A woman said Friday that Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax had raped her nearly two decades ago.
Lawyers for that woman, Meredith Watson, made the accusation in a statement that also called on Fairfax to resign from office.
Another woman, California university professor Vanessa Tyson, had recently accused Fairfax of sexual assault in an incident nearly 15 years earlier. He has unequivocally denied Tyson’s accusation.
Fairfax’s office did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for a response to the second accusation. But his spokeswoman, Lauren Burke, told The Washington Post that “we’re calling for an investigation on all of these matters.” She told the Post that Fairfax would have further response later.
Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe called for Fairfax to resign in a tweet Friday afternoon.
Watson’s statement claims she was raped by Fairfax in 2000 in a “premeditated and aggressive” attack while they were both students at Duke University. The two were friends, but had never been romantically involved, according to the statement.
Watson’s decision to come forward was spurred by “a strong sense of civic duty and her belief that those seeking or serving in public office should be of the highest character,” her lawyers said in the document,
She is not seeking any money in damages, the statement claims.
A New York Times reporter said in a tweet that Watson has been employed as a “fundraising consultant.”
Tyson, a politics professor at Scripps College in California, alleged that Fairfax had forced her to engage in oral sex with him in 2004, after they first engaged in “consensual kissing” in his hotel room in Boston.
Fairfax has said the encounter was consensual — a claim Tyson rejects — and that her accusation “simply is not true.”
The accusations against Fairfax are far from the only scandal roiling Virginia’s Democratic leadership.
The state’s governor, Ralph Northam, was hit with calls for his resignation from Republicans and Democrats alike after it was revealed that Northam’s 1984 medical school yearbook page included a racist photo of a person in blackface next to another person wearing a KKK hood.
Northam reportedly told his staff Friday that he will not resign over the controversy. If he did resign from office, Fairfax would be next in the line of succession to fill his spot.
The next person in the line of succession after Fairfax, Attorney General Mark Herring, admitted that he, too, wore blackface at a college party in 1980.
“Honest conversations and discussions will make it clear whether I can or should continue to serve as attorney general,” Herring said Wednesday.
If all three Democratic leaders resigned, then Republican Kirk Cox, the speaker of the House of Delegates, would become governor.
