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“Does anybody think it’s any coincidence that on the eve of potentially my being elevated that that’s when this uncorroborated smear comes out?” Fairfax told reporters surrounding him in the rotunda of the state Capitol about whether he believes Northam, a fellow Democrat, was behind the accusation coming to light. He offered no evidence tying the Northam camp to the allegation.
Just hours after The Washington Post published a story Monday outlining the woman’s allegation — that Fairfax assaulted her soon after they had met in Boston at the Democratic National Convention — the lieutenant governor said he and the woman had what he called “a 100 percent consensual” sexual encounter.
“We hit it off, she was very interested in me and so eventually, at one point, we ended up going to my hotel room,” said Fairfax, 39, recounting in a measured voice what he said happened in 2004.
Fairfax asserted that the woman had subsequently called him and said she wanted him to meet her mother. He said he had no documentary evidence of any further conversations after their sexual encounter in 2004, when he was working as the personal aide to John Edwards, then a senator from North Carolina and the Democratic vice presidential candidate. Asked if he had seen her since the time in his hotel room, he said, “I don’t believe so.”
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The New York Times has reached out to intermediaries for the woman who made the allegation, but they did not immediately comment Monday.
An adviser to Northam, asked Monday if the embattled governor had been behind the revelation of the assault allegations, denied any responsibility and said the Northam camp did not have the capacity to plot such a move at a moment when Northam is struggling to retain his job.
The accusations against Fairfax threw Virginia’s government into a deeper state of chaos three days after an image surfaced from Northam’s medical school yearbook page showing a man in blackface and another in a Ku Klux Klan robe. The governor, after initially acknowledging he was one of the men in the 1984 photo, is now denying he was and refusing insistent calls from state and national Democrats that he resign.
Even though Northam admitted Saturday at his own news conference to once darkening his face with shoe polish for a Michael Jackson costume at a dance party, his advisers said Monday that he would not step down, and his chief of staff told other aides at a staff meeting that they owed it to Northam to remain with him for now, according to a Democrat briefed on the conversation.
For his part, Fairfax noted that he is in “a unique position” and wanted to remain “circumspect” about whether he thinks the governor should quit.
But he was less restrained in claiming that there was a “manipulation” effort to derail his career in elective politics, which began with his election as lieutenant governor in 2017.
“It’s such a shame that this has been weaponized and used as a smear because this is a very real issue,” he said of sexual assault.
Fairfax ran separately from Northam during the Democratic primaries for lieutenant governor and governor; unlike candidates in some other states, Northam did not choose Fairfax as his running mate.
After Fairfax spoke to the news media for just more than 10 minutes, the clerk of the state Senate, Susan Clarke Schaar, strode through a pack of reporters and photographers and told the lieutenant governor he needed to return to his post presiding over the chamber.
Monday’s spectacle aside the Houdon-designed George Washington statue in the Capitol here was extraordinary: Fairfax, a 39-year-old African-American, rebutting claims of sexual misconduct and suggesting the accusations were part of an effort by allies of Northam to salvage a governorship that is listing due to the racism that still scars Virginia.
The fast-moving events began at 2:55 a.m. Monday, when aides to Fairfax — a Democrat widely seen as a rising star in the party — put out a statement saying the allegation was “false” and that Fairfax had “never assaulted anyone — ever — in any way, shape or form.” The aides said that Fairfax is considering “appropriate legal action against those attempting to spread this defamatory and false allegation.”
The Fairfax aides said The Washington Post investigated the allegation around the time of the lieutenant governor’s inauguration in January 2018 and chose not to publish a story.
The Post story Monday partially disputed the Fairfax statement. According to the Post story, the woman contacted the newspaper after Fairfax won election in November 2017 and alleged that he had sexually assaulted her in 2004.
The Post was unable to corroborate her allegations, which Fairfax had denied, according to Monday’s story. The Post, however, disputed the Fairfax statement’s assertion that the newspaper had found inconsistencies and red flags in the woman’s allegation; the newspaper labeled those assertions as incorrect.
Fairfax aides then chose to issue a second statement Monday afternoon, this time accusing The Post of having “smeared” Fairfax by publishing its Monday story detailing the allegations without corroboration. The Post’s executive editor, Martin Baron, replied that Fairfax had gone first in “issuing a statement regarding allegations against him, making specific representations about Post reporting,” and that the paper had an obligation to clarify the nature of allegations and its reporting.
As Northam met Monday, first with his Cabinet and then with his staff in the state Capitol complex, stunned legislators arrived to word of the middle-of-the-night statement by Fairfax’s aides after the publication of the story by the right-wing website Big League Politics.
Arriving at the Capitol for the General Assembly’s weekly session Monday, House Speaker Kirk Cox told reporters he did not want to pursue impeachment against Northam, saying that he hoped the governor would quit of his own volition. And he acknowledged that he was unsure if Northam’s conduct met the threshold for impeachment.
After Fairfax, the third in line to become governor is the state attorney general, Mark Herring, a Democrat who had indicated plans to run for governor in 2021.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.