The new details on Herschel Walker and what they mean for his denials

We’ve known key aspects of the timeline before, thanks to reporting initially from the Daily Beast and later from the New York Times and now The Post:

• The woman, who spoke to The Post and others on the condition of anonymity, has provided reporters a copy of a receipt from a women’s clinic from Sept. 12, 2009, in the amount of $575.
• She has also provided an ATM slip that has an image of the check from Walker, in the amount of $700. (The Post confirmed the check contained an address associated with Walker at the time and what appears to be his signature. The woman said she had estimated the cost using internet searches and added travel and recovery expenses.)
• She has also provided a get-well card she says Walker sent her and which contained the check.

Walker hasn’t denied the payment itself — “I send money to a lot of people,” he said, when asked about it by Fox News’s Sean Hannity — just that he paid for an abortion. His case would seem to be that any such payment would’ve been meant for some other purpose, even though it arrived soon after the abortion, was for a similar amount and, according to the woman, was contained in the get-well card.

But the woman insists she and Walker spoke about at length about obtaining the abortion. And The Post’s new report adds that the woman’s bank account at the time contained less than $600, which The Post’s Linskey and Crites confirmed with a contemporaneous ATM receipt.

The reason that’s significant: It would suggest that the woman, who has said she was unemployed at the time amid the Great Recession, was in real need of help covering her expense. It might be possible that she would ask for money without necessarily disclosing what it was for. But this was a major expense during a time of apparently significant financial hardship; it would seem to make sense for someone in such a position to emphasize the urgency of the situation.

The woman assures she and Walker discussed the purpose of the money and that the discussions were lengthy. A person she confided in at the time also confirms it.

“When I talked to him, I said, ‘You need to send — I can’t afford to pay for this,’” the woman told The Post. She added that she told Walker: “We did this, too. Both of us did this. We both know how babies are made.”

Despite the evidence, Republicans have continued to rally around Walker and argued that he’s being impugned. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and the head of Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), appeared alongside Walker on Friday.

But even aside from the details above, Walker has offered a series of confusing defenses that are difficult to reconcile.

He had repeatedly said that he didn’t know who could make such an allegation, even as the woman was later reported to be the mother of one of his children. A day after that report, Walker continued to plead ignorance, despite the report stating she had their child in the early 2010s — a date that would’ve come after three of his four known children were born.

(After Walker said on Thursday he still didn’t know who the woman was, his wife reached out to her the next day, according to texts she provided to the Daily Beast. Walker has since told ABC News that he figured out who the woman was “last week.”)

Walker has also said all of the Daily Beast’s reporting is false, despite having confirmed its earlier reporting that he had fathered the other children.

And Walker has explained his son Christian Walker’s decision to speak out against him by saying his son was “extremely hurt” by the reports of other children, because he believed his dad had “never told him about it.” Walker said his son’s belief was mistaken, but it would seem odd that his adult son would believe such a thing if his father had indeed been transparent about his siblings.

Thus far, we’re still waiting to see how Georgia voters feel about the matter, and their verdict could be crucial for control of the Senate — just as it was in the 2020 election. A University of Georgia poll released Tuesday showed the race remains tight, with Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.) at 46 percent and Walker at 43 percent. But only a handful of interviews were conducted after the Daily Beast’s initial report on Oct. 4.