On the menu today: Greetings from sunny Miami, Fla., where last night I hosted a Burke to Buckley fellowship session of the National Review Institute — you can learn more about the program here — and today I’ll be at an NRI regional seminar, interviewing former Governor Jeb Bush, discussing fiscal conservatism, limited government, and what Florida has gotten right that so many other states have gotten wrong.
Alas, the news back home in northern Virginia is about as far from sunny as you can get.
Tragedy in Virginia
Former Virginia Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax’s murder of his wife Cerina is a horrific and shocking crime, and his subsequent suicide is shocking as well.
I suspect few Virginians had given Fairfax much thought since his fourth-place finish in a five-candidate field in the 2021 Virginia Democratic primary. Less than four years earlier, more than 1.3 million Virginians had cast a ballot for him to be lieutenant governor; in the gubernatorial primary, just 17,606 voted for him to be the nominee.
In the interim, two women accused Fairfax of sexual assault. Vanessa Tyson, a fellow at Stanford University and associate professor at Scripps College, accused Fairfax of forcing her to perform oral sex during a 2004 encounter; Fairfax insisted the encounter had been consensual. Two days later, Meredith Watson alleged that Fairfax’s assault on her was “premeditated and aggressive” when they both attended Duke in 2000 and that the two were friends but not romantically involved, according to a statement from her legal counsel. Her counsel said that Watson “shared her account of the rape with friends in a series of emails and Facebook messages that are now in our possession. Additionally, we have statements from former classmates corroborating that Ms. Watson immediately told friends that Mr. Fairfax had raped her.”
(Maybe Justin Fairfax’s accusers were lying, but if they were, they were lies that started long before Fairfax started running for public office.)
Fairfax said that his sexual encounter with Watson was consensual, as well. He insisted that the accusations were part of a “political smear campaign.” This was all occurring as Democratic Governor Ralph Northam faced calls to resign over a photo that appeared on his medical school yearbook page that depicted him in either a Klan hood or blackface, and state attorney general Mark Herring had admitted that he had worn blackface as well in college.
Both women sought to testify before the Virginia General Assembly, but no formal hearing was ever convened.
Virginia House Minority Leader Eileen Filler-Corn wrote, “The allegations against Lieutenant Governor Fairfax are extremely serious. As such, the House Democratic Caucus called on him to resign,” but also said the House Democratic Caucus had “concerns regarding whether such a hearing in a political body would be impartial and could result in a highly charged political environment” and thus would not support any state legislative investigation.
This was a bizarre and contradictory position for the chamber’s Democrats to take; the accusations against Fairfax were apparently “extremely serious,” serious enough to warrant his immediate resignation, but simultaneously not serious enough for the state legislature to hold hearings about them. A more cynical mind might contend that the state’s Democratic leaders just wanted the issue to go away.
In his defense, Fairfax stated he had “passed two full, field background checks by the FBI” and received a top secret security clearance. The background checks presumably would have been conducted in connection with his work as a federal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice from 2010 to 2012. It is worth keeping in mind that an FBI background check might not uncover past nonconsensual sexual encounters, and that the FBI never released anything from those background checks; Fairfax simply asserted that his background check proved his good character.
Fairfax filed a $400 million defamation lawsuit against CBS News, claiming CBS had “published, promoted, and amplified” false statements without fact-checking the women’s allegations, and contended the network had run the report about his accusers to distract from its own sexual harassment scandals:
Since 2017, CBS had been publicly excoriated with its own #MeToo scandals involving several high-ranking figures at the network, including CBS This Morning co-anchor Charlie Rose, former CBS News Chairman and former Executive Producer of 60 Minutes Jeff Fager and former CBS CEO Les Moonves. Upon information and belief, in the immediate aftermath of those high-profile #MeToo scandals, the network sought to visibly align itself on the side of perceived victims to improve its public image.
U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga was unconvinced, concluding that Fairfax did not prove that CBS had good reason to doubt the accounts of the accusers, or aired the interviews out of “actual malice,” or that the network “intentionally inflicted emotional distress” by running the story. Judge Trenga dismissed the case.
In 2021, Fairfax ran for governor, and argued that he was the victim in the situation during the gubernatorial debate:
“We can’t just talk theoretically about what generally happens, but we have a real-world example where I was falsely accused in 2019,” said Fairfax. “Everyone here on the stage called for my immediate resignation, including Terry McAuliffe. . . . He treated me like George Floyd. He treated me like Emmett Till — no due process, immediately assumed my guilt.”
Now, as you likely recall, Emmett Till was lynched and George Floyd was fatally asphyxiated. Fairfax had his reputation severely damaged but wasn’t even forced to leave his elected position.
I mention all this because while Fairfax served out his term, his life was never the same, and apparently shortly after leaving office, his mental health, marriage, and life unraveled. He contended for years that he had been “denied any meaningful opportunity to establish the truth, clear my name and get justice.” But if his accusers’ accounts were true, he was a two-time rapist who had never faced criminal charges.
This morning, the Washington Post offers a dark and detailed account of Fairfax’s life after leaving office in January 2022:
“Heavy daily alcohol” use had become routine after the end of his term in 2022, and his wife told the court that he had used money meant for horseback-riding lessons for their children to purchase a gun that year.
Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis said Justin Fairfax shot Cerina Wanzer Fairfax several times in the basement of their home in the Annandale area of Northern Virginia, then shot and killed himself in an upstairs bedroom.
The article continues:
But the sexual assault allegations from years past brought by two women upended those hopes and caused a depressive ripple in his personal life, Fairfax County Circuit Court Judge Timothy J. McEvoy wrote in a March 30 opinion related to the couple’s divorce proceeding.
Davis said that Fairfax, 47, was recently served paperwork related to that case. The couple, he said, were separated but living together. They married in 2006.
Both of the couple’s children, a teenage boy and girl, were at home when the shooting occurred, Davis said. The couple’s son called 911, he said. . . .
On March 30, Fairfax County Circuit Court Judge Timothy J. McEvoy issued a ruling in the couple’s divorce proceedings:
McEvoy granted Cerina Fairfax primary physical custody of the couple’s children in his March 30 order. It allowed the former lieutenant governor parenting time twice a week with the possibility that it could increase, on the condition he committed to taking Breathalyzer tests before and during his time with the children. Cerina Fairfax was also awarded possession of the couple’s home.
Justin Fairfax was ordered by McEvoy to move out by April 30.
The notion of a former federal prosecutor who had been an ardent supporter of gun control — even government confiscation of “essentially automatic weapons” — murdering his wife with a gun is more than a little ironic.
In 2023, Fairfax posted on Facebook, “Gun violence is a national health crisis emergency, and we need to start acting like it! We need a #HeadHandHeart approach that addresses mental health, unfettered access to weapons of mass killing & the internal damage that prompts people to destroy others.”
I suppose it’s a small step from knowing, deep down, “I shouldn’t be trusted with a firearm” to concluding “no one should be trusted with a firearm.”
Sometimes a candidate loses a race, and his life just seems to fall apart. When I heard the news about Fairfax, I thought about Andrew Gillum, the former mayor of Tallahassee, Fla., who was considered a rising star in Democratic politics, and who came within a half a percentage point of winning the 2018 gubernatorial race against Ron DeSantis. By March 2020, Gillum was hitting rock bottom:
Mr. Gillum was found in a Miami Beach hotel room last week when paramedics were called in to help another man who was suffering from a possible drug overdose.
“This has been a wake-up call for me,” Mr. Gillum said. “Since my race for governor ended, I fell into a depression that has led to alcohol abuse.”
The police found three small plastic bags of what appeared to be crystal meth in the room at the Mondrian Hotel in Miami’s South Beach. Mr. Gillum denied any methamphetamine use and said he was in town for a friend’s wedding.
Police officers, who found him vomiting in the bathroom, said they were unable to question him “due to his inebriated state,” according to an incident report filed by the Miami Beach Police Department.
Gillum, no longer facing criminal charges of corruption, appears to be in a better state now.
It’s understandable that candidates would take defeats hard; it’s their name on the ballot and their reputation on the line. But defeats happen in politics, all the time. Some of the biggest, most successful, and most influential political figures in America lost races at one point or another. Ronald Reagan lost presidential campaigns in the primaries of 1968 and 1976. Bill Clinton lost a congressional campaign in 1974 and his gubernatorial reelection bid in 1980; Barack Obama lost his bid for a U.S. House seat in a 2000 primary.
As my friend Cam Edwards noted yesterday, “Even if you think Justin Fairfax got a raw deal or was the victim of political machinations in an attempt to reduce pressure on Ralph Northam to resign over his blackface scandal, being the target of a smear campaign still doesn’t justify or excuse murdering your spouse.”
ADDENDUM: Last year, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani earned $1,643 in music royalties from his works as the rapper “Young Cardamom.”
Credit where it’s due to the mayor, who celebrated Tax Day like the Joker pledging to terrorize Gotham, for a good line when he said, “A lot of people say they’re listening [to my music]. . . . They’re not listening.”