The woman who has accused Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax of sexual assault released a lengthy statement outlining her allegations Wednesday — and accused him of engaging in a “smear campaign” against her.
Vanessa Tyson, a politics professor at Scripps College in California, says she met Fairfax at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, where she walked him back to his Boston hotel room one night and “consensual kissing quickly turned into a sexual assault.”
“Mr. Fairfax put his hand behind my neck and forcefully pushed my head towards his crotch. Only then did I realize that he had unbuckled his belt, unzipped his pants, and taken out his penis. He then forced his penis into my mouth,” she said in a statement released by law firm Katz, Marshall and Banks — the same outfit that represented Christine Blasey Ford in her allegations against then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
“Utterly shocked and terrified, I tried to move my head away, but could not because his hand was holding down my neck and he was much stronger than me. As I cried and gagged, Mr. Fairfax forced me to perform oral sex on him. I cannot believe, given my obvious distress, that Mr. Fairfax thought this forced sexual act was consensual.”
Tyson went to the Washington Post with her allegations after Fairfax was elected in late 2017, but the paper ultimately didn’t publish the story at the time, saying this week it couldn’t corroborate either side of the story.
She said this left her feeling “powerless, frustrated, and completely drained.”
In an initial statement denying Tyson’s allegations, Fairfax claimed the paper didn’t go ahead with the story because her allegation had “significant red flags and inconsistencies” — which the paper has subsequently denied, and she now says falsely painted her as a liar.
“Mr. Fairfax’s suggestion that The Washington Post found me not to be credible was deceitful, offensive, and profoundly upsetting,” she said.
Tyson says Fairfax continued his “smear campaign” at a press conference Monday, where he pointed reporters to a 2007 video in which she discussed being the victim of incest and molestation as a kid — and noted that she didn’t mention the alleged Boston assault.
“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. His reliance on this video to say the opposite is despicable and an offense to sexual assault survivors everywhere,” she said.
Her allegation finally surfaced publicly over the weekend amid calls for Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam to resign over a newly unearthed racist photo in his medical school yearbook — which would hand the job to Fairfax.
Tyson said she felt “outrage and despair” and “vented” her “frustration” in a private Facebook post that didn’t identify Fairfax by name. A screengrab of the post wound up being published by the website Big League Politics.
Ahead of Tyson speaking out Wednesday, Fairfax released another statement reiterating that they had a “consensual encounter,” but stressing that he doesn’t want to “denigrate” Tyson or “diminish her voice.”