The Daily Beast's Roger Sollenberger has done more than his share of bombshell reporting on Herschel Walker in 2022, describing, in elaborate detail, allegations that the U.S. Senate candidate impregnated two different women and wanted them to have abortions — allegations that the MAGA Republican has flatly denied. Sollenberger offers yet another bombshell report on Walker in an article published by the Beast on December 1; this time, the reporter details a former girlfriend's allegations of violent and abusive behavior.
"A former longtime girlfriend of Republican senatorial candidate Herschel Walker has come forward to detail a violent episode with the football star, who she believes is 'unstable' and has 'little to no control' over his mental state when he is not in treatment," Sollenberger explains. "The woman, Dallas resident Cheryl Parsa, described an intimate and tumultuous five-year relationship with Walker in the 2000s, beginning shortly after his divorce and continuing for a year after the publication of his 2008 memoir about his struggle with dissociative identity disorder (DID), once known as multiple personality disorder."
In Georgia, Walker is trying to unseat incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock. Walker has been campaigning as a severe social conservative, aggressively courting the far-right white evangelical vote and proposing strict abortion bans even in cases of rape or incest. Georgia's U.S. Senate race shows that truth can be so much stranger than fiction; Rev. Warnock is an ordained Baptist minister, yet white evangelicals are rallying around Walker despite allegations that he has impregnated two women he wasn't married to, encouraged them to have abortions, committed adultery countless times, and committed acts of domestic violence.
Critics of Walker and the Christian Right or Religious Right have been pointing to the race as a textbook example of why they hold the far-right white evangelical movement in such low regard. Walker's white Republican evangelical supporters, they argue, aren't about principle; they'll all about tribalism and power. And Sollenberger's report on Parsa's allegations won't make Walker's critics any less critical of him.
According to Sollenberger, "Parsa, who has composed a book-length manuscript about her relationship with Walker, says she is speaking out because she is disturbed by Walker's behavior on the campaign trail, which she claims exhibits telltale flare-ups of the disorder she tried to help him manage for half a decade…. Parsa provided a detailed account of a 2005 incident that turned violent after she caught Walker with another woman at his Dallas condo. She said Walker grew enraged, put his hands on her chest and neck, and swung his fist at her. 'I thought he was going to beat me,' she recalled, and fled in fear."
Parsa didn't hold back during her interview with the Daily Beast. According to the Dallas resident, Walker uses DID as an "alibi" to "justify lying, cheating, and ultimately destroying families."
"He's a pathological liar," Parsa told the Beast. "Absolutely. But it's more than that. He knows how to manipulate his disease, in order to manipulate people, while at times being simultaneously completely out of control."
Parsa, Sollenberger reports, is "one of five women who were romantically involved with Walker who spoke to The Daily Beast for this article."
"All of them described a habit of lying and infidelity — including one woman who claimed she had an affair with Walker while he was married in the 1990s," Sollenberger explains. "All five women said they were willing to speak to expose the behavior of the man they now see running for Senate…. This is the first time in the campaign that a woman has gone on the record with accusations against Walker. His candidacy, however, has been dogged by other allegations of domestic violence, specifically from a 2008 interview with his ex-wife that resurfaced ahead of his announcement last August."
Despite all the damning allegations against Walker, it is possible that he will be representing Georgia in the U.S. Senate in 2023. The race has been close. After the November 8 election, Warnock had more votes than Walker. But because Warnock's lead was less than 50 percent (49.4 percent for Warnock and 48.5 percent for Walker), the race went to a runoff under Georgia's election rules.
The runoff election is scheduled for Tuesday, December 6. An Emerson College/The Hill poll released on December 1 found Walker trailing Warnock by about 2 percent.
If Warnock is reelected, Democrats will have a 51-seat majority in the U.S. Senate. But if Walker wins, the Senate will have a 50-50 Democratic/Republican split — which will still be a Democratic majority because of Vice President Kamala Harris' ability to break a tie.
Democratic strategists have been stressing that Walker is unfit to serve in the Senate, and Parsa agrees.
"He is not well," Parsa told the Daily Beast. "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."
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