ATLANTA – Republican U.S. Senate nominee Herschel Walker, a staunch opponent of abortion, is denying a media report that he paid for an abortion for a girlfriend in 2009.
But his son reacted to Walker’s response to the story The Daily Beast posted on its website Monday by calling his father on Twitter a liar and hypocrite.
The elder Walker told FOX News host Sean Hannity Monday night the story is “a flat-out lie” concocted by supporters of incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga.
“They’ll do anything to win this seat,” Walker said. “They want to make it about everything else except the true problems we have in this country: inflation, the border wide open, crime. They don’t want to talk about that, so they’re making up lies.”
Walker is vowing to sue The Daily Beast for defamation.
Meanwhile, his 24-year-old son, Christian Walker, criticized his father on Twitter after The Daily Beast posted the abortion story. The younger Walker said he has been mostly absent from the campaign trail because his father has not owned up to his past.
“I did one event last year when we were told he was going to get ahead of his past and hold himself accountable,” Christian Walker said. “That never happened.”
Warnock’s campaign has been running ads featuring Herschel Walker’s ex-wife, Cindy Grossman, describing how he held a gun to her head.
Walker has said he is accountable for his past violent behavior but that he was struggling with dissociative identity disorder at the time, a mental illness about which he later wrote a book.
The younger Walker, who has gained a reputation as a conservative influencer, said the family tried to talk Herschel Walker out of running for the Senate because of his violent past.
Christian Walker took his father to task for posing in campaign ads as a “family man.”
“You don’t get to pretend you’re some moral family guy,” the younger Walker said. “Talk policy. Do not lie.”
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation