Two rape allegations later, one of them corroborated by contemporaneous witnesses, Justin Fairfax, remains the Democratic Lieutenant Governor of Virginia. That puts him next in line to succeed Gov. Ralph Northam, also a Democrat, who can’t remember whether he wore a KKK hood or blackface in a yearbook photo from 30 years ago.
Sure, there’s been a bit of performative outrage from the media, but for the most part, Fairfax has spent the past two months riding out the dwindling interest in the allegations. After all, the media now must focus on the predatory hair-sniffing of Joe Biden!
An “allegation” that the then-Vice President kissed the back of the head of a Nevada Democrat at a 2014 campaign event dominated cable news over the weekend, with very serious journalists questioning whether it could oh so conveniently torpedo his all-but-certain presidential run. Surely the timing is a coincidence.
Luckily, CBS News has followed up on the Fairfax story, conducting harrowing interviews with both accusers. Fairfax concedes that he had sexual encounters with both women, but maintains that they were consensual. The alarming evidence begs to differ.
The first accuser, Vanessa Tyson, alleges that Fairfax assaulted her after a consensual kiss at the 2004 DNC. While her story, especially in light of the fact that she’s an ardent Democrat and a feminist professor, is incredibly compelling, she didn’t tell anyone about the assault until 2017. Alone, her story is credible, but fails to fulfill the preponderance of the evidence, a bar that seems fair to use in evaluating public accusations against powerful people.
The second accuser, Meredith Watson, alleges that Fairfax raped her while they were both students at Duke University in 2000. Not only did Watson specifically name Fairfax when she told people about the rape at the time, but at least one went on the record to confirm her account to the Washington Post. Furthermore, in 2016 Watson received an email from another friend from Duke, inviting her to a campaign event for Fairfax. Watson replied, “Justin raped me in college and I don’t want to hear anything about him. Please, please, please remove me from any future emails about him please.”
At this point, I fail to see how Fairfax’s guilt doesn’t pass the preponderance of evidence. One woman provided a credible but not very substantiated account of sexual assault. She was followed up by a highly corroborated account from a separate woman whom she had never met. The significant detail that CBS News’ latest interviews have added to the fray is that Fairfax’s modus operandi was the same in both cases: He specifically targeted, isolated, and assaulted women he knew had previously been victims of sexual assault.
Tyson had told Fairfax prior to the assault that she was a survivor of incest, and Watson had told him she was previously raped by a Duke basketball player. Both have now acknowledged that Tyson probably took advantage of that.
Absent new allegations that Biden crossed the line of hair-sniffing to something more nefarious or that he engaged in creepy behavior in private, Democrats’ last-ditch attempts to nuke his presidential campaign just play politics with justice for actual sexual assault survivors. Biden’s behavior is undoubtedly creepy, but the media and the party gave him a pass for half a century. Rather than cry crocodile tears so the one candidate who can actually win a primary and the general is forced out of the race, Democrats and Republicans alike ought to maintain a laser focus on Virginia until a monster is ousted from the state’s leadership.
