Justin Fairfax, Virginia's Lieutenant Governor, Denies Sexual Assault Allegation

In a statement issued at 2:55 a.m., aides to Fairfax — a Democrat who has drawn national attention as Gov. Ralph Northam considers resigning over past racist behavior — said 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 New York Times has reached out to intermediaries for the woman who has made the allegation. They did not immediately comment on Monday.

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 published a story Monday that 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 soon after they met in Boston at the Democratic National Convention.

The Post had been 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.

As Northam met Monday with advisers in the state Capitol complex here to discuss his future, 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.

The allegation threw Virginia’s government into a deeper state of chaos, just two days after Northam admitted that in 1984 he had used shoe polish to darken his face for a Michael Jackson-themed dance party but denied in the same year that he had appeared in blackface or a Ku Klux Klan robe.

Arriving at the state Capitol for the Legislature’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 volition. He acknowledged that he was unsure if Northam’s conduct met the threshold for impeachment.

After the 39-year-old Fairfax, the third in line to become governor is the state attorney general, Mark Herring, a Democrat who had already indicated plans to run for governor in 2021.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.