Defiant Cain says he won’t drop out of GOP race

Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Her­man Cain addresses the media Tues­day, in Scotts­dale, Ariz. Cain said Tues­day that he would not drop his bid for the Repub­li­cans pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion in the face of decade old alle­ga­tions of inap­pro­pri­ate sex­ual behavior.

AMANDA LEE MYERS

Asso­ci­ated Press

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — Under ris­ing pres­sure from fel­low Repub­li­cans, pres­i­den­tial hope­ful Her­man Cain sought to muddy the rep­u­ta­tion of one accuser, force­fully denied any and all alle­ga­tions of sex­ual impro­pri­ety and vowed Tues­day the grow­ing con­tro­versy would not drive him from the race for the White House.

“Ain’t gonna hap­pen,” he declared.

Cain flashed defi­ance one day after a woman pub­licly accused the can­di­date of grop­ing her more than a decade ago, adding her voice to three other accusers with alle­ga­tions that pres­i­den­tial rival Mitt Rom­ney called “par­tic­u­larly disturbing.”

Speak­ing at a news con­fer­ence, Cain vowed, “we’ll get through this,” as he sought to steady a cam­paign that has made him the leader in an unof­fi­cial race to emerge as Romney’s prin­ci­pal con­ser­v­a­tive rival.

At one point he said he would be will­ing to take a lie detec­tor test, but then appeared to hedge his answer sec­onds later.

The Geor­gia busi­ness­man was in the midst of his sec­ond week try­ing to cur­tail the furor sur­round­ing his unortho­dox cam­paign. There were signs his polit­i­cal trou­ble was far from over less than two months before the lead­off con­tests of the GOP nom­i­na­tion fight.

Rom­ney joined other GOP oppo­nents in urg­ing Cain to answer the alle­ga­tions. Promi­nent Repub­li­cans pressed for a full account­ing. And there were grow­ing indi­ca­tions of unease in con­ser­v­a­tive circles.

“If there is a pat­tern then it’s a part of his char­ac­ter and then, yes, it is going to mat­ter,” Tony Perkins, head of the con­ser­v­a­tive Fam­ily Research Cen­ter, said in an interview.

Another name con­fronted Cain, as well, when one of his two orig­i­nal accusers gave an inter­view to The New York Times and was iden­ti­fied pub­licly by news orga­ni­za­tions includ­ing The Asso­ci­ated Press as Karen Kraushaar, now a spokes­woman in the Trea­sury Department’s office of inspec­tor gen­eral for tax administration.

When asked about Kraushaar, Cain said he recalled her accu­sa­tion of sex­ual harass­ment but insisted “it was found to be baseless.”

An upstart in the pres­i­den­tial race, Cain shot to the top of opin­ion polls and emerged in recent weeks as Romney’s main oppo­nent, with tea party activists and other con­ser­v­a­tives flock­ing to the for­mer pizza com­pany executive’s tell-it-like-it-is style and out­sider image.

But, since Oct. 30, he’s been dogged by accu­sa­tions from women that he acted inap­pro­pri­ately toward them while he headed the National Restau­rant Asso­ci­a­tion in the 1990s. And in recent days, the women have started to step for­ward publicly.

At least two women who worked at the restau­rant asso­ci­a­tion the same time as Cain filed sex­ual harass­ment com­plaints with the trade group and received finan­cial settlements.

One of them was Kraushaar.

After her name was revealed by sev­eral news sites on Tues­day, The AP chose to pub­lish it after inde­pen­dently con­firm­ing she was one of his accusers.

Kraushaar and her attor­ney pre­vi­ously had attempted to keep her name out of the pub­lic dis­cus­sion, but they issued an anony­mous state­ment last week that con­firmed she had com­plained of sex­ual harass­ment and received a finan­cial pay­out from the trade group. Kraushaar later con­firmed to news orga­ni­za­tions that she had filed the com­plaint. And she spoke pub­licly on Tues­day to the Times, say­ing she had decided to speak out since her name was public.

“When you are being sex­u­ally harassed in the work­place, you are extremely vul­ner­a­ble,” she said. “You do what­ever you can to quickly get your­self into a job some place safe, and that is what I thought I had achieved when I left.”

Kraushaar, 55, pre­vi­ously worked as a news reporter, and she has held other U.S. gov­ern­ment jobs since she left the restau­rant asso­ci­a­tion after she set­tled her com­plaint against Cain. She also has writ­ten a children’s book with her mother-in-law, “Gas Sta­tion Charley,” about a dog. Her hus­band, Kevin, has worked as a lob­by­ist on envi­ron­men­tal, munic­i­pal and health issues. He has donated money to both Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans. They live in sub­ur­ban Maryland.

A third woman told The AP last week that she con­sid­ered fil­ing a work­place com­plaint against Cain over what she deemed sex­u­ally sug­ges­tive remarks and ges­tures that included an invi­ta­tion to his cor­po­rate apart­ment. And a for­mer poll­ster for the restau­rant asso­ci­a­tion has said he wit­nessed yet another episode involv­ing a dif­fer­ent woman.

The AP has not iden­ti­fied the other woman who filed a claim against Cain while work­ing at the restau­rant asso­ci­a­tion. It also has not iden­ti­fied the third woman, who did not file a claim, because it promised con­fi­den­tial­ity to her because she said she feared retal­i­a­tion if her name became public.

Sharon Bialek came for­ward Mon­day to say that Cain, an acquain­tance, groped her in car in July 1997 after they’d had din­ner in Wash­ing­ton. Cain led the asso­ci­a­tion at the time, and the unem­ployed Bialek was seek­ing job advice. She said she had been fired from her job rais­ing money for the trade group’s edu­ca­tion arm — told, she said, that she had not raised enough money.

Early Tues­day, Cain’s cam­paign sought to under­cut her credibility.

It issued a tough state­ment about Bialek includ­ing ref­er­ences to civil law­suits in the Cook County Court sys­tem in Illi­nois allegedly relat­ing to her and cited news reports of her involve­ment in a pater­nity case and a bank­ruptcy filing.

“In stark con­trast to Mr. Cain’s four decades spent climb­ing the cor­po­rate lad­der ris­ing to the level of CEO at mul­ti­ple suc­cess­ful busi­ness enter­prises, Ms. Bialek has taken a far dif­fer­ent path,” the cam­paign said.

It also ques­tioned whether Bialek had a finan­cial inter­est in step­ping forward.

“Who is financ­ing her legal team, have any media agreed to pay for her story, and has she been offered employ­ment for tak­ing these actions?”

In a round of media inter­views, Bialek was asked repeat­edly about her motives in speak­ing out after stay­ing quiet for 14 years.

“I’m just doing this because it’s the right thing to do,” she said. She said she was nei­ther paid nor offered a job to go pub­lic with her alle­ga­tions. She said she waited so long to come for­ward because “I was embar­rassed … and I just kind of wanted it to go away.”

She said she wasn’t pay­ing a fee to Glo­ria Allred, the attor­ney whose name has become syn­ony­mous with women’s rights issues.

Late in the day, Cain fought back, stand­ing before a crush of reporters at a hotel on the out­skirts of Phoenix. Out­side, pro­test­ers waved signs that read: “Hey Her­man. How many more women will you be call­ing liars?”

Cain said he called the news con­fer­ence because he wanted to speak directly to the pub­lic, accus­ing the media of dis­tort­ing his response to the alle­ga­tions. He said he had never seen Bialek until she called her news con­fer­ence on Mon­day in New York, along­side attor­ney Allred.

“I don’t even know who this woman is,” he said of Bialek. “I tried to remem­ber if I rec­og­nized her and I didn’t.”

Cain said it was “a remote pos­si­bil­ity” when asked if it were pos­si­ble he would recall Bialek’s alleged inci­dent in the future.

“I seri­ously doubt I’m going to have an ‘a-ha’ moment later,” he said.

Cain con­tended that “the Demo­c­ra­tic machine” was push­ing the alle­ga­tions but said he could not point to any­one in par­tic­u­lar. He also sug­gested his accusers were lying.

Ear­lier, Rom­ney, the for­mer Mass­a­chu­setts gov­er­nor who has been a GOP front-runner for months, told ABC News/Yahoo! the alle­ga­tions were seri­ous “and they’re going to have to be addressed seri­ously.” He called the lat­est accu­sa­tions dis­turb­ing, and Cain didn’t disagree.

“He’s right. They are dis­turb­ing to me,” Cain responded. “They are seri­ous. And I have taken them seriously.”

But they’re untrue, he declared.

Other Repub­li­cans sounded alarms about Cain’s trou­bles and the impact on the GOP race as the party gears up to try to defeat Pres­i­dent Barack Obama next fall.

“Get all the facts in front of peo­ple, oth­er­wise he’s going to have this con­tin­u­ing dis­trac­tion,” Mis­sis­sippi Gov. Haley Bar­bour, a for­mer Repub­li­can National Com­mit­tee chair­man with deep ties to the GOP estab­lish­ment, told MSNBC.

Though recent polling shows Cain still doing well, party oper­a­tives sug­gested it was only a mat­ter of time before his polit­i­cal stand­ing could suffer.

“Herman’s base is going to stick with him,” said Repub­li­can strate­gist Rick Tyler, Newt Gingrich’s for­mer spokesman. “But the aver­age Repub­li­can voter who is not as engaged as intensely in the race, is sick of this and, for Cain, the con­cern is they will pass on it and pass on him.”

Cain looked to keep those sup­port­ers in his corner.

“We are not going to allow Wash­ing­ton or pol­i­tics to deny me the oppor­tu­nity to rep­re­sent this great nation,” he said.

“As far as these accu­sa­tions caus­ing me to back off and maybe with­draw from this pres­i­den­tial pri­mary race? Ain’t gonna hap­pen. Because I’m doing this for the Amer­i­can peo­ple, and the chil­dren and the grandchildren.”

Posted by AP News on Nov 9 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.