Dr. Vanessa Tyson, the woman who has accused Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax of sexually assaulting her at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, released a statement on Wednesday detailing her allegations. Gov. Ralph Northam, a fellow Democrat, has been facing near-universal calls for his resignation since Friday, when a racist photo from his 1984 medical school yearbook became public, and Fairfax is first in line to become governor.
Tyson, who now works as a political science professor at Scripps College in California, said that back at the 2004 convention she met Fairfax, and the two struck up a friendship. Later, as she was accompanying Fairfax back to his hotel room to retrieve some documents, he proceeded to kiss her. While this advance was “not unwelcome” and she kissed him back, Tyson says she “had no intention of taking my clothes off or engaging in sexual activity.” However, Fairfax “put his hand behind my neck and forcefully pushed my head towards his crotch.” She continued by saying that the future lieutenant governor “forced his penis into my mouth.”
Tyson writes that she “tried to move my head away, but could not because his hand was holding down my neck and he was much stronger than me,” and that, “As I cried and gagged, Mr. Fairfax forced me to perform oral sex on him.” She declares that she can not believe “given my obvious distress, that Mr. Fairfax thought this forced sexual act was consensual,” and that she had never given him any form of consent. Tyson continues by saying she avoided Fairfax at the convention afterward and that she didn’t speak about what happened for years.
However, in October 2017, when Fairfax was the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor and Tyson was living in California, she writes that she learned about his campaign and saw his image in the paper, which “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 says that by December 2017, after Fairfax had won the general election, she had told her friends about what happened and spoken to the Washington Post. The paper ultimately did not run the story, which Tyson says made her feel “powerless, frustrated, and completely drained.”
Tyson continues by saying that after she learned over the weekend that Fairfax would become governor should Northam resign, she posted a private Facebook post where, while not identifying Fairfax by name, she “stated that it seemed inevitable that the campaign staffer who assaulted me during the Democratic Convention in 2004 was about to get a big promotion.” The post made its way on to the conservative website Big League Politics without her permission, and “Fairfax issued a statement further escalating this matter by calling me a liar and falsely characterizing the reasons The Washington Post decided not to run a story about my allegations.”
Tyson adds that Fairfax’s suggestion that the paper “found me not to be credible was deceitful, offensive, and profoundly upsetting,” and that 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.” Tyson declares that nowhere in this video did she talk about being assaulted by Fairfax, and that this is hardly proof he didn’t attack her, but his “reliance on this video to say the opposite is despicable and an offense to sexual assault survivors everywhere.”
Since this story became public on Monday, Fairfax has continued to deny any wrongdoing and has insisted what what happened back in 2004 was a consensual sexual encounter.