, who lives in Dallas, similarly described Walker as mentally “unstable,” alleging that he has “little to no control” over his emotions when he is not in treatment for dissociative identity disorder, a condition previously referred to as multiple personality disorder.
“He is not well,” Parsa told The Daily Beast of Walker. “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.”
Walker revealed and discussed at length his diagnosis in a 2008 memoir entitled Breaking Free, describing his battle with the illness and how he came out the other side. The now 60-year-old used the story as evidence of a redemption, of sorts, amid his campaign for Georgia’s Senate seat, saying in a television ad that by “the grace of God, I’ve overcome” his diagnosis.
Parsa, who told The Daily Beast her last contact with Walker was in 2019, did not agree with the assessment of his mental health status.
“He knows how to manipulate his disease, in order to manipulate people, while at times being simultaneously completely out of control,” she told the outlet.
Walker's campaign did not respond to a request for comment from Spectrum News.
While Parsa is the first woman to publicly tie her name to accusations of abuse against Walker during his campaign, the former football star has been dogged by allegations of coercing women to get abortions in previous romantic relationships outside of his marriages. Walker repeatedly stated throughout his campaign that he does not support abortion, to varying degrees.
The first such report came In early October, when The Daily Beast published a story regarding a woman, who asked that her identity be kept private, claiming Walker paid for an abortion in 2009.
The news outlet received and reportedly verified a receipt showing a $575 payment for the abortion, along with a get-well card from Walker – with the message “pray you are feeling better” and signed with a capital “H” – and bank deposit records showing an image of a $700 personal check from Walker dated five days later.
The Republican nominee for Senate called the report a “flat-out lie” and said he would sue.
Weeks later, a second anonymous woman, represented by famed civil rights attorney Gloria Allred, alleged Walker drove her to an abortion clinic and paid for the procedure after she became pregnant as the result of a consensual relationship in 1993.
Walker publicly denied the allegations during a campaign event the same day.
"I've already told people this, this is a lie and I'm not going to entertain it," Walker said in part.
It’s not only former romantic partners that have come forward with concerning allegations against Walker during his Senate run.
One of Walker's sons, Christian, a vocal conservative advocate on social media, slammed his father in a series of Twitter posts.
"Every family member of Herschel Walker asked him not to run for office, because we all knew (some of) his past. Every single one," Christian Walker wrote. "He decided to give us the middle finger and air out all of his dirty laundry in public, while simultaneously lying about it. I'm done."
The younger Walker went on to level a number of other accusations against his father, adding: "I know my mom and I would really appreciate if my father Herschel Walker stopped lying and making a mockery of us."
Still, it remains to be seen if the latest series of accusations move the needle in Georgia’s Senate race. Walker finished roughly 36,000 votes behind incumbent Democrat Sen. Raphael Warnock in the midterm elections; since neither candidate gained more than 50% of the overall vote, a special election runoff was triggered.
Warnock said the latest allegations represent a “disturbing pattern” from Walker, adding that “all of these women can’t be lying.”
“There’s one after another after another,” Warnock told reporters Thursday of the repeated allegations. “And his own family members have indicated that they felt threatened by him. And I think for people who are looking at this, it is deeply concerning. I think that this race is about character and [...] I think the women of this state and the people in this state deserve better.”
Hundreds of thousands of voters have turned up to cast their ballots each day since early voting started, according to Georgia election officials.