RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) — Lawyers for Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax have sent another letter to prosecutors in North Carolina asking for a response to their request for a criminal investigation into the sexual assault allegations made against Fairfax in February.
An attorney with the firm Robbins, Russell, Englert, Orseck, Untereiner & Sauber LLP, Barry J. Pollack, sent a letter Tuesday to Durham County District Attorney Satana Deberry on behalf of the lieutenant governor.
In the letter, Pollack says he has not received a response to the first letter sent in June pushing prosecutors to begin investigating the
“public and serious criminal” allegations.
“On June 12, 2019, I wrote to inform you that Lt. Governor Fairfax welcomes the opportunity to meet with your office, to share information he has that is relevant to Ms. Watson’s allegation against him, and to testify under oath and penalty of perjury about that allegation. Unfortunately, your office has also not responded to my June 12th letter,” Pollack wrote in the letter.
Fairfax has been accused of sexual assault by two different women: Vanessa Tyson and Meredith Watson. Watson has accused Fairfax of raping her in 2000 while the two were students at Duke University.
The attorney for Watson shared a response to the June 12 letters. In the statement, Watson’s lawyer doubts Lt. Gov. Fairfax’s desire for “the public to know the truth,” claiming if Fairfax did, he would have welcomed a public hearing in the Virginia legislature.
Pollack also provided prosecutors with polygraph test results that Fairfax argues clear him of the sexual assault allegations.
In Pollack’s second letter to Deberry, he states there was an eyewitness to the events underlying Watson’s allegations.
“The eyewitness, whose identity I can share with you, has stated unequivocally that Ms. Watson’s allegation that she was raped or otherwise sexually assaulted by Mr. Fairfax is false,” Pollack wrote.
Watson’s attorney Nancy Erika Smith released a statement in response to the latest claims made in the July 9 letter to Durham County’s prosecutor. In the statement, Smith says Fairfax is continuing to dodge public hearings “tooth and nail.”
Five months after being accused of rape, Justin Fairfax changes his story yet again. First it didn’t happen then it was consensual, and now for the first time he implicates his buddy as a participant. If Justin Fairfax wants the truth to come out, this secret witness should testify under oath, in public, along with Mr. Fairfax, both his victims and their witnesses. Fairfax continues to fight a public hearing tooth and nail. That says it all.
NANCY ERIKA SMITH, ATTORNEY FOR MEREDITH WATSON
WAVY sister station WRIC 8News has reached out to the Durham County District Attorney for comment.
