Friday, February 11, 2022

Herschel Walker's Domestic Violence Past




Trumpist tool Herschel Walker, the former NFL running back and current candidate for the Georgia Republican nomination to oppose Sen. Rev. Rafael Warnock in November, has a checkered past filled with violence and unstable behavior. As the Associated Press reported last summer:

"...an Associated Press review of hundreds of pages of public records tied to Walker’s business ventures and his divorce, including many not previously reported, sheds new light on a turbulent personal history that could dog his Senate bid. The documents detail accusations that Walker repeatedly threatened his ex-wife’s life, exaggerated claims of financial success and alarmed business associates with unpredictable behavior.

Walker, now 59, has at times been open about his long struggle with mental illness, writing at length in a 2008 book about being diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, once known as multiple personality disorder."  (our emphasis)

Credit's due for facing his mental illness publicly, but Walker now faces new questions about a specific domestic violence incident in 2001 that required psychiatric and law enforcement intervention:

"One warm fall evening in 2001, police in Irving, Texas, received an alarming call from Herschel Walker’s therapist. The football legend and current Republican Senate candidate in Georgia was 'volatile,' armed and scaring his estranged wife at the suburban Dallas home they no longer shared.

Officers took cover outside, noting later that Walker had 'talked about having a shoot-out with police.' Then they ordered the 1982 Heisman Trophy winner and onetime Dallas Cowboy to step out of the home, according to a police report obtained by The Associated Press through a public records request.

Much of what happened that day at the $1.9 million mansion remains shrouded from view because the report, which Irving police released to the AP only after ordered to do so by the Texas attorney general’s office, was extensively redacted."  (our emphasis) 

As domestic abuse survivors know, if it's happened once, it's happened other times. Walker has received the full-throated endorsement of the seditionist Malignant Loser, and other Republican leaders, including Sen. "Moscow Mitch" McConnell. Despite living in Texas for years, he was chosen to run against Sen. Warnock to blunt accusations that Georgia's Republican Party has been engaging in anti-black, Jim Crow era voting rights restrictions. After all, Walker's black too, right?

To say the Republicans are standing behind a flawed candidate in Walker is an understatement, especially compared to Reverend Warnock. But then, look who the Republicans chose for their cult leader.

BONUSHe's also a deadbeat, apparently (very Trumpy!) --

(photo: Walker and his cult leader. John Bazemore / AP)

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