The “Equal Opportunity” candidate for U.S. Senator from Georgia, former football player Herschel Walker, has been dogged by a disturbing and previously unreported incident: a stalking incident. His first wife, Shawna, claims that Walker stalked and threatened her; he also allegedly telephoned her and showed up unannounced at her father’s home.
As Georgia gears up to elect a replacement for Senator Saxby Chambliss, the special election is heating up with a serious contender: Herschel Walker.
Herschel Walker, a former running back and NFL Hall of Fame inductee and one of the most accomplished and popular athletes in Georgia history, is now campaigning to succeed David Perdue in the United States Senate. A new report from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Wednesday details some of the more disturbing episodes in the former player’s life that may explain why some voters are reluctant to give him their support.
Walker’s ex-pal wife’s informed police that the football star had been following her and had previously made “threats to her” and had “her home monitored.” The nature of the threats made by Walker, who is now one of the most high-profile Senate contenders in the nation and a strong friend of former President Donald Trump, was not specified in the report.
Two other women, Walker’s ex-wife and an ex-girlfriend, have accused him of making threats throughout the years, alleging that he threatened to shoot them in the head. Walker, who rose to national prominence as a collegiate football star at the University of Georgia, has begun a campaign for the Peach State’s competitive Senate seat, and their old accounts have reappeared in recent weeks. The third woman’s story has never been told before.
The lady, who was in her late twenties when she reported Walker to police, told CNN this week that he had threatened her, but she requested not to be named and refused to disclose the details of his threats. She said categorically that she had never dated or been in a relationship with Walker.
Walker’s team refused to comment on the woman’s claims or the police report from 2002. In response to inquiries about the event, a campaign spokeswoman, Mallory Blount, highlighted Walker’s previous battles with mental health issues, which he has openly discussed.
“It’s unfortunate that people in politics and the media, who applauded Herschel for his openness over a decade ago, are now making false claims, stereotyping, criticizing, and trying to sensationalize his history just because he is a Republican Senate candidate,” she said in a statement.
Reports go into great depth about the allegations made against Walker.
A police officer from the Dallas suburb of Irving responded to a “prowler complaint” from a lady who claimed she thought someone was “sneaking about outside her home,” according to the May 2002 report acquired by CNN via a public records request. According to the officer, Jason Mullins, the lady “thought she knew who the individual would be” but was “extremely hesitant to tell me.”
The lady eventually confessed to Mullins that the guy she was suspicious about was Walker. The lady informed Mullins that she had “a disagreement” with Walker about a year before contacting the cops, and that “he started calling her, making threats to her, and having her home monitored.” The paper does not specify what those dangers were.
According to the article, she said that when she saw Walker at a nearby resort recently, he “jumped into” his car and followed her “all the way to her home.”
Mullins added, “She is extremely frightened (sic) of the person and is worried that he is going to start harassing her again.” “She said that she does not want to be contacted by him under any circumstances since she believes it would exacerbate the issue.”
Mullins stated that he spoke with the security at the woman’s community’s entrance, who claimed he hadn’t seen Walker enter the neighborhood.
Mullins, who is still employed by the Irving Police Department, claimed that as far as he knows, the department did not pursue the woman’s claims any further.
“It’s doubtful that we would have contacted him since she indicated that she didn’t want us to,” Mullins told CNN, “but I can’t say for sure.” According to him, the woman’s claim was treated as a “informational report” that would be kept on file rather than a “criminal offense report” that would be sent to police detectives.
Walker’s wife, Cindy Grossman, was divorcing him after almost two decades of marriage at the time of the story.
Walker threatened to murder Grossman throughout their marriage, according to Grossman. Walker had put a razor to her neck, and at one time, “he placed [a] pistol to my temple and claimed he was going to blow my brains out,” she recalled in a 2008 interview with CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta. This week, Grossman did not reply to CNN’s request for comment.
After the couple got divorced, the threats persisted. Grossman sought a protection order against Walker in December 2005. In an affidavit filed with the request, Grossman’s sister, Maria Tsettos, said that Walker had phoned her and threatened to murder Grossman and her then-boyfriend. Tsettos claimed he “said categorically” that he planned to shoot his sister Cindy and her partner in the head.
According to the petition, Grossman and her boyfriend were in a mall when Walker “slowly drove by in his car, aimed his finger at (Grossman), and tracked (her) with his finger as he drove.” Tsettos had threatened Grossman again earlier that day, according to Walker.
The protection order petition was granted by the court. The case was originally reported by the Associated Press.
Walker’s work explores mental health problems in depth.
Walker has spoken out about mental health problems he had throughout his marriage to Grossman, revealing in interviews and authoring a book that he was diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder. In a 2008 CNN interview, he claimed he didn’t recall being aggressive against his wife, but he didn’t dispute it, and he mentioned that blackouts were one of his disorder’s symptoms.
Walker said in his book that he sought treatment for his condition following another violent incident in 2001, when he drove around Dallas searching for a guy who had failed to deliver a vehicle he had purchased. Walker claimed that voices in his mind urged him to murder the guy, and he envisioned “the physical pleasure I’d receive from witnessing the tiny entrance and the shower of brain tissue and blood bursting behind him — like a Fourth of July rocket.” He claimed he resisted the impulses and went to the doctor, and that he subsequently published his book to help others understand mental illness.
Grossman’s allegations were subsequently echoed by another woman intimately connected with Walker. According to a 2012 Irving police complaint, Myka Dean, who had an on-and-off relationship with Walker for 20 years, said he had threatened to murder her.
Dean said Walker “told her that he was going to come and sit outside her apartment and ‘blow her head off when she walked outside,” according to the police report. “He then informed [Dean] that when he murdered her, he was going to ‘blow his head off.’”
Dean had reservations about reporting the threat, stating she didn’t “want him to go in jail” and became “very hesitant,” according to the officer.
According to the officer, the department had “prior interaction” with Walker, citing a 2001 police complaint. This Thursday, the Irving police department refused to make the report public, stating that it was being kept “waiting an Attorney General request for opinion.”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution first published Dean’s accusation last week. Dean died in 2019.
When questioned about Dean’s police statement, Walker’s spokesman, Blount, said the candidate “emphatically rejects these bogus allegations,” describing them as “political mudslinging.”
“We are extremely proud of the guy Herschel Walker has become,” Dean’s mother told the Journal-Constitution, adding that she was unaware of the accusations.
Drew Griffin, Nelli Black, Audrey Ash, and Yahya Abou-Ghazala contributed reporting to this story for CNN.
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