The Washington Post said Monday the woman accusing Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax of sexual assault 15 years ago did not present any inconsistencies in her story, as his office claimed in an overnight statement.
Fairfax, who would succeed embattled Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam if he resigned, faces accusations aired on a right-wing site of sexually assaulting a woman at the Democratic National Convention in 2004.
Fairfax’s chief of staff and communications director released a statement Monday, just before 3 a.m., maintaining his innocence from the allegations. Fairfax, 39, said when the woman, Vanessa Tyson, went to the Washington Post with the same story last year, they found no corroborating evidence and several inconsistencies in her story.
“The Post carefully investigated the claim for several months,” Fairfax’s chief of staff and communications director said in a statement. “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 Post, however, said in its story on Fairfax’s denial it did not find “significant red flags and inconsistencies within the allegations,” the statement asserts.
In fact, the paper said it could not find anyone to corroborate either Fairfax’s or Tyson’s accounts of the alleged incident.
Tyson’s story emerged from weekend chaos surrounding Gov. Northam. A photo from Northam’s 1984 medical school yearbook shows a person in blackface and another in Ku Klux Klan garb. It is not clear whether either individual is Northam, and he has provided inconsistent accounts about the photograph.
