But she also feared that as a black woman, she would face added scrutiny because the prominent politician she named, Justin E. Fairfax, was African-American, too.
“You’re not supposed to betray your race,” Watson, 39, said in her first interview since she accused Fairfax last month of assaulting her when they were in college together at Duke University nearly two decades ago. Fairfax has denied her allegations.
The #MeToo movement has brought into the open the challenges all women face when they say they have been sexually assaulted. Their accusations are disbelieved. Their motives are questioned. Their pasts are examined.
But black women can face added blowback, including suggestions from other African-Americans that they are being disloyal to their race by calling out prominent men among them.
The allegations against Fairfax have spurred fresh conversations about how society treats black women who say they have been sexually assaulted.
Similar discussions have flared around an entirely separate case involving R&B; singer R. Kelly. Kelly was charged with 10 counts of sexual abuse last month, allegations he has denied. Though the two cases have little in common, they both highlight the challenges facing black women.
Fairfax, who maintains that he had a consensual sexual encounter with Watson, said in a statement that it was also important to consider the injustices that black men have been subjected to in America.
“As a matter of general principle, no one should challenge the fact that African-American women have been marginalized regarding sexual assault claims,” Fairfax said in the statement. “Nor should anyone challenge the fact that African-American men have been the targets of false allegations of sexual assault, whoever the accuser. We need a justice system that treats both accusers and the accused fairly and affords both due process.”
Watson said she came forward in part as an act of solidarity with Vanessa Tyson, another black woman, who has accused Fairfax of sexually assaulting her during an encounter at the Democratic National Convention in Boston in 2004. (A spokeswoman for Tyson said she was unavailable to comment. Fairfax has denied her allegations.)
Watson said she has received some support, but the condemnation has stung.
After she came forward, Watson said, a black male friend told her he could not believe she was “going to do this to a black man.”
On social media, strangers described her as opportunistic, dismissed her as a pawn to take down Fairfax and equated her to the white woman who falsely accused Emmett Till of flirting with her, leading to his lynching in 1955.
“I feel like I’ve been torn apart the most by my own community, quite frankly,” Watson said. “As black women, we shouldn’t have to keep going through this and bearing it in silence and just feeling like these things can happen to us.”
There are a variety of underlying reasons for this desire to sometimes give black men a break, experts say. Distrust in the criminal justice system is part of it. So is the acknowledgment that black men face considerable hurdles on their way toward success. The underlying sentiment is similar to the hesitancy of some black residents to call 911 on other black people: Will they get a fair shake?
“Coming forward against a black man who is liked by his community, I don’t know if anything is as difficult as that in terms of a situation a survivor can be in,” said Saida Grundy, an African-American, women’s and gender studies professor at Boston University who has written about the subject.
Successful black men are seen as exceptional, she said, and so “tarnishing them with allegations is somehow a betrayal to black people who have made it.”
Fairfax, a Democrat, has called for a law enforcement investigation to clear his name, asserting that Watson was part of an effort to prevent him from succeeding Gov. Ralph Northam, who faced pressure to resign after admitting to wearing blackface.
Watson said she would testify at a public hearing. Leaders in the Republican-controlled Virginia Legislature have said they would hold a public hearing, but it is not clear when.
One of those standing by Fairfax has invoked the ugly history of black men being falsely accused as a reason to question the accusations against him.
“There have been just too many false charges filed against black men,” said Marty Jewell, a former Richmond, Virginia, city councilman who, along with other older black civic leaders, criticized what he felt was a rush to judgment against Fairfax. “We do know that women, through their scorn, have made false charges against men to get even.”
Those types of attitudes and the suggestion that black women have a responsibility toward black men have made Aliyah Young, a Chicago activist who works at A Long Walk Home, an organization focused on empowering black women and girls, hesitant to publicly discuss her own experience of being sexually assaulted by a black high school classmate, she said.
She said she has cut short family dinners and blocked people on social media when they started to blame black women for their own victimization in the Kelly case.
Young often protests police abuse against black people, which factored into her decision not to call out her own attacker. “If I’m about the black agenda, I can’t go against black people,” said Young, 17, now a freshman at DePaul University.
More than 4 in 10 black women experience physical violence from an intimate partner during their lifetimes, according to a report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.
Yet research suggests that black women may be less likely to report being sexually assaulted to the police because of negative experiences with law enforcement; prosecutors may be less likely to bring charges when sexual assault victims are black in certain situations, and jurors may be less likely to convict, studies suggest.
Roughly 20 years ago, Lisa VanAllen, 38, accused Kelly of coaxing her into group sex when she was a minor.
She was the prosecution’s main witness against Kelly during the decade-old trial in which he was acquitted of child pornography charges. During that time, VanAllen said, most criticism came from other black people.
“No one was checking to see if I was OK,” she said. “I got no compassion.”
That was an attitude that needed to change, said Grundy, the Boston University professor.
“We have to ask ourselves, if the cost of not bringing a good brother down is always silencing the black woman, then what the hell kind of racial progress is that?” she said. “You don’t make progress on half the race.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.