The woman who accused Virginia Lt. Governor Justin Fairfax of a sex assault in 2004 has offered the grim details about the night in question.
The woman is Vanessa Tyson, a professor at Stanford University, who says Fairfax forced her to perform a sexual act during the Democratic National Convention in 2004. Her story first surfaced on the conservative Big League Politics website.
Fairfax quickly and hotly denied it, which prompted Tyson’s statement that her attorneys released yesterday.
Details
Tyson’s attorneys, Katz, Marshall and Banks, also helped Christine Blasey Ford peddle her ultimately refuted allegations against U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. But unlike Ford’s, Tyson’s memory is not shrouded in fog.
The publication of her story “flooded me with painful memories, bringing back feelings of grief, shame, and anger,” Tyson wrote, “that stemmed from an incident with Mr. Fairfax that occurred in July 2004 during the Democratic National Convention in Boston.”
The two met, she wrote, on July 26, 2004. “On the afternoon of the third day of the Convention, July 28, 2004, Mr. Fairfax suggested that I get some fresh air by accompanying him on a quick errand to retrieve documents from his room in a nearby hotel.”
Tyson wrote that the few interactions she had with Fairfax gave her “no reason to feel threatened” and so she agreed to head to his room. That’s when Fairfax, she wrote, made his move. He began kissing Tyson, and “although surprised by his advance, it was not unwelcome and I kissed him back. He then took my hand and pulled me towards the bed.”
Nor did Tyson expect what came next. As she explained in detail in a statement to the media, Fairfax forced her to perform oral sex on him.
After the assault, she wrote, she avoided Fairfax and “suffered from both deep humiliation and shame. I did not speak about it for years, and I (like most survivors) suppressed those memories and emotions as a necessary means to continue my studies, and to pursue my goal of building a successful career as an academic.”
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But then, in October 2017, just before Virginia’s gubernatorial election, she saw Fairfax’s picture at The Root, a publication aimed at black readers. “The image hit me like a ton of bricks, triggering buried traumatic memories and the feelings of humiliation I’d felt so intensely back in 2004.”
Tyson felt compelled to speak out and went to the Washington Post. The newspaper’s refusal to publish the story left her feeling “powerless, frustrated, and completely drained. Again I tried to bury memories of this painful incident and focus on my work and my students.”
But then Big League Politics published Governor Ralph Northam’s yearbook photos that show the leftist advocate of infanticide in blackface, a much bigger sin, for Democrats, than the mass murder of the unborn.
Tyson explained that Northam’s possible resignation and, thus, Fairfax’s elevation to governor left her with a “jarring sense of both outrage and despair,” and led to the Facebook post that described an assault but did not identify Fairfax.
Big League Politics then broke that story and linked it to the lieutenant governor.
Fairfax denied her accusation, she writes, and his “suggestion that the Washington Post found me not to be credible was deceitful, offensive, and profoundly upsetting. He has continued a smear campaign by pointing reporters to a 2007 educational video in which I talked about being the victim of incest and molestation. In that video I did not talk about being assaulted by Mr. Fairfax. This, of course, is not proof that he did not assault me.”
Representative Bobby Scott Knew of an Allegation
Meanwhile, we now know that the Washington Post was not Fairfax’s only protector. Representative Bobby Scott, ABC News has reported, knew about the allegation a year ago.
But Scott, who represents Virginia’s 3rd congressional district, said nothing, unlike his Democratic colleagues in the Senate who, using using much less credible and frankly ridiculous allegations, attempted to destroy Kavanaugh.
For his part, Fairfax again denied the accusation.
Photo: AP Images
