A Texas woman told police in 2002 that Georgia US Senate candidate Herschel Walker had threatened and stalked her, according to a police report obtained by CNN.
The woman, a friend of Walker’s ex-wife, told police that the football star had been following her, and had previously made “threats to her” and had “her house watched.” The report did not specify the nature of the threats by Walker, who is now one of the highest-profile Senate candidates in the country and a close ally of former president Donald Trump, who endorsed him on Thursday.
Over the years, two other women – Walker’s ex-wife and an ex-girlfriend – have also accused him of making threats, telling authorities Walker claimed he would shoot them in the head. Their years-old accounts have resurfaced in recent weeks as Walker, who won national fame as a college football player at the University of Georgia, launched a campaign for the Peach State’s battleground Senate seat. The third woman’s account has not been previously reported.
The woman, who was in her late 20s at the time she contacted police, confirmed to CNN this week that Walker had threatened her, but asked not to be identified and declined to discuss the specifics of his threats. She stressed that she never dated or had a relationship with Walker.
Walker’s campaign declined to respond to the woman’s allegations or discuss the 2002 police report. In response to questions about the incident, Mallory Blount, a campaign spokesperson, cited Walker’s past struggles with mental health issues, which he’s spoken about publicly.
“It is sad that many in politics and the media who praised Herschel for his transparency over a decade ago are now making false statements, stereotyping, attacking, and attempting to sensationalize his past just because he is a Republican Senate candidate,” she said in a statement.
Reports detail claims against Walker
In the May 2002 report, which CNN obtained through a public records request, a police officer from the Dallas suburb of Irving wrote that he responded to a “prowler call” from a woman who said she believed someone was “sneaking around outside her house.” The woman said she “felt she knew who the person would be” but was “very reluctant to tell me,” the officer, Jason Mullins, wrote in the report.
Eventually, the woman told Mullins that the person she suspected was Walker. About a year before calling the police, the woman told Mullins, she had had “a confrontation” with Walker and “he began calling her, making threats to her and having her house watched.” It’s not clear from the document what those threats entailed.
She said that when she had recently seen Walker at a local resort, the former football star “jumped into” his vehicle and followed her “all the way to her house,” according to the report.
“She is very frighten (sic) of the individual and is afraid that he going (sic) to begin bothering her again,” Mullins wrote. “She advised that she does not want him contacted under any circumstances as she feels this will only make the problem worse.”
Mullins wrote that he talked to the guard at the entrance to the woman’s neighborhood, who said he hadn’t seen Walker enter the area.
Mullins, who is still working for the Irving police department, said that from what he could tell, the department didn’t further investigate the woman’s allegations.
“Since she stated that she didn’t want us to contact him, it’s unlikely that we would have, but I can’t tell you that for sure,” Mullins told CNN. He said the woman’s allegation appeared to have been taken as an “informational report” that would stay on file, instead of a “criminal offense report” that would be forwarded to police investigators.
The report came around the same time that Walker’s wife, Cindy Grossman, was divorcing him after nearly two decades of marriage.
Grossman has spoken publicly about Walker threatening to kill her during their marriage. In a 2008 interview with CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta, she said that Walker had held a razor to her throat, and at one point, “he held [a] gun to my temple and said he was going to blow my brains out.” Grossman did not respond to CNN’s request for comment this week.
The threats continued after the couple was separated. In December 2005, Grossman filed for a protective order against Walker. Grossman’s sister, Maria Tsettos, said in an affidavit submitted with the request that Walker had called her and threatened to kill Grossman and her then-boyfriend. He “stated unequivocally that he was going to shoot my sister Cindy and her boyfriend in the head,” Tsettos said.
One day that month, Grossman and her boyfriend were at a mall when Walker “slowly drove by in his vehicle, pointed his finger at (Grossman) and tracked (her) with his finger as he drove,” according to the petition. Walker had called Tsettos threatening Grossman again earlier that day.
The judge granted the petition for a protective order. The Associated Press first reported the case.
Walker’s book details mental health issues
Walker has spoken publicly about facing mental health issues during his marriage to Grossman, saying in interviews and writing in a book that he had been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, which was previously known as multiple personality disorder. He said in the 2008 CNN interview that he didn’t remember being violent toward his wife, but he didn’t deny it and noted that one of the symptoms of his disorder was blackouts.
In his book, Walker wrote that he sought help for his disorder after another violent episode in 2001, in which he drove around the Dallas area looking for a man who had failed to deliver a car he bought. Walker wrote that voices in his head told him to kill the man, and he imagined “the visceral enjoyment I’d get from seeing the small entry would and the spray of brain tissue and blood — like a Fourth of July firework — exploding behind him.” He fought off the urges and went to a doctor, he said, and later wrote his book to destigmatize mental illness.
Another woman romantically involved with Walker later made similar accusations to Grossman’s. Myka Dean, who told police she had an on-and-off relationship with Walker for 20 years, said he had threatened to kill her, according to a 2012 Irving police report.
A police officer wrote that Dean said Walker “told her that he was going to come and sit outside her apartment and ‘blow her head off when she came outside,’” the report said. “He then told [Dean] he was going to ‘blow his head off’ after he killed her.”
Dean expressed doubts about reporting the threat, the officer wrote, saying she didn’t “want him to get in trouble” and becoming “pretty reserved.”
The officer noted that the department had had “previous contact” with Walker, citing another police report from 2001. The Irving police department declined to publicly release that report this week, saying it was being withheld “pending an Attorney General request for opinion.”
The allegation by Dean, who died in 2019, was first reported last week by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
When asked about Dean’s statement to police, Walker’s spokesperson Blount said the candidate “emphatically denies these false claims,” calling them an example of “political mudslinging.”
Dean’s mother told the Journal-Constitution that she hadn’t known about the allegations and added that “we are very proud of the man Herschel Walker has become.”
CNN’s Drew Griffin, Nelli Black, Audrey Ash and Yahya Abou-Ghazala contributed to this report.
