The murder of Cerina Fairfax is inexcusable, but the calculated political destruction of Justin Fairfax deserves both scrutiny and culpability.
by Shaun Kenney
The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.”
— Greg Iles, “The Quiet Game” (1999)
One never truly knows the weight each of us might be carrying. What we can say is that no one has the unmitigated right to load that weight on others.
Justin Fairfax — a former lieutenant governor of the Commonwealth — was carrying a great weight indeed. Having been nearly a breath away from becoming governor himself after the Northam scandal involving blackface and a Ku Klux Klan hood, Fairfax found himself the target of a vicious and personal character assassination at the hands of McAuliffe’s public relations goons only for then-Democratic Attorney General Mark Herring to have been caught in his own blackface scandal. Northam was rehabilitated and even had the testicular fortitude to endorse Democratic candidates and have his endorsement welcomed in turn.
Fairfax managed to survive his term as lieutenant governor only to find that he was unemployable — the dark cloud of allegations being disproven one by one to an audience that didn’t give a damn. Fairfax’s political career was destroyed, his personal career was destroyed, his reputation was destroyed, and his self-worth was destroyed before consuming his marriage as well.
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