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 from California, said she was assaulted by Fairfax in 2004 during the Democratic National Convention in Boston.
By Friday evening, Fairfax was facing a wave of calls for his resignation. Democrats in the Virginia House and Senate urged him to step down, saying he “could no longer fulfill his duties to the commonwealth.” 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 of 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.”
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 becoming the state’s second African-American governor if Gov. Ralph Northam bowed to calls to resign.
Now Fairfax is facing those demands himself: After Watson’s allegation became public Friday, three prominent 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 its 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 1980s. Many Democrats have been calling for Northam to resign, but some have been offering words of support for Herring.
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 six people Friday who said that Tyson had told them over the last two years that she had been sexually assaulted by Fairfax.
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 the allegation by Tyson.
“The details of Ms. Watson’s attack are similar to those described by Dr. Vanessa Tyson,” Smith said.
Smith provided an email exchange between Watson and a friend from Duke, Milagros Joye Brown, in which Watson tells her friend not to include her on correspondence regarding Fairfax because he had raped her in college.
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 that her client did not seek medical attention or go to police or the university administration, and that Watson perceived Fairfax as a politically influential figure on campus.
A college friend of Watson’s, Kaneedreck Adams, said in an interview Friday that Watson told her she was raped the day after she said it happened, and named Fairfax as her assailant.
Adams said that she went to visit Watson at her apartment and that “she was upset, she was kind of crying quietly and she said that she had been raped” by Fairfax.
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.”
Karen Kessler, a spokeswoman for Watson, said Watson is not planning on litigation or seeking financial compensation. She said Watson, who has worked as a fundraising consultant for nonprofit companies, would not be conducting 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.
In interviews with The Times this week, six people said that Tyson told them over the last two years that she had been sexually assaulted at the convention, and that her account was consistent with her public statement this week. The people said she provided varying levels of detail, but three of them said she identified the assailant as Fairfax, a lieutenant governor, or a politician on the rise.
Two professors currently joining Tyson in a prestigious fellowship at Stanford told The Times that she recounted the 2004 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, a sociology professor at the University of Michigan.
Another fellow, Jennifer J. Freyd, a University of Oregon professor known for her work studying sexual violence, also remembers the conversation, relaying that Tyson described how the incident was “clearly a traumatic experience.”
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 the police or file a complaint with them.
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 that she was assaulted. A GoFundMe account, set up by a political scientist at Menlo College in California, had raised more than $20,000 as of Friday morning.
“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 alleged 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 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.
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.
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.
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. 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 politics professor 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 that he had assaulted her during the 2004 convention.
“I did not know who Justin Fairfax was,” McWilliams said. “And I immediately went home and Googled him.”
The distinguished Stanford fellowship Tyson began last fall is merely her latest rung up the academic ladder after a working class upbringing in the Los Angeles area, the biracial daughter of a single white mother. 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.
In a statement issued Thursday, Scripps College in Claremont, California, where Tyson is a professor of politics, 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 that she and Tyson have become close despite having known each other for 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.
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.