Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax acknowledged Monday he had a sexual encounter with a woman accusing him of sexual assault in 2004, when he was working as an aide for then-Sen. John Edwards.
“We hit it off, she was very interested in me, and so eventually, at one point, we ended up going to my hotel room,” Fairfax, a Democrat, told reporters Monday.
His admission is a major complication for Democrats calling for Gov. Ralph Northam to step down after it emerged there was a picture of men in blackface and Klan robes on his 1984 medical school yearbook page. Fairfax, the descendant of a freed slave named Simon Fairfax, is due to succeed Northam if he resigns. The state Attorney General Mark Herring is next in line after Fairfax.
The lieutenant governor, 39, a Catholic, married his wife Cerina, a dentist, in 2006. They have two children, Cameron and Carys. Before rising to elected office, Fairfax worked for Edwards, the North Carolina senator and 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee. Edwards ran again for president in 2008 and was later disgraced after it was revealed he had an affair and fathered an illegitimate daughter with his campaign videographer while his wife Elizabeth Edwards had terminal cancer.
Fairfax’s recent remarks come hours after the Washington Post reported that a woman had approached the newspaper with the allegation before Fairfax was inaugurated. The Post said it investigated the claim but Fairfax and his accuser told different versions of what happened in his hotel room. The publication could not find others to corroborate their stories.
Fairfax and the woman met in Boston at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. When the two went back to Fairfax’s hotel room, she alleges they began consensually kissing before Fairfax forced her to perform oral sex. She told the Washington Post the two realized they had a mutual friend and one afternoon Fairfax asked her to walk with him to his hotel room to pick up some papers.
In a statement released at 2:57 a.m. on Monday, Fairfax denied the allegations as the woman described and said the encounter was “100 percent consensual.” Fairfax alleges the woman called him after the encounter and said she wanted her mother to meet him, but said he didn’t believe he and the woman had seen each other since their encounter in his hotel room.
Fairfax’s chief of staff and communications director said in the statement: “The Post carefully investigated the claim for several months. After being presented with the facts consistent with the Lt. Governor’s denial of the allegation, the absence of any evidence corroborating the allegation, and significant red flags and inconsistencies with the allegations, the Post made the considered decision not to publish the story.”
The Washington Post, however, accused Fairfax of lying: “The Post did not find ‘significant red flags and inconsistencies within the allegations,’ as the Fairfax statement incorrectly said.”
