A defiant Herman Cain says he will not drop his bid for the Republican presidential nomination in the face of allegations of inappropriate sexual behaviour.
"Ain't gonna' happen," Cain said on Tuesday at a news conference a day after a fourth woman accused him of unwanted sexual advances.
"We will get through this," he added, trying to steady a campaign rocked by the controversy the past 10 days.
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Cain denied anew that he had ever behaved inappropriately and said the alleged incidents "simply didn't happen".
He said he would be willing to take a lie detector test if he had a good reason.
Earlier, Cain sought to undercut the credibility of the latest woman whose accusations are threatening his Republican presidential campaign.
A second woman has now stepped out of the shadows to go public with her accusations of sexual harassment.
Karen Kraushaar said she was one of two women who had settled a claim against Cain for sexual harassment back in the 1990s, when she was employed by the National Restaurant Association.
She had issued a statement last week through her lawyer accusing Cain, then the president of the association, of "a series of inappropriate behaviours and unwanted advances".
"When you are being sexually harassed in the workplace, you are extremely vulnerable," Kraushaar, now a spokeswoman with the Treasury Department, told the New York Times on Tuesday.
"You do whatever you can to quickly get yourself into a job some place safe, and that is what I thought I had achieved when I left."
The interview with the Times was published just as Cain was giving a press conference in Arizona to deny any accusations of sexual harassment.
"I have never acted in appropriately with anyone, period," he said.
Kraushaar, who previously had wanted to remain anonymous, said she had decided to reveal her identity after another woman, Sharon Bialek, on Monday accused Cain of groping her in a car in 1997.
Kraushaar told the Times she was not sure whether she would give the details of Cain's alleged harassment against her, but said she was considering "the idea of a joint press conference where all of the women would be together with our attorneys and all of this evidence would be considered together".
At the press conference in Arizona, Cain said that he recalled Kraushaar's complaint but that her accusations were "found to be baseless".
"She could not find anyone to corroborate her story," Cain said.
Cain, a former pizza company executive once seen as the rank outsider in the race to be crowned the Republican Party's presidential nominee, has been fighting mounting accusations of sexual harassment now involving four women.
The scandal is threatening to derail his campaign even as he vies with Republican veteran Mitt Romney at the top of the polls for the party's nomination to take on Democratic President Barack Obama in the 2012 elections.
