Former football star Herschel Walker, the Republican nominee for a U.S. Senate seat in Georgia, has been getting criticized for making extremely false statements, including that he was an FBI agent, but now he’s getting criticized for what he hasn’t said.
Walker, a strong supporter of Donald Trump who was endorsed by the former president, has bragged about being a good dad, but he has a secret son he has never publicly acknowledged and whose mother had to go to court to secure child support, according to new reporting from The Daily Beast‘s political reporter Roger Sollenberger.
Walker, who has a 22-year-old son, Christian, also “has a second son, who has apparently been estranged from his biological father since his birth a decade ago.”
That’s despite Walker having taken “a principled stand against fatherless households and deadbeat dads—specifically in the Black community,” The Daily Beast reports.
“And I want to apologize to the African-American community, because the fatherless home is a major, major problem,” Walker said in a September 2020 interview, adding that he had been “like a father to some of those kids that had never had fathers.”
One month earlier Walker “told right-wing internet personalities Diamond and Silk that if you have ‘a child with a woman, even if you have to leave that woman… you don’t leave the child.'”
In 2019 Walker reportedly “said his greatest accomplishment was being a good father,” The Daily Beast notes, adding that he “has pointed to his parenting as a model for other unconventional families.”
Walker’s secret son’s “mother, whose name we are also withholding for privacy reasons, had to take Walker to court a year after giving birth in order to secure a declaration of paternity and child support.”
The court case lasted more than a year.
“When the court issued its final child support order in Aug. 2014, the boy was more than 2 years old.”
He has never met or spoken with his half-brother, Christian, according to “a person close to the boy’s family with direct knowledge of the events.”
While fairly active on social media, Walker stopped mentioning his son Christian on Twitter in 2016 (except for this post demanding a photo retraction in 2020.) This is one of his last tweets that mention Christian Walker:
Walker’s spokesperson, Scot Paradise, did not deny he has another child, saying he is “proud of his children,” and then went on to attack The Daily Beast.
“To suggest that Herschel is ‘hiding’ the child because he hasn’t used him in his political campaign is offensive and absurd,” Paradise said.
But in 2020, just days before the presidential election, Walker did exactly that:
UPDATE:
The Daily Beast’s Sollenberger posted a screenshot of a recent tweet from Walker’s adult son Christian, who was criticizing men for fathering children and not raising them.