As Herschel Walker eyes Senate run, a turbulent past emerges
ATLANTA >> A homegrown football hero and businessman supported by his longtime friend Donald Trump, Herschel Walker has an attractive profile for Republicans looking to reclaim a U.S. Senate seat in Georgia.
But as he decides whether to run, a more complex picture is taking shape. An Associated Press review of Walker’s statements over the years, along with a cache of public records, some including previously unreported details, reflects a pattern of turbulent and sometimes threatening behavior that could dog Walker’s Senate bid.
The documents detail accusations of threats Walker made on his ex-wife’s life, exaggerated claims about private-sector success and erratic behavior that disturbed his business allies. The account come on top of Walker’s previous disclosures about his history of struggling with mental illness.
That worries some Republicans in Washington and Georgia as they chart a path back to a Senate majority in the 2022 midterm elections. Their concern is that the 59-year-old political novice could win the GOP nomination with his fame and Trump’s help, but falter against Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock. Georgia’s first Black senator, Warnock won a special election in January and will seek a full six-year term next year.
Walker “certainly could bring a lot of things to the table,” Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, said in a recent interview. “But as others have mentioned, there’s also a lot of questions out there.”
Walker disclosed his mental illness in a 2008 book, “Breaking Free,” detailing a diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder. In that account, Walker told of as many as a dozen personalities — or “alters” — that he’d constructed as a defense mechanism against the bullying he suffered as a stuttering, overweight child.
The National Alliance on Mental Illness describes the disorder as “alternating between multiple identities,” leaving a person with “gaps in memory of every day events.” It notes men with the disorder often “exhibit more violent behavior rather than amnesia.”
In his book, Walker acknowledged violent urges. He wrote that he played Russian roulette, and recalled sitting at his kitchen table in 1991 pointing a gun, loaded with a single bullet, at his head. “I wasn’t suicidal,” Walker explained, but “just looked at mortality as the ultimate challenge.”
Walker pitched a turnaround story, saying he decided in 2001 that “it was time to stop running and face some harsh realities.” He cited therapy and his Christian faith as influences.
His watershed moment: driving his car to confront a man who’d “messed up my schedule” and thinking about what it’d be like to shoot the man. Walker changed course, he wrote, after seeing a bumper sticker with the message “SMILE. JESUS LOVES YOU.”
Yet Walker’s violent behavior continued well after the 2001 revelation and his efforts to get help, according to court records obtained by the AP.