Attacker or Attacked?

She is the one that did this to me; she attacked me. I did nothing; you have no proof. The he said she battle is going on, and Cain is taking full advantage of the press coverage.

According to poltico.com, during Herman Cain’s tenure as the head of the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s, at least two female employees complained to colleagues and senior association officials about inappropriate behavior by Cain, ultimately leaving their jobs at the trade group, multiple sources confirm to POLITICO. The women complained of sexually suggestive behavior by Cain that made them angry and uncomfortable, the sources said, and they signed agreements with the restaurant group that gave them financial payouts to leave the association. The agreements also included language that bars the women from talking about their departures.

According to the Daily Beast, Herman Cain is pushing back hard against the Politico report that alleges that at least two women accused him of misconduct when he ran the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s.

"It is totally baseless and totally false," the presidential candidate told Fox News on Monday morning. "Never have I ever committed any kind of sexual harassment."
 

He added: "If the restaurant association did a settlement, I wasn’t even aware of it and I hope it wasn’t for much. If there was a settlement, it was handled by some of the other officers at the restaurant association." 

Without knowing a name it leaves the implications unknown but it has been said by sources tha the women  involved were paid off with five figure settlements.

Politico says that “the women complained of sexually suggestive behavior by Cain that made them angry and uncomfortable” and that they later signed agreements barring them from talking about their departures. There were “conversations allegedly filled with innuendo or personal questions of a sexually suggestive nature,” the report says, as well as “descriptions of physical gestures that were not overtly sexual but that made women who experienced or witnessed them uncomfortable.” An unnamed source cited by Politico says one of the women cited “an unwanted sexual advance” by Cain at a hotel where an event was being held.

On Sunday outside CBS’s Washington bureau, where he had just appeared on Face the Nation, Cain told Politico he has “had thousands of people working for me” over the years and could not comment “until I see some facts or some concrete evidence.” He also declined to comment when given the name of one of the women said to be involved.

The weight  of the allegations will become clear for Cain, the former pizza executive who has managed  to top most GOP presidential polls, when we see how loudly they ricochet through the media echo chamber. He has already had several weeks of bad publicity over mistakes and missteps on his position on abortion and an electrified border fence, which have done little to slow his rise.

The arc of the story will also depend on whether anyone comes forward to corroborate the allegations on the record, and whether the women choose to surface publicly.

Will he be the Bill Clinton and make it through, or will be the Anthony Weiner and be forced to resign, only time will tell.