If the Washington Post didn’t have double standards, it would have no standards at all.
Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax’s office issued a statement Monday rejecting claims by a woman who alleges he sexually assaulted her in 2004, when they both attended the Democratic National Convention.
Almost as notable as Fairfax’s denial is the fact that the Washington Post was first approached by the alleged victim more than a year ago and decided not to publish her story. The Post explained Monday that it declined to report the woman’s allegations due to an absence of corroborating evidence.
It’s good to see that the newspaper has found a renewed interest in the standard of proof it abandoned entirely when it broke the story of similar allegations of sexual misconduct leveled last year against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Recall that it was the Post that first got Christine Blasey Ford to go on the record with her allegations.
The accusation against Virginia’s lieutenant governor was published first by the right-wing news site Big League Politics, which last week unearthed a 35-year-old photo reportedly showing Virginia’s Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam dressed in either blackface or KKK robes at a party (more here on that). Fairfax stands to take over the governorship, should Northam’s blackface scandal force the current governor out of office.
“Lt. Governor Fairfax … has never assaulted anyone — ever — in any way, shape or form,” reads a statement from Fairfax’s office. “The person reported to be making this false allegation first approached the Washington Post … more than a year ago, around the time of the Lieutenant Governor’s historic inauguration.
“The Post carefully investigated the claim for several months,” the Fairfax statement said. “After being presented with facts consistent with the Lt. Governor’s denial of the allegation, the absence of any evidence corroborating the allegation, and significant red flags and inconsistencies within the allegation, the Post made the considered decision not to publish the story. Tellingly, not one other reputable media outlet has seen fit to air this false claim.”
The Post published a slightly different, but mostly similar, version of events Monday: “The Washington Post, in phone calls to people who knew Fairfax from college, law school and through political circles, found no similar complaints of sexual misconduct against him,” the paper reported. “Without that, or the ability to corroborate the woman’s account — in part because she had not told anyone what happened — The Washington Post did not run a story.”
The article added, “She said she never told anyone about what happened at the time or in the years that followed until shortly before she approached The Post.” Notably absent from the paper’s explanation is any indication that it had indeed found “significant red flags and inconsistencies within the allegations” in the accuser’s story, as Fairfax’s office claims. But let’s put that aside for a moment and focus on the fact that the Post claims it didn’t publish the alleged victim’s story due to a lack of evidence.
What’s the paper’s excuse for running multiple stories repeating totally uncorroborated allegations of sexual abuse aimed at Kavanaugh? When the Post got Ford on the record amid the fight over Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination, the paper didn’t seem to be so concerned by the fact that she couldn’t provide a single piece of evidence to verify her claim that the judge tried to rape her when they were both in high school — or even that they’d ever met.
Note that, absent the leaks, her allegation could have been properly investigated by senators from both parties on the Senate Judiciary Committee without the resulting damage to privacy and reputation. But the Post, less worried in that case about the lack of evidence behind the allegation, plowed ahead.
In fact, as the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute’s Ted Frank noted Monday, there are fewer red flags in the Fairfax accuser’s story then there were in Ford’s. Unlike Ford, Fairfax’s accuser identifies the exact year and location of the alleged assault. Unlike Ford, Fairfax’s accuser belongs to the same political tribe, and therefore speaks against interest in at least one sense.
There are other things that bother me about the Post’s uneven treatment of the Fairfax and Kavanaugh accusers. For example, the paper’s first original coverage of the allegation against the lieutenant governor came only after Fairfax had issued a statement defending himself. Kavanaugh was afforded no similar benefit.
It’s fine if the Post passed on the Fairfax story because of a genuine lack of evidence. And there definitely doesn’t appear to be that much to go on, other than the word of a single accuser. But it’s hard to see the Post’s decision to spike her story as anything but politically biased considering how the paper gorged itself on nearly every flimsy and fantastic allegation hurled in Kavanaugh’s direction, no matter how ridiculous, again with no evidence to back any of it up.
It’s funny how editorial standards change, depending on the target’s party affiliation.
