Herschel Walker has maintained that he still doesn’t know the identity of the woman claiming she had an abortion after she and Walker got pregnant in 2009. But on Friday afternoon, the woman finally heard from a top Walker campaign surrogate: Julie Blanchard, the candidate’s wife.
In text a message exchange shared with The Daily Beast, the woman—who says she later had a child with Walker against his wishes in 2012—told Blanchard it was “cruel” that Walker “continues to claim he doesn’t know me or the abortion he paid for.”
“He brought all of this on himself when he decided to get on a platform and denounce abortion and make a mockery of his children who have done NOTHING to deserve this,” wrote the woman.
“Shame on him,” she added.
The woman asked Blanchard if she had previously known about the abortion, or if she had known that Walker had also said it wasn’t the “right time” to get an abortion when they conceived another child three years later. (The woman went forward with the pregnancy despite Walker’s wishes.)
Instead of directly answering the woman’s question about the abortion, Blanchard wrote that “this makes me incredibly sad,” claiming she “continually tried to bridge a better relationship” between the estranged family members.
Provided to The Daily Beast
Blanchard added that she “witnessed everyday Herschel pray for you and [your son] & everyone in our family.” She added that Walker calls and texts the child “regularly,” and feels “sadness” when he gets no response—to which the anonymous woman replied, “Are you kidding me?”
Blanchard, who for years has also served as a go-between messenger for Walker and the woman, replied at 1:19 pm EDT, according to the text message chain. An hour later, the campaign blasted out a fundraising text message calling the abortion allegation a “flat-out lie.”
The texts show that Blanchard initiated contact with the woman at 9:54 am on Friday to complain about this reporter investigating the existence of Walker’s children. Previously, their last text was on Aug. 30.
The woman also provided The Daily Beast with a detailed personal account of her life after having Walker’s child, shining a light on the nature of her son’s relationship with Walker—or, as she puts it, the lack thereof. She asked for anonymity out of concern for her family’s privacy and safety, but supported her claims with text messages, photographs, and court records.
Walker has not seen their son in person for more than six-and-a-half years, the woman said. The football legend has, by her count, met his son a total of three times, which she supported with photographs. Two of those instances were related to child support hearings.
Walker’s campaign declined to comment for this story.
For an idea of how present Walker has been in their son’s life, the woman shared a series of screenshots of text messages from Walker to the boy’s iMessage account on his iPad.
The messages are incredibly revealing.
For instance, Walker never told the boy he had a half-brother until after The Daily Beast broke the news this June. The woman said she also didn’t know about the other son, which she expressed in a text message to Blanchard the day after the story published.
On July 7, the messages show—three days after Walker sent his son an Instagram photo from a July 4 campaign event—the boy asked his father if he had any other brothers or sisters he did not know about, in addition to adult son Christian Walker and a daughter Walker had previously disclosed to the boy.
Walker, who had confirmed the half-brother to The Daily Beast three weeks previously, lied to his son. “You have the brother and sister I told you about. Love you,” he wrote.
On Aug. 1, Walker sent his estranged son a photo of his half-brother, explaining, “This picture never went,” followed by the half-brother’s name.
That message is followed by four unanswered texts from Walker, all of them saying, “Love you.” Three of them were sent after midnight.
Walker sent that same “Love you” message to his son frequently, no matter how many times it went unanswered. Sometimes the child would write short notes back—inviting Walker to a baseball game, wishing him a Happy Easter, sending a photo of himself with gifts. The pace accelerated in 2021, when Walker was gearing up to announce his candidacy.
Between June 4 and June 12 of that year, the texts show, Walker sent seven “Love you” messages, and nothing else. The boy replied, “You to,” on June 13, after which Walker asked how he was doing. The boy invited his father to watch him play baseball, and Walker said he would like to see him play, but according to the woman, the last time Walker saw his son was January 2016.
Then, between July 1 and Oct. 11, the texts show, Walker sent his son 34 unanswered brief text messages. All but six say “Love you,” with the vast majority of them coming between midnight and 3:41 in the morning.
On the evening of Oct. 13, his son replied, “What’s my favorite color?What grade am I in?And how old am I”
Walker responded the next afternoon: “God bless you, love you”
Walker didn’t send another text message for more than a month, at which time he wrote: “Your dad loves you so much” on Nov. 21.
According to the woman and her lawyer, she dated Walker between November 2008 and September 2011. She ended the relationship after Walker urged her to terminate her second pregnancy, as The New York Times reported on Friday.
The woman noted that Walker has never missed any of his $3,500 monthly payments, an amount that has remained steady since their 2014 court order even though Walker’s financial disclosure filed in August shows a net worth between $29 million and $62 million.
“A lot of people would probably be surprised at the low amount that it is, but it was enough for me to take care of my son, and I was planning on working,” said the woman, who was a graduate student at Columbia University at the time. “Obviously, in New York that doesn’t go very far. But I wanted it to be fair and legal, so that neither of us would be upset about it.”
She said she had only received “sporadic” $1,000 payments from Walker before she sued for child support in 2013. The woman hadn’t planned to go to the courts, but wanted to work it out quietly with lawyers, which text messages corroborate.
At one point in texts from the time, Walker misunderstands this goal, writing, “this will be public when we have lawyers.” The woman assures him it won’t, saying she told her attorneys “both of us would like this as quiet as possible.”
She explained to The Daily Beast that she wanted privacy for both of them.
“Obviously he’s Herschel Walker,” she explained.
In another text exchange from the time, Walker told the woman to “calm down” while she was trying to arrange a meeting between their lawyers.
She replied, “I told you before I don’t want to argue with you-let the lawyers do that. I’m not upset, H-just would like this taken care of in a timely manner, and thus far, it hasn’t.” (“H” was a nickname for Walker, which the woman frequently used in texts with him. It’s also the letter that he signed on the “get well” card he sent her after the abortion, along with a $700 signed personal check.)
The messages stretch back to the day she gave birth to their son, when she sent Walker photos of the newborn.
“WOW how are you guys doing. I wish I was there, I am in Villahermosa Mexico,” Walker replied. “You ok ,your texts just came thur .When was he born.”
She tells him, and Walker responds, “I am so sorry I was not there.”
“We waited and waited and waited,” the woman said of the early out-of-court stages of the child support dispute. “Eventually, I needed money to live and take care of my son, but there was no resolution. I gave him ample time to work it out privately, but he didn’t want to do that, so I ended up having to go to court.”
At the time, Walker, an outspoken Christian, had been balancing relationships with a number of other women. They include one who gave birth to another son in 2009, a woman who died in 2019, and Blanchard. The Daily Beast has spoken with another woman who confirmed she was also concurrently in a years-long relationship with Walker.
In 2010, Walker told talk radio host Howard Stern that he had only slept with two women.
The first time Walker met their son, she said, was the morning before Walker’s first in-person family court appearance. It was 2013, and the boy was a little over one year old.
Walker, she said, didn’t want to meet his son for the first time in a courtroom, so on the morning of the hearing, she brought the toddler to his hotel. She provided a photo of the moment.
But Walker didn’t show up for the hearing later that day, she recalled. A lawyer for the woman corroborated the claim.
The second time Walker met their son, a year later, he was in the courthouse for the final settlement hearing. The woman provided a photo of the encounter, which her lawyer also recalled.
For the third and final meeting, in January 2016, Walker brought along Blanchard.
At the time, Walker was on a pre-planned trip to the area where the anonymous woman, unable to afford child care at the time, was living at home with one of her parents.
“I moved back home to take care of my son,” she explained. She said she tried to work for several months after graduate school, but said she would have to take her son with her on business trips, and find a babysitter in whatever city she was in.
“And that was costing me more than I was making. So I ended up having to, you know, move back home,” said the woman, who has relocated with her son and built a successful professional career.
“And it was great that I got to stay home with him for a couple of years, but it also felt like a setback, moving in back home when I was thirty-something with a kid,” she recalled. She was able to “get back on her feet” and work once she got child support.
She received her first child support payment in August 2014, she said—the month the case was resolved in court, according to records shared with The Daily Beast.
“He never had to tell me how much money he made,” the woman said, explaining the size of what she acknowledges as her “fairly low” $3,500 monthly payment.
That amount was about $2,000 above the mandatory minimum, but it had not been adjudicated by the court; it was Walker’s offer. The woman said she had “essentially no income,” but her attorney warned that if she asked the court for more, “you could be seen as, you know, a woman trying to get more money from this famous celebrity athlete millionaire and actually end up with a lot less.”
In Jan. 2017, when the woman was still living with one of her parents, Walker asked if she wanted to buy a flight for herself and her son to meet him in Florida. When she told him she had booked the dates in a text message, Walker backed out.
“Tomorrow will be a bad time just got to base and the change times because of today,” Walker wrote in the text, claiming he was at a military base—a claim that three women said believed Walker sometimes used as an excuse to meet another woman.
Since that last January 2016 visit, the woman has repeatedly invited Walker back, she said, but he never took her up on the offer. Over the last year, her son, who is now 10, “put two and two together,” she said, and rejected the one form of regular communication Walker maintains: Christmas and birthday gifts.
“This year he asked his father to come visit, instead of sending boxes,” the woman told The Daily Beast. “But when Herschel didn’t come, and sent a box of gifts, [my son] put two and two together, and said he didn’t want them anymore.”
The woman said when they returned the box, it was soon mailed back to them. Her son didn’t accept the presents, she said.
In the new series of text messages on Friday, Blanchard appeared chiefly concerned about The Daily Beast’s previous reporting in June, labeling the child that the woman had with Walker a “secret son.”
“He has always talked about his children proudly,” Blanchard wrote, though there is no public record of Walker discussing three of his children, and he had denied the existence of two of them to his own campaign staff, The Daily Beast reported in July.
In fact, the woman told The Daily Beast, Walker had never even told the anonymous mother that he had a third son. She only found out that her son had a half-brother when she read The Daily Beast’s reporting, which Walker had already personally confirmed.
That half-brother was born in early 2009—the same year Walker paid for the abortion.
Asked about her feelings about Walker today, the woman said she didn’t have any hard feelings, because she didn’t have any feelings at all.
“I feel for my son. That’s it. Me, personally? He’s chosen not to be a father. That’s his prerogative. I wish him well,” she said.
“I wish he would’ve stayed the wonderful football legend people thought he was, so he wasn’t an embarrassment to his son,” she added. “Now I guess they know the real him.”
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