Professor Vanessa Tyson finally issued a public statement through her legal counsel at Katz, Marshall, & Banks, detailing the full extent of her rape allegation against Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax. The allegation, if true, is devastating.
Tyson describes the assault as follows:
The interaction, as described, is unequivocally an act of rape. The question remaining is whether the allegation is credible, or more likely true than not.
Tyson says that she emotionally buried the assault in her mind for more than a decade, focusing on obtaining her Ph.D. and becoming a professor, but claims when Fairfax appeared in a photo in an article from October 2017 on the Root, a historically black news site, she “felt it was crucial to tell close friends of mine in Virginia, who were voters, about the assault.” The Root did in fact publish two articles that month featuring a photo of Fairfax.
Within two months, Tyson says that she told “many” friends, including one at the Washington Post, in the hopes of sharing her story. The Washington Post’s previous explanation, that they declined to publish her story due to a lack of corroborating evidence, aligns with Tyson’s account.
That Tyson has no contemporaneously corroborating witnesses doesn’t help verify her allegation, but the Democratic Party ought to investigate the matter and interview those who she told about Fairfax in 2017. Tyson’s credibility is enhanced by the fact that Fairfax has already conceded that a sexual encounter occurred in the time and place that she described, albeit he maintains it was consensual. That Tyson is also a liberal feminist with no political animus towards Fairfax also adds another point toward her credibility.
If Tyson’s friends do confirm the consistency of her recollection of her story, her allegation may just achieve the preponderance of the evidence standard. In any case, Democrats decided to throw out that standard when they rushed to condemn Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh as guilty due to an allegation, with not only zero evidence, and zero contemporaneously corroborating witnesses, but also from an accuser who can’t even prove she ever met him.
Fairfax also claimed that Tyson “stayed in touch” with him in the “months following” the encounter, whereas Tyson explicitly said she never contacted him again. If Fairfax provided call records, texts, or emails from this time frame, that would immediately discredit Tyson’s story — not because no rape victim would keep in contact with her assailant, but because it would undermine her account of their relationship.
Furthermore, NBC News reports that in a private meeting on Monday night, Fairfax said of Tyson, “Fuck that bitch.” As the Kavanaugh standard would hold, his temperament alone is disqualifying.
An unbiased investigation could help us get closer to a conclusion on this. If we get inconsistent accounts from the people in whom Tyson confided, Fairfax shouldn’t be forced to resign.
But if those other stories are consistent? Well, that might just be the end of Fairfax’s political career.
