THE NEW ABNORMAL

A Fascinating Detail in the Herschel Walker Saga

On this week’s episode of The New Abnormal, host Andy Levy talks with Daily Beast politics reporter Roger Sollenberger about his exclusive series of stories on the candidate.

The Daily Beast reporter who broke the story of Herschel Walker paying for a girlfriend’s abortion has provided behind-the-scenes details and thoughts on the case.

Politics reporter Roger Sollenberger pointed to the key detail in the cobweb of Walker stories to host Andy Levy on this week’s episode of political podcast The New Abnormal: the woman behind the allegations.

After The Daily Beast reported the details surrounding Walker and the girlfriend’s abortion in 2009, the anti-abortion Georgia Senate candidate went on the defensive, denying the allegations and claiming he was unaware who that woman could be.

Then Sollenberger says, as reported in a Thursday article, “that prompted the woman to offer additional details about her relationship to Walker and why her accusation is so credible: She agreed to publicly disclose that she and Walker also had a child together.”

Speaking to Levy, Sollenberger said the woman “is incredible. She’s incredibly brave. It’s really important. But also his relationship with her is so strange. He wasn’t around, he did not raise this kid at all. He’s not in touch with her in any meaningful sense.”

Sollenberger described the NFL star turned politician as “one of the most fascinating figures in American public life” and said he began digging into his life at the beginning of the year, when “some details in the documents that I was able to dig up were just kind of strange… and merited further exploration.”

He said that when he broke the news that Walker had a secret son, he was able to connect with a “number of people in Walker’s close circles, a number of past partners.”

“I’ve learned so much about the guy and in the process of that, I got this story and we reported it.”

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Speaking of the potential political ramifications for Walker, guest podcast host Josie Duffy Rice, who writes about prisons and prosecution at The Unnamed, told Levy that while the abortion bombshell could swing the vote, it is unlikely to make Republicans switch.

“This is not nothing, I think that it contributes to people’s distrust and perception of Walker as a loose cannon that’s kind of unpredictable. But at the end of the day, Herschel Walker will vote with Republicans on literally everything.

“We’re talking about someone who will do what Republicans ask him to do, and at the end of the day, that’s far more important to voters. Now, I’m hearing a lot of people say people who are for Herschel Walker are not going to change their vote to [Raphael] Warnock. I think that’s probably, or I should say definitely true, but I think it’s also possible that they just don’t vote in that race.”

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Then, Mark Joseph Stern, senior writer at Slate who covers court and law, describes how the Supreme Court is blowing up law school too.

“The court has become, in many ways, corrupted by the political process and so just delivers these decisions that fall perfectly in line with the platform,” he says.

“These professors are having to rewrite their syllabuses on the fly. The bar exam is having to redo all of its questions every single year. The court is moving fast and breaking a lot.

“These professors are truly struggling with not just the outcomes which they find distasteful but the processes that lead there. And they just feel like this is not the law they once believed in. This feels a lot more just like hardball politics dressed up in the garb of judicial decision making.”

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Martha MercerEditor

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