By Nia-Malika Henderson
In her first televised interview ever, Gloria Cain, wife of Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain, sat down with Fox News and said that the allegations of sexual harassment against him don’t square with the man she knows.
“To hear such graphic allegations and know that that would have been something that was totally disrespectful of her as a woman and I know that’s not the person he is,” she said, according to partial transcripts of an interview with Greta Van Susteren that will air on Fox News Monday night. “He totally respects women.”
Cain, who has been married for 43 years to the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, has been silent for much of her husband’s race for the White House. Her last public appearance came in May when her husband announced his candidacy.
“I looked at especially this last lady and the things that she said I’m thinking he would have to have a split personality to do the things that she said,” Cain said of the allegations against her husband.
Over the last two weeks, as the Republican frontrunner has battled allegations that he sexually harassed four women, Herman Cain has often mentioned his wife, saying that she is “200 percent” supportive of him and “200 percent” still his wife.
The couple have two children, a son, Vincent and a daughter, Melanie — Van Susteren also interviewed them, and they said that their father has a lot to say, and that they are “immune to it,” at this point.
Like their mother, they have also stayed out of the limelight.
In acknowledging that one woman reached a settlement agreement with the National Restaurant Association, where he served as president in the 1990s, Cain said he mentioned to one of his accusers that she was about the same height as his wife, a comment that made it into the sexual harassment complaint, Cain said.
Cain’s wife, who is said by friends to be a quiet woman, and who is a registered Democrat according to her husband, has steered clear of the spotlight and has not assumed the traditional role of candidate’s wife. Cain has said that his wife has been outraged by the claims against her husband. When Gloria Cain watched accuser Sharon Bialek’s news conference last Monday, she told her husband that the man that Bialek described sounded nothing like the man she’s known for 45 years.
“The things that that woman described, she said, that doesn’t even sound like you, and I’ve known you for 45 years,” Cain recalled his wife saying to him after she watched the press conference from Atlanta. “My own wife said that I wouldn’t do anything as silly as what that lady was talking about.”
Cain said that she sometimes thinks about life in the White House.
“Sometimes I let myself go there, but then I try to pull myself back in that I don’t want to start projecting too far in the future, because then I would worry more,” she said. “So I try to take one day at a time and in that way, if, or when that happens, then I have faith that the Lord will have me ready to do what I need to do, to help him.”
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