Herschel Walker has doubled down in his fight against claims made by a woman that he paid for her abortion.
“They’ve woken a grizzly bear,” he told Fox News Digital.
The Georgia Republican Senate nominee running against Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock said the GOP “is behind me”, noting that Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Rick Scott of Florida came to the Peach State to campaign for him.
Mr Walker is maintaining his denial of a report that he paid for an abortion 13 years ago. According to The Daily Beast, he told an unidentified girlfriend in 2009 to go through with the procedure and he later gave her $700 as reimbursement.
On the campaign trail, Mr Walker has been staunchly pro-life. The woman cited receipts to The Daily Beast as well as a “get well” card sent by Mr Walker.
“Did you ever have a conversation with this woman ... about an abortion?” ABC’s Linsey Davis asked Mr Walker during an interview.
Mr Walker said he hadn’t.
“Did you ever, to your knowledge, give money to pay for the cost of an abortion?” Ms Davis prodded.
Mr Walker again rejected the idea. Asked if the woman was lying, he said, “yes, she’s lying”.
Just hours after the initial story was posted, Mr Walker appeared on Hannity on Fox News, saying that it was “a flat-out lie”.
On Tuesday, he again told Fox News Digital that “it’s a lie”.
The Daily Beast later added to their reporting that the woman had a child with Mr Walker three years after the abortion he allegedly paid for.
The woman told The New York Times that Mr Walker urged her to have another abortion, but that she refused to do so. Mr Walker has also rejected this claim.
The former football player has been slammed as a hypocrite on the issue of abortion.
“It’s a lie so I’m not a hypocrite,” he told Fox News Digital on Tuesday.
With his ex-wife, Mr Walker had a son, Christian, a right-wing influencer who has now entered the fray in his father’s Senate race to criticise his lack of parenting.
Christian Walker said his father is “not a ‘family man’ ... you left us to bang a bunch of women, threatened to kill us, and had us move over 6 times in 6 months running from your violence”.
A Democrat-supporting political action committee released an ad on Tuesday featuring the younger Mr Walker.
“I love him to death. I hope they’re paying him. I’ve been paying his rent for a long time. So I hope they’re paying him a little bit. But I love him to death,” the GOP nominee told Fox News Digital when asked about the ad.
He added that Democrats are “coming up with anything they can come up with”.
“They don’t realise that they’ve woken a grizzly bear,” he said. “Now they got a fight on their hand. Before I was just going to beat them by a little bit. Now I’m going to beat them by a lot.”
He later told a crowd at a campaign spot in Carrollton that “I don’t think they know that they woke up a bear… so they got to bring more than that”.
Mr Walker told the crowd to “wake up… it’s time for us to stand up, to straighten up”.
“We’re here for one reason. We’re going to make sure we’ll do everything we can to help Herschel Walker become the next senator from Georgia,” Mr Scott told the press.
