RICHMOND, Va. — One afternoon in the early 1990s, a middle-schooler showed up at Frank Emory Jr.'s law office in Charlotte, sent there by an aunt who knew Emory from church. The child, in town visiting relatives, wanted to hear about the law. He had plans.
“He said, ‘I’m going to run for office,'” Emory recalled. “'I am going to be a leader. I believe that I have something to offer.'”
Ever since that meeting, Justin Fairfax has been carrying out his plan, steadily and doggedly, becoming lieutenant governor of Virginia by age 38. It had been a starry run — Duke University, presidental campaigns, Columbia Law School, a U.S. attorney’s office. Then, days ago, Fairfax was on the cusp of becoming Virginia’s next governor, the second black governor in Virginia history, as Gov. Ralph Northam reeled from a scandal over a racist yearbook picture.
But Fairfax’s ever-upward career trajectory suddenly took a sharp turn. Two women have come forward with detailed allegations that he sexually assaulted them, one in a fraternity house at Duke University in 2000 and the other in a hotel room at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
He allegedly committed the assaults during some of the most formative years of Fairfax’s ascent, when classmates were sure he was on his way to a powerful career in politics. One of the accusers did not tell the authorities at the time, her lawyer said, partly because Fairfax was a politically influential figure on the Duke campus.
Now, some who knew Fairfax are wondering how well they had really known him all along.
Democratic leaders and lawmakers have called for Fairfax to resign; Duke University has asked him to step down from a board position; the law firm where he works has placed him on leave; half his staff has resigned. Although Fairfax has denied the allegations and may survive in his current term in office, the likelihood of winning a future election “is dim in a Democratic primary and even dimmer in a general election,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.
Summing up his chances now in electoral politics, Sabato said: “Obliterated.”
In a statement Tuesday, Lauren Burke, Fairfax’s communications director, said, “Mr. Fairfax has asserted consistently that he has never sexually assaulted anyone ever. He has called for an independent and impartial investigation of the allegations against him and said that he looks forward to cooperating fully and completely with any such investigation.”
Fairfax seemed innately meant for politics. He was president of his class at DeMatha Catholic High School in Maryland. He then went on to become president of his fraternity chapter at Duke, as well as president of the National Pan-Hellenic Council, an organization of black fraternities and sororities.
“The running joke was he’s going to be the first black president,” said Marlon Meade, who knew him at Columbia Law School. “Obviously somebody beat him to that.”
At Duke, he majored in public policy, giving a speech at graduation in which he spoke of the “deep passion and commitment to making our collective public life the absolute best that it can possibly be.”
Elisabeth Epps, a lawyer and criminal justice activist who went to Duke with Fairfax, remembered him as a “big man on campus” whose ambitions were well known. “The chatter was, ‘would he be governor of North Carolina or Virginia?'” she said.
It was at Duke that Fairfax got to know Meredith Watson, a student two years behind him who had dated one of his friends. She became part of a vibrant social circle surrounding the fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha, the only black fraternity at Duke that had its own house — and where Fairfax served as president.
Watson, in statements released by her lawyer, Nancy Erika Smith, has accused Fairfax of a “premeditated and aggressive” sexual assault that took place in the Alpha Phi Alpha house during spring break in 2000, the year Fairfax was to graduate. According to Smith, who has not released specifics of the sexual assault, the pair had never dated and did not have a romantic relationship.
Epps recalled Fairfax, whose campaigns she supported and whose wedding she attended, as kind and as only a gentleman to her. But she believes Watson, because she knew her and the other women who have corroborated her story.
A Duke professor, impressed by Fairfax’s political talent, helped him land a job out of school on Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, compiling briefing books for Tipper Gore.
“There are some 22-year-olds you look at and say, ‘I’m going to be working for this person some day,'” recalled Jeremy Bash, who was an adviser on the Gore campaign. “Justin was that guy.”
From there, Fairfax returned to Washington and worked in the office of Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., answering constituent mail and doing research. Then it was on to Columbia Law School, where he made Law Review and developed a reputation as a man who always remembered first names and was ready to help out by making connections.
“Not like rich-kid connected,” said Meade, his classmate, “but more connected than you would expect.”
During the summer of 2004, before his third year of law school, Fairfax worked for a few weeks on the Kerry-Edwards campaign as a “body man” to Edwards, the personal aide who traveled with the candidate. It was hardly the stuff of high policy, but it did get him a ringside seat at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston.
At the convention, he met Vanessa Tyson, a political scientist. Tyson, in a statement released last Wednesday, said that she became friendly with Fairfax at the convention and one day he asked her to walk to his hotel room with him on a quick errand to pick up some documents. As she stood in the entryway of his room, she said, he kissed her, then pulled her toward the bed. “As I cried and gagged, he forced me to perform oral sex on him,” her statement said.
Fairfax returned in the fall to finish law school and afterward clerked for a federal judge. “He spoke to everybody: the people in the cafeteria, the people that do the trash,” recalled the judge, Gerald Bruce Lee, who is now retired. A standard legal career followed: a stint at WilmerHale, a big Washington law firm, and then work as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office in Virginia’s Eastern District.
And in 2012, to the surprise of nearly no one who knew him, he decided to run for attorney general of Virginia.
Fairfax, who was an unknown to Virginia’s political class, wanted to run for attorney general, an ambitious goal for a political novice but one in keeping with his work as a prosecutor. The post was also sought by Mark Herring, a two-term state senator. It was a longshot, and in the June 2013 primary, Herring won by fewer than 4 points.
Herring, who is facing a scandal of his own after admitting last week to wearing blackface in college, ran for re-election four years later, but this time Fairfax won the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor. He defeated two candidates who were arguably more seasoned, including Gene Rossi, a longtime Justice Department prosecutor who helped train Fairfax during his two-year stint as an assistant U.S. attorney.
Rossi remembers some of Fairfax’s cases — a cash-smuggling prosecution that went to trial, bank robbery and drug prosecutions, as well as some alien re-entry cases.
“I was disappointed when Justin left the U.S. attorney’s office after just two years because of my firm belief that he had a very promising future,” Rossi said.
During the general election, Fairfax’s opponent, Jill Vogel, attacked him for his lack of experience, suggesting he wasn’t sufficiently informed to discuss issues.
Rossi, now a lawyer in private practice in Washington, held a large fundraiser for Fairfax during the general election and has remained close to him. When it appeared Fairfax would ascend to the governor’s office earlier this month, he sent him a text. “LG Justin: Find the quiet in the storm. Keep the faith,” he said. “You cannot lose. Prayers with you. Gene R.”
The next day, Tyson’s allegations emerged. Rossi, who said he could not ignore the disturbing accounts, has not been in touch with Fairfax since.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.