One of the women accusing Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax of rape said she was also sexually assaulted by former NBA player Corey Maggette, according to a report published Monday evening.
Meredith Watson told multiple friends years ago that she had been raped by the 14-year NBA veteran and current Fox Sports analyst while they were at Duke University two decades ago, The New York Times reported.
“Meredith told me she had been raped twice at Duke,” said R. Stanton Jones, a partner at the law firm Arnold & Porter in Washington, who grew up with Watson in Baltimore.
“And she told me that one of the men who raped her was the Duke basketball player Corey Maggette. That was a name I knew because I’m a basketball fan.”
Watson told her friend about the rape while they were both home for the summer in 2001, Jones said.
In a March 2017 Facebook message exchange with another friend Watson also mentions both of the attacks, according to the report. The messages were provided to the Times by Watson’s spokeswoman Karen Kessler.
In the conversation, the friend asks Watson whether she reported the rape, allegedly at the hands of Fairfax, and she responded: “You know I didn’t report it after how the university responded when I reported Corey Maggette.”
Watson says the pol sexually assaulted her in 2000 when they were both students at Duke. Fairfax has denied that he raped Watson or Vanessa Tyson, the other woman accusing him, saying he had encounters with them that were consensual.
Maggette attended Duke for one year, 1998-99, and then played in the NBA until 2013. He denied the allegation.
“It has only been through media accounts and a statement from Meredith Watson’s lawyer that I first learned or heard of anything about these sexual assault allegations,” Maggette said in a statement. “I have never sexually assaulted anyone in my life and I completely and categorically deny any such charge.”
Watson’s lawyer, Nancy Erika Smith, said on Friday that her client was raped by a Duke basketball player during her sophomore year at the school but didn’t name the player.
After Watson reported the rape to the school, an unnamed dean “discouraged her from pursuing the claim further,” Smith said.
The university said it was investigating the allegation and declined to comment on whether it had failed to act on the accusation.