The woman, Meredith Watson, accused Fairfax of raping her while they were students at Duke University in 2000, saying in a statement that his actions were “premeditated and aggressive” and demanding that he resign immediately. Watson spoke out two days after Vanessa Tyson, a political-science professor at Scripps College, said she was assaulted by Fairfax in 2004 during the Democratic National Convention in Boston.
Late Friday, Patrick Hope, a Democrat in the Virginia House, said he would introduce articles of impeachment against Fairfax on Monday if the lieutenant governor had not resigned by then.
Fairfax, in a statement issued Friday evening, denied all the allegations and called the latest one “demonstrably false.” He vowed he would not resign.
“I demand a full investigation into these unsubstantiated and false allegations,” Fairfax said. “Such an investigation will confirm my account because I am telling the truth.”
“I will clear my good name,” he added.
After days of intense pressure on the state’s Democratic governor and attorney general over past incidents when they wore blackface, the spotlight has swung quickly to Fairfax, who only days ago had been preparing for the possibility of replacing Gov. Ralph Northam and becoming the state’s second African-American governor if Northam bowed to calls to resign.
Now Fairfax is facing those demands himself: After Watson’s allegation became public Friday, three Democrats — former Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia and Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, both 2020 presidential candidates — said Fairfax should step down.
“The allegations against Justin Fairfax are serious and credible,” McAuliffe said. “It is clear to me that he can no longer effectively serve the people of Virginia as lieutenant governor.”
For Virginia Democrats and national party leaders, the political turmoil in the state is complicated by issues of race and the state’s racist history as the onetime heart of the Confederacy. Northam and Attorney General Mark Herring are both white men who have admitted wearing blackface in the past. Many Democrats have been calling for Northam to resign, but some have been offering words of support for Herring.
If Northam resigns, Fairfax is next in line to become governor. If Northam and Fairfax were to resign, Herring would become governor.
On Thursday night, the state’s two Democratic senators, several members of Congress from Virginia and some 2020 Democratic presidential candidates called for an investigation into Tyson’s allegation against Fairfax. The New York Times published accounts from five people Friday who said that Tyson had told them over the last two years that she had been sexually assaulted by Fairfax.
Rep. Jennifer Wexton, a Northern Virginia Democrat who was elected to Congress last year, offered Fairfax no support Friday.
“I believe Dr. Vanessa Tyson,” she wrote on Twitter. “I believe Meredith Watson. And I believe Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax must resign.”
Nancy Erika Smith, a lawyer for Watson, said in the statement outlining her client’s allegations that Watson was coming forward out of a sense of civic duty after learning about allegations by Tyson.
“The details of Ms. Watson’s attack are similar to those described by Dr. Vanessa Tyson,” said the statement from Smith.
In an interview, Smith recounted her client’s claim that Fairfax assaulted her during spring break in 2000 in a room at the house of Alpha Phi Alpha, an African-American fraternity at Duke.
“It was her sophomore year at Duke and his senior year, and they were hanging out,” Smith said. “They had never dated. She had dated one of his friends. They did not have a romantic relationship. He gets up and walks out. Comes back in. Shuts off the light and locks the door. She knew things were going south when he locked the door.”
Smith would not describe details of the alleged sexual assault. Smith said her client did not seek medical attention or go to police or the university administration, saying Watson perceived Fairfax as a politically influential figure on campus.
A college friend of Watson’s, Kaneedreck Adams, said in an interview that Watson had told her of the rape the day after it happened, in the spring of 2000, and named Fairfax as her assailant.
Kaneedreck said she went to visit Adams at her apartment and “she was upset, she was kind of crying quietly and she said that she had been raped.” She named Fairfax, who Kaneedreck also knew; the three were part of a relatively small and close-knit community of black students at Duke, Adams said.
Adams recounted questioning Watson about what happened.
“I said, ‘Did you say no?’ and she said, no she couldn’t say no,” Adams said. “And she said she was trying to get out of there, get away, remove herself from the situation and she said Justin kept pushing her down.”
Adams declined to provide further details, but said the alleged assault did not take place not during a party.
Karen Kessler, a spokeswoman for Watson, said in an interview that she is not planning on litigation or seeking financial compensation.
She said Watson, who graduated from Duke a year after Fairfax and has worked as a fundraising consultant for nonprofit companies, would not be conducting any interviews discussing her allegations.
Before Watson came forward, Fairfax had been grappling with Tyson’s allegation and repeatedly insisting that he had been falsely accused and that no corroboration existed. But in recent days, friends and colleagues of Tyson’s have come forward to support her.
Two professors currently joining Tyson in a prestigious fellowship at Stanford told The Times that she recounted the episode with Fairfax to them last fall, saying he had sexually assaulted her.
“What she told us was pretty much exactly what was in the statement that she released but with vastly less detail,” said Elizabeth A. Armstrong.
Another fellow, Jennifer J. Freyd, a University of Oregon professor known for her work in sexual violence, also remembers the conversation, relaying how Tyson described how the incident was “clearly a traumatic experience.”
In interviews with The Times this week, five people said Tyson told them over the past two years that she had been sexually assaulted in an encounter at the convention, and that her account was consistent with her public statement this week. The people said she provided varying levels of detail to them, but three of them said she identified the assailant as Fairfax, a lieutenant governor, or a politician on the rise.
On Friday, after The Times published its article on Tyson’s supporters, a sixth woman came forward to say Tyson had also confided in her. Susan J. McWilliams, a professor of politics at Pomona College in California, said that in a conversation around the time of Fairfax’s election as lieutenant governor in 2017, Tyson told her he assaulted her during the 2004 convention.
“I did not know who Justin Fairfax was,'’ McWilliams said. “And I immediately went home and Googled him.”
Tyson did not tell anyone in 2004 about the encounter with Fairfax, according to people close to her legal team, and she did not notify or file a complaint with police.
But throughout academia, there has been an outpouring of encouragement for Tyson, 42, who has taught at Scripps College in California and Dickinson College in Pennsylvania over the last decade, and earned a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago.
More than 740 academics have signed a letter of support for her, according to its organizer, Nadia E. Brown, a political scientist at Purdue University who said Tyson also told her of the assault. A GoFundMe account, set up by a political scientist at Menlo College in California, had raised more than $20,000 as of Friday morning. A hashtag has sprung up on Twitter: #IBelieveVanessa.
“Everything she said in her statement was exactly what she told me when we talked,” said Diane L. Rosenfeld, a founding director of the Gender Violence Program at Harvard Law School, who said Tyson told her of the assault in December 2017.
“She’s not doing this for any fame,” Rosenfeld added. “She’s not suing him for money, so disbelievers and doubters can’t say, ‘Oh, she just wants money.’ She just wants, as she says, the Virginia voters to know who this person is.”
Tyson’s account was also partly corroborated late Wednesday by Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., whose aides said Tyson told the congressman a year ago that she had made an allegation of sexual assault against Fairfax, without offering details.
Tyson has declined to give an interview to The Times. She has said she was spurred to come forward by the realization that Fairfax might soon become Virginia governor. That possibility arose after the disclosure last week of a racist photograph on Northam’s medical school yearbook page, and his subsequent admission that he had once blackened his face as part of a Michael Jackson costume, leading to widespread calls for him to resign.
In her statement, Tyson described a forced sexual encounter with Fairfax in a Boston hotel room while the two were working at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. It began with kissing that was “not unwelcome,” she said, but quickly escalated into nonconsensual oral sex.
She asked for privacy, insisting that she wanted to resume her life as an academic and professor. “I do not want to get embroiled in this highly charged political environment,” she wrote in the statement.
At the time of the alleged assault, Tyson was already volunteering at a Boston rape crisis center. She had helped start the center’s Survivor Speakers Bureau, where she shared her story about being sexually abused as a child. She also started a self-esteem program for female juvenile offenders in Massachusetts, according to a biography posted on her personal webpage.
Her work at the rape crisis center made her attack feel “especially degrading,” she said in her statement. She said she did not speak of it for years because she felt “deep humiliation and shame.”
In separate interviews Thursday and Friday, five friends of Tyson said she told them of the encounter either in late 2017, early 2018 or last fall. One, a mutual friend of Tyson and Fairfax, who asked not to be named to protect his own privacy, said he dated Tyson in the late 1990s and believed her account. Given her experience with abuse as a child, he said, she was not the type of person to become intimate in the way she described with someone she had just met.
The distinguished Stanford fellowship she began last fall is merely the latest rung up the academic ladder for Tyson, who had a working class upbringing in the Los Angeles area, the biracial daughter of a single white mother. Her mother often took her to Los Angeles Dodgers games when she was growing up, buying cheap tickets for seats in the bleachers, and today Tyson remains an avid fan.
Tyson graduated from Princeton in 1998 and would later tell the Princeton Alumni Weekly that she identified as African-American partly because that was the way the world saw her. “I am biracial, but I could not pass for white,” she said.
She would go on to obtain a masters and doctorate, both in political science, at the University of Chicago.
Now a professor of politics at Scripps College in Claremont, California, Tyson is also the author of a book, “Multiracial Coalitions and Minority Representation in the US House of Representatives,” published in 2016.
In a statement issued Thursday, the college confirmed that Tyson “shared with several members of the Scripps community the details about a 2004 sexual assault,” and said those conversations “are consistent” with her written account.
Friends describe Tyson as gregarious, and a mentor to younger scholars, particularly people of color. “Academics are socially awkward people,” Brown said. “We tend to be a lot more introspective and quiet and reserved, and she pulls people out of their shells.”
Freyd, the Oregon professor who is also doing a fellowship at Stanford, said she and Tyson have become close despite having known each other only a few months. On Thursday, Freyd joined 35 other fellows at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences to support her.
“We are incredibly proud to call Vanessa Tyson a colleague,” their statement said. “We know her to be a thoughtful scholar of integrity and compassion and stand with her in this difficult time.”
Next Tuesday, Tyson and Freyd are planning a symposium at Stanford — arranged well before Tyson disclosed her allegations. It is titled “Betrayal and Courage in the Age of #MeToo.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.