Latest Cain accuser goes public

NEW YORK – Leaving little to the imagination, a Chicago-area woman on Monday accused Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain of making a crude sexual advance more than a decade ago when she was seeking his help finding a job.

“Come clean,” Sharon Bialek challenged Cain at a news conference in New York at which she described herself as “a face and a voice” to support other accusers who have so far remained anonymous.

Cain pointedly denied her charges late Monday and said he would fight the claims head-on at a news conference this afternoon in Phoenix.

“There is not an ounce of truth to all these allegations,” he said on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” I’m going to set the record straight.

He said he got angry and disgusted as he watched the account he said was “totally fabricated.” Bialek’s nationally broadcast appearance on cable television marked a new and – for Cain – dangerous turn in a controversy that he has struggled for more than a week to shed. An upstart in the presidential race, Cain shot to the top of public opinion polls in recent weeks and emerged, however temporarily, as the main conservative challenger to Mitt Romney.

Accompanied by her prominent lawyer, Gloria Allred, Bialek accused Cain of making a sexual advance one night in mid-July 1997, when she had traveled to Washington to have dinner with him in hopes he could help her find work.

She said the two had finished dinner and were in a car for what she thought was a ride to an office building.

“Instead of going into the offices he suddenly reached over and he put his hand on my leg, under my skirt toward my genitals,” she said.

“He also pushed my head toward his crotch,” she added.

Bialek said she told her boyfriend, an unidentified pediatrician, as well as a longtime male friend about the episode.

None of Cain’s other accusers has provided details as graphic as Bialek’s account. But Joel Bennett, an attorney who represents one of them, said her details were “similar in nature” to what his client encountered.

Allred, a prominent sex discrimination attorney with Democratic ties, moved preemptively to blunt any attacks on Bialek’s motives. She described her client as a registered Republican, a single mother and a woman with a long and successful career.

Court records indicate Bialek had financial difficulties a decade ago when she filed for bankruptcy protection and reported $4,500 in unpaid rent and $13,000 in outstanding credit card bills.

Current property records show she owns a house on an acre of land in a Chicago suburb.

Some of Cain’s allies immediately made a target of Allredrather than focusing any anger on Cain’s accuser.

Georgia state Sen. Joshua McKoon accused Allred of “carnival theatrics” fueled by a partisan agenda.

But Doug Heye, a political consultant who is unaligned in the GOP race, said Bialek’s allegations “are different because they involve a name and specific details.”