Justin Fairfax says this video shows ‘inconsistencies’ in his accuser’s story, but it does nothing of the sort

Fairfax’s accuser Tyson, who has allowed her name to be made public, is a professor of politics at Scripps College, currently on leave from a fellowship at Stanford, where she is researching “the politics and policies surrounding sexual violence against women and children in the United States.” She is leveling a serious charge against Fairfax, who acknowledges a sexual encounter took place at the time she stated, but insists it was purely consensual.

In trying to fight off the accusations as a baseless smear in a Monday press conference, Fairfax pointed to a video.

“In the course of our initial discussions with the Washington Post, we showed them ample evidence of the inconsistencies in the story, including there’s a video of this person from about 12 years ago talking about sexual assaults that have happened to her,” Fairfax said. He described how the accuser, now known to be Tyson, was “talking about her history, saying that we needed to make sure that we are loud about these things, and came out in public, and she also talked about having been in Boston and worked at a rape crisis center at the time of this encounter, and yet in that video, never says a word about having been assaulted in Boston, about having been assaulted as an adult, or about having been assaulted by me.”

Yet, Fairfax’s description of the 2007 video, which NBC’s Geoff Bennett flagged as the one Fairfax was talking about, leaves out important context. In the video clip, which is part of a longer interview, Tyson is telling the story of how she met the filmmaker, Angela Shelton. Tyson describes how they met while Tyson was working at the rape crisis center in Boston. She then goes on to say that they had something in common, because, Tyson reveals, that she was a survivor of incest, and that her father was a convicted child molester. As described in the bio on her website, Shelton, too, says she was a survivor of sexual abuse in childhood. So it’s not all clear from this video that Tyson was meaning to describe all of the times she was sexually assaulted. Instead, she was merely describing the similar stories of childhood abuse that bonded her with Shelton.

To be clear, the video doesn’t mean that Fairfax is guilty, either. It just doesn’t do anything to discredit her story. And it doesn’t reflect particularly well on Fairfax that he thinks drawing attention to a video in which Tyson describes a very traumatic experience for her as a “gotcha moment.”