Herman Cain faces the music over new sex allegations

REPUBLICAN presidential hopeful Herman Cain is set to respond to allegations of sexual harassment today after a fourth woman came forward to accuse him. Sharon Bialek claims Cain groped her and tried to force himself on her in a car in Washington 14 years ago.
 
Three other women have made allegations about Cain, but Bialek is the first to appear before the media. At a press conference on Monday, where she was accompanied by the high-profile lawyer Gloria Allred, she told reporters: "I want you to come clean, Mr Cain."
 
She said she approached Cain for help in finding work after losing her job in 1997, when Cain was head of the National Restaurant Association.
 
After taking her out to dinner Cain stopped the car. Bialek said: "Instead of going into the offices he suddenly reached over and he put his hand on my leg, under my skirt toward my genitals... He also pushed my head toward his crotch."
 
When she asked him to stop, she says he told her: "You want a job, right?"
 
Still more claims appeared in the Washington Examiner, which reported today that Cain asked a female employee of the US Agency for International Development to try and arrange a date with an audience member after he gave a speech at an event in Cairo in 2002.
 
As Cain prepared for this afternoon’s press conference in Phoenix, Arizona, news commentators were divided on his chances of surviving the scandal.

"Cain has two big problems," Ed Pilkington wrote in The Guardian of Bialek's claims. First, millions of TV viewers watched a woman claiming sexual harassment, which is bound to inspire empathy. Second, the detailed and graphic description of Cain’s alleged behaviour was "at best humiliating, at worst totally damaging".
 
Michelle Goldberg in The Daily Beast says Bialek's story is "wearingly familiar" adding: "Most women I know have experienced something similar... I don't know whether Bialek's story is true, I do know that it rings true."

The historian Tim Stanley, blogging for The Daily Telegraph, believes many Cain supporters will turn a blind eye. "Conservatives are so suspicious of the media that they will tend to trust the word of a fellow ideologue [Cain] over that of the liberal hordes that rail against him.”
 
But what about other Republicans? Politico correspondents Jonathan Martin and Juana Summers argue: "Beyond the charges themselves, the widening scandal is now threatening Cain in another way: the story has begun to loom so heavily over the GOP race that it’s irritating Republicans who want to focus on defeating President Obama." ·