For about 24 hours in February 2019, it looked as if Justin Fairfax was in line to become Virginia’s governor.
Gov. Ralph Northam’s infamous “blackface” yearbook page had just been revealed. Rumors were rife that Northam would resign. Northam called Fairfax — then the state’s lieutenant governor — on the night of Feb. 1 and told him he’d “sleep on” his decision.
Fairfax was so certain that he was about to be thrust into the governor’s chair that he called his staff together to strategize how to proceed. “With Democratic leaders universally calling for Northam to step down, Fairfax summoned a handful of reporters to his office on a Saturday and discussed the logistics of his presumed rise to the governorship,” The Washington Post reported.
Northam didn’t resign. Fairfax soon had other problems: allegations of sexual assault. He vigorously denied those but never recovered from the accusations. His law firm put him on leave, his alma mater (Duke University) asked him to leave a governing board, multiple staff members quit. Fairfax went from thinking he was just hours away from a swearing-in to such an abrupt fall that when he sought the party’s nomination for governor in 2021, he managed just 3.54% of the vote. After leaving office, he became the equivalent of a political “non-person,” never mentioned, never invited. It’s difficult to remember a political star in Virginia who rose so fast and blinked out so fast.
On Thursday, Fairfax made the news in the worst way possible: Police said he had killed his wife and then turned the gun on himself. Fairfax was 47, still a youthful age in politics. Cerina Fairfax was a prominent dentist in Northern Virginia. Police said the couple had been going through a divorce. The Violence Policy Center says there are about nine murder-suicides each week in the United States and two-thirds of them involve an intimate partner.
Fairfax had spent years trying to get the FBI to open an investigation that he said would clear his name. It never came. John Reid, last year’s Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, endured some allegations (which he denied) at the start of last year’s campaign. Reid, a former broadcaster who now runs The Reid Revolution podcast, posted on social media Thursday: “Justin called me several times last year after what was done to me to encourage me not to give up. My understanding from speaking with him privately was that he was ruined by what he swears were total lies. When I did the reporter thing and called around, his close associates said he couldn’t find or keep steady employment and that things had been pretty rough.”
This is a tragic end to a once-promising political career. Fairfax’s time in Virginia politics was brief — the lieutenant governorship was the only office he was ever elected to — but consequential. As the state Senate’s presiding officer, he broke ties that liberalized the state’s abortion laws and legalized personal possession of small amounts of marijuana. (What legislators and the governor are dealing with now is how to legalize retail sales.) He was prepared to cast a tie-breaking vote to expand Medicaid in Virginia until the politics changed and the measure passed the Senate 23-17.
Fairfax was the first statewide political figure to come out against the Mountain Valley Pipeline. He made news when he refused to take part in what was then the state Senate’s annual observance of Robert E. Lee’s birthday. He posted on social media: “I will be stepping off the dais today in protest of the Virginia Senate honoring Robert E. Lee … I’ll be thinking of this June 5, 1798, manumission document that freed my great-great-great grandfather Simon Fairfax from slavery in Virginia.” He carried those papers with him when he was inaugurated as lieutenant governor and often spoke of his family’s journey from slavery to the state Capitol.
Had the tumultuous events of February 2019 never happened, Fairfax would have surely been a leading contender for his party’s nomination for governor in 2021. Had Northam resigned, and the sexual assault allegations never happened, Fairfax might have been in the rare position of serving out Northam’s term and then running for a term all his own. That could have given him seven straight years in the governorship, something no one has ever done. Fairfax could have become one of the most significant political figures in Virginia history. That’s not how things worked out, though.
On Thursday, Virginia leaders from across the spectrum issued statements invoking the word “tragedy” and expressing concern for the Fairfax family’s two teenage children, who were home at the time of their parents’ murder-suicide. Only Cozy Bailey Sr., president of the NAACP, mentioned Fairfax’ political career: “His advocacy for criminal justice reform, voting rights, and women’s rights has left an indelible mark on our community.”
Almost universally, the statements about the Fairfaxes’ deaths included the phone number of the National Domestic Violence hotline (800-799-7233), the Virginia Family Violence and Sexual Assault Hotline (800-838-8238) or the Virginia Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (988).
