Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain faces new allegations of improper sexual advances toward a colleague.
Sharon Bialek, from Chicago, became the first of four alleged victims to detail her encounters with the former head of the National Restaurant Association when she laid out the blow-by-blow of their relationship during a Monday press conference.
Bialek said their relationship began in Chicago in 1996 when Cain was the keynote speaker at a NRA event.
Cain met Bialek and her boyfriend at Marche restaurant in Chicago, she said. They sat at the same table, and Cain invited the couple to an after party at his hotel suite.
A month later she was fired from the NRA for not meeting fundraiser quotas, and her boyfriend suggested she reach out to Cain and ask for his help. She called Cain's office and arranged a meeting in Washington D.C.
While there, Cain upgraded her hotel, she said, to a "palatial suite."
She and Cain drove together to visit the NRA offices, but instead of going inside, Cain parked the car a block away. Bialek said Cain suddenly reached under her skirt and toward her genitals. He also tried forcing her head to his crotch, she said.
"I was very surprised and very shocked," she said Monday. Bialek said she told Cain she had a boyfriend and this wasn't what she came to Washington D.C. for. She asked him to stop and he did, Bialek told reporters.
Bialek recently re-encountered Cain at a suburban Chicago Tea Party event, to which she was invited.
She confronted Cain, asking him whether he remembered her. Cain said that he did and looked uncomfortable before he was "whisked away by his handlers."
Bialek said she didn't file a complaint at the time because she wasn't employed by the foundation, but the other three women empowered her to speak up.
"I want you, Mr. Cain, to come clean, admit what you did," Bialek said during the conference.
"I implore you, make this right," she said.
Bialek lives in Mundelein with her fiance, Mark Harwood, who also spoke with the media and defended her on Monday.
She's a 1983 graduate of the University of Illinois and has worked at Revlon, co-hosted a cooking show, Easter Seals and in radio sales for WGN and CBS.
