Meanwhile, Herman Cain’s problems just keep getting worse.

Herman Cain flatly denies the most serious allegation facing him – that he made an unwanted sexual advance toward a female employee at a work event – but POLITICO has learned new details making clear there were urgent discussions of the woman’s accusations at top levels of the National Restaurant Association within hours of when the incident was alleged to have occurred.

The new details—which come from multiple sources independently familiar with the incident at a hotel during a restaurant association event in the late 1990s—put the woman’s account even more sharply at odds with Cain’s emphatic insistence in news media interviews this week that nothing inappropriate happened between the two.

In recent days sources—including associates of the woman and people familiar with operations of the restaurant association—have offered new details of the incident.

The woman in question, roughly 30 years old at the time and working in the National Restaurant Association’s government affairs division, told two people directly at the time that Cain made a sexual overture to her at one of the group’s events, according to the sources familiar with the incident. She was livid and lodged a verbal complaint with an NRA board member that same night, these sources said.