Former football great and U.S. senatorial candidate Herschel Walker, who has criticized absentee fathers, has a secret son with whom he allegedly has no close relationship. 

Walker campaign manager Scott Paradise confirmed in a statement on Wednesday that the 60-year-old Georgia Republican, who hopes to unseat Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, financially supports the child, CNBC is reporting. 

Herschel Walker, the Republican party’s candidate for the U.S. Senate, speaks during a rally for Georgia GOP candidates at Banks County Dragway in Commerce, Ga., Saturday, March 26, 2022. (Hyosub Shin/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP, File)

This revelation is particularly galling to Walker’s critics because he has taken pains to talk about the importance of fathers in the lives of children and has been especially critical of Black men who abandon their children.

The news about Walker’s 10-year-old son was first reported by The Daily Beast, which withheld the name of the child and his mother for privacy reasons. Walker shares 22-year-old son, Christian, with his ex-wife Cindy DeAngelis Grossman. 

He previously told pro-Trump media 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.”

Paradise confirmed that Walker is not actively involved in raising his son. The mother of the boy took Walker to court for child support a year after giving birth and to secure a declaration of paternity, according to the Daily Beast report.

“Herschel had a child years ago when he wasn’t married,” Paradise said in a statement. “He’s supported the child and continues to do so. He’s proud of his children. To suggest that Herschel is ‘hiding’ the child because he hasn’t used him in his political campaign is offensive and absurd.” 

Meanwhile, Walker has publicly condemned absentee fathers while touting his close relationship with Christian. “If you got a child, hug your child every day,” Walker said in a 2017 speech, per the Daily Beast report. 

In a September 2020 interview cited in the Daily Beast report, Walker made pointed comments about black absentee fathers: “And I want to apologize to the African-American community, because the fatherless home is a major, major problem,” noting that he’d been “like a father to some of those kids that had never had fathers.”

Still, Walker hasn’t publicly acknowledged his second son. Per the Daily Beast report, the child has grown up more than 1,500 miles from the former athlete’s Texas home. 

According to The New York Times, Bakari Sellers, a former Democratic state lawmaker from South Carolina, called out Walker’s hypocrisy on Twitter, saying he was “out here lecturing black men on fatherhood and ain’t seen his kid since Obama’s first term.” 

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