Attorney Of Justin Fairfax’s Sexual Assault Accuser Says ‘Decades of Signs’ Existed Before Tragedy
Data from the Violence Policy Center found that nine out of 10 Black females are killed by a man that they know, often with a gun.
Black News 
The attorney of former Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax’s sexual assault accuser said “signs of his anger” existed for years, The New York Post reports.
Fairfax and his wife, Dr. Cerina Fairfax, were found dead in their Annandale home early April 16 in what is being described as a murder-suicide. Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis described the incident as “an ongoing domestic dispute surrounding what seems to be a complicated or messy divorce.”
Attorney Nancy Erika Smith, who represented Meredith Watson when she accused Fairfax of rape in 2000, released a statement claimed that “there were decades of signs of his anger and mistreatment of women, and he used the court system to intimidate his victims and news outlets,” Smith said.
An acquaintance of Fairfax said the sexual assault scandal took a toll on his marriage when “he couldn’t find a job really.”
“His wife was a dentist, and she had grown up very poor, and it was very important to her to be financially stable and to have a good home for her children,” the acquaintance noted.
In 2019, Watson told Gayle King that she felt Fairfax used their friendship to his advantage when they were students at Duke University.
“He knew that the year prior, I had been raped by someone and that nothing was done about it. And he was a very good friend to me,” Meredith Watson told King at the time. “Which is why I never would’ve expected anything like this from him.”
March for Our Lives executive director Jaclyn Corin labeled Dr. Farifax’s death as a continuous pattern of the disproportionate impact of domestic gun violence on Black women.
“Their experiences are often left out of the broader conversation,” Corin said.“If we’re not naming who is most affected, we’re not building solutions that actually meet the scale or the reality of the problem.”
The Fairfax case comes just weeks after Vice Mayor of Coral Springs Nancy Metayer Bowen was allegedly shot and killed in her home by her husband, Stephen Bowen.
Data from the Violence Policy Center found that nine out of 10 Black females are killed by a man that they know, often with a gun. The 2023 study revealed that 733 Black females were murdered by men in single-victim/single-offender incidents at the rate of 3.1 in every 100,000, compared to the rate for white women being 1.2 for every 100,000.
RELATED CONTENT: Former Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax and Wife Cerina Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide
