A college professor who accused Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax of sexual assault in a 2004 incident is running for a state Assembly seat in California, as Fairfax’s own 2021 Virginia gubernatorial bid gears up.
Vanessa Tyson, a member of the Democratic Party like Fairfax, this week launched her bid for an open state Assembly seat based in Whittier, east of Los Angeles. Tyson, a politics professor at Scripps College, gained a national profile in February when she said Fairfax, now 40, “forced me to perform oral sex on him” on July 26, 2004, when they were both attending the Democratic National Convention in Boston.
Days later, a second woman, Meredith Watson, came forward with sexual assault allegations against Fairfax, recalling a “premeditated and aggressive” attack in 2000 when both were college students at Duke University.
Fairfax strongly denied both allegations. In September, he filed a $400 million defamation lawsuit against CBS over interviews with the women. Fairfax contends the network amplified claims against him that are “false, defamatory and politically-motivated.”
Tyson’s bid for office comes as Fairfax gets ready to seek the 2021 Virginia Democratic gubernatorial nomination. He’ll face state Attorney General Mark Herring and possibly former Gov. Terry McAuliffe. Virginia’s Democratic governor, Ralph Northam, under state law can’t run for a second straight term.
The Washington Examiner reached out for comment from Tyson’s campaign and Fairfax’s office.
In her state Assembly campaign, Tyson is running on a platform of affordable housing, education, and environmental protection, among other issues. Her campaign website makes no mention of Fairfax and her allegations against him.
The Southern California area she seeks to represent was once the college stomping grounds of Republican President Richard Nixon, but is now heavily Democratic. In California’s “top two” system, the first- and second-place finishers in the first round of voting usually face off again in November, meaning the seat is virtually certain to stay Democratic.
Tyson graduated from Princeton University in 1998, then earned her master’s and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
Fairfax, a former federal prosecutor, won Virginia’s lieutenant governorship, a traditional steppingstone to governor, in 2017. The position is part time, paying $36,321 annually. Fairfax over the summer resigned as a partner at the law firm Morrison & Foerster, where he was placed on leave earlier in the year after the sexual assault allegations arose.
