I Went to Duke With Justin Fairfax and Cerina Fairfax. Decades Later, He Killed Her
I wrote about Justin and Cerina Fairfax for Vanity Fair. I wrestled with this one for a while and it was hard to write for reasons you'll see in the column, but I hope it makes people think about these systemic problems that put women's lives in danger.
There's a fundraiser for their two children, and you can contribute here.
Former Virginia lieutenant governor Justin Fairfax killed his wife, Cerina, months after she filed for divorce. The news about my old friend evokes the patterns that emerge in stories that end this way—with women violated, abused, and murdered.
The stereotype among Duke University haters is that it’s a four-year containment unit for assholes. That wasn’t always true in my experience as an undergraduate, but Duke was, in every sense, a rich kids’ school. Especially in the late 1990s, it was full of legacy admits—students whose parents had made big donations to get them either in or off the wait list, kids whose parents were well-connected, so they were too. The year I matriculated, as I remember it, less than 20% of the student body was on any kind of financial aid. (I was part of that 20%; my dad was a local lineman for Alabama Power, and no one in my family had gone to college.) If you weren’t wealthy and weren’t white, navigating Duke was that much harder for you.
Dr. Cerina Wanzer Fairfax, one of my classmates, was neither. I didn’t know her well, but Duke was small—there were maybe 1,700 students in our graduating class—and everyone was required to live on campus the first year, so I knew her by face and reputation. Cerina was a public school grad who didn’t come from money and was on a science-heavy pre-med track.
Like many of us who didn’t come from privilege—and nearly everyone willing to suffer the university’s notoriously brutal organic chem program—she was serious about why she’d come to Duke. She was cerebral, exuding confidence about her plans and intentions. Some people have a clarity of purpose so strong that it’s evident even to their acquaintances.
Justin Fairfax was a year behind us—and if he didn’t have a clarity of purpose, he certainly had a clarity of ambition. Justin and I spent time together working on student projects; he was charming, good-looking, and passionate about everything. He carried himself like a big man on campus, because he was one—at least, as much of one as you could be without being on the basketball team. If you’d asked me in 1999 to name the person from my era at Duke who was most likely to become president of the United States, I would’ve answered without hesitation: Justin Fairfax. He was very intense and tightly wound, as a lot of ambitious people are. At the time, that didn’t seem significant.
Justin and Cerina met at Duke, then got married in 2006. As many of us expected, she got her doctorate in dental surgery, and he ran for office. His career culminated when he was voted lieutenant governor of Virginia—then came crashing down after two women accused Justin of sexual assault, which he denied.
After he left office, he tried desperately and unsuccessfully to re-enter public life. He tried to pick up legal clients, but couldn’t find enough work. He went into debt, isolated himself, and began drinking daily. According to friends, he became obsessed with clearing his name. When the allegations came out, a former acquaintance told me on Bluesky, “That was when he really bared his teeth.”
Two weeks ago, Justin Fairfax shot and killed his wife, then himself, while their teenage children were in their family home. Cerina, known professionally as Dr. Wanzer Fairfax, was running a successful dental practice in Virginia and was in the process of divorcing Justin. Court papers indicate that he had been ordered to move out of the house they shared.
Cerina was supporting the family on her own, both financially and emotionally. In 2025, she filed for divorce. She’d installed cameras in the house, which suggests she anticipated she might need evidence of what was happening within its walls. Justin, meanwhile, refused to move out because, as he told a friend, he was worried the courts would accuse him of abandoning their family. Eventually, a judge ordered him to leave and granted custody of their children to Cerina. Two weeks before the court stood to enforce that move-out order, Justin took a gun—which, according to court documents, he bought with money intended for his children’s horseback riding lessons—and murdered his wife.
When I first heard the news of what Justin had done, I could not reconcile it with the person I knew way back then. When someone you know and like, and believe has the potential to do great things, does something more horrific than you can imagine the worst person you’ve ever encountered doing, it screws you up. You wonder what’s wrong with your judgment: I thought Justin was a good person. Do I simply not know what a good person is?
The good person in this story is the person whose life he ended. And the more I think about what happened, the more I see the same patterns that emerge in stories that end this way—with women violated, abused, and killed. To me, two points stand out: the fact that universities are allowed to adjudicate sexual assault cases internally instead of treating them like the violent felonies they are, and the fact that the legal system incentivizes divorcing couples to live together during their separation process because otherwise they may give up legal rights, even though women killed by their partners have often tried to leave. (Black women in particular are more at risk, and are murdered by men at two and a half times the rate white women are.)
I could not bring myself to closely examine the first accusation when the sexual assault allegations against Justin came out, because one of his accusers told a story that was familiar in the worst kind of way. Meredith Watson, who accused Justin of raping her in 2000 at a frat party, was a sophomore when I was a senior. Before that, Watson said, she had been sexually assaulted by another Duke student, a basketball player, and that when she told a university administrator, they discouraged her from reporting the assault. Though she didn't name her alleged assailant at the time, according to friends of Watson, she told them the basketball player was Corey Maggette. She alleged that Justin said he knew she wouldn’t say anything about his assault because of what happened with Maggette. (Maggette denied the accusations in 2019. “I have never sexually assaulted anyone in my life and I completely and categorically deny any such charge,” he said. Duke declined to comment at the time.)
This rings true to me. I agree that the environment at Duke back then was hostile to women who’d been sexually assaulted, and I know this because I was also raped at Duke—at a frat party, by someone I didn’t know well, though I’d thought he was a “nice” guy. When it happened, I’d been at Duke long enough to understand that women who came forward with accusations would be pressured to adjudicate everything via the university system and a panel consisting of faculty members and students. Nothing ever seemed to happen to the men; the worst punishment on offer was a short suspension, which I don’t remember anyone actually getting. On a campus where 80% of the student body could afford the tuition, it goes without saying that most of the alleged perpetrators were wealthy, some probably the children of donors and other patrons. If I came forward, my entire sexual history would be litigated in front of administrators, professors, and classmates. I couldn’t afford a lawyer, but my rapist probably could. I felt that if I went to the administration, I would be the one pushed out—not my rapist. (Duke did not respond to a request for comment.)
So I can imagine the futility and despair that Watson felt when she tried to report her rape, and why she didn’t try to report Justin after that. She had already been taught that nothing would happen—that if anything, she’d be made to feel guilty about endangering the future of a young man with incredible potential.
Somehow, it’s only the men who seem to have incredible potential.
I have no idea what Cerina thought when the allegations first came out. But I’m inclined to believe that Justin was a different person with her—at least in the beginning. I don’t believe she would have married him had she known he was an alleged rapist. I imagine her tormenting herself over whether she really knew who she was married to.
Regardless, when Cerina eventually decided that she could not be married to Justin anymore, he behaved the way violent men whose wives try to leave them have behaved so often. He was angry, lied to the police that she had abused him (an allegation that was disproven by the camera footage), and refused to accept her decision.
I know enough divorced people who’ve had difficult separations to have seen this sort of thing before too, though thankfully never with the same horrific conclusion. In these situations, the separating parties are told that they need to stay in their house if they want an equitable split; if one of them moves out, it could be construed as abandonment of the family.
Hospital data from a Finnish study shows that the potential for intimate partner violence peaks in the 6 to 12 months before divorce—and that women with children are at higher risk after their marriages end. Despite this, American family courts perpetuate a system that forces women at risk of partner violence to be in close proximity to the person most likely to kill them if they want to get a fair judgment about housing and custody of their children.
This is insanity, but it’s also misogyny. It makes perfect sense that people in the middle of an acrimonious divorce would not want to live under the same roof. But we live in a country that still has largely conservative attitudes about marriage and, as a matter of policy, has made divorce intentionally difficult. This has the effect, also intended, of keeping women in marriages, even when they are harmful for them. The GOP has targeted no-fault divorce for precisely this reason. Given that women currently initiate about two-thirds of divorces, making it harder to divorce disproportionately benefits men.
This systemic push to keep women in situations that are dangerous for them—for the benefit of men—has killed too many women. It’s one of the direct reasons why Cerina is dead.
I can’t help thinking, too, about another factor: how, when men face actual consequences for sexual impropriety or assault, instead of looking inwardly, far too many of them lash out, blame women, and fail to acknowledge the harm they’ve done.
Justin had been obsessed with “clearing his name.” His process of doing so involved disparaging his accusers, browbeating people and institutions that no longer wanted to be associated with him, and refusing to accept a path that precluded a return to being a public figure. This betrays a deep sense of entitlement and contempt for women that also feels awfully familiar: Think of the comedian who goes back on tour and jokes about how much the accusations against him cost; the many people in the Epstein files who cannot believe anyone is up in arms about women (read: these 16 year olds), who absolutely knew what they were doing when they got involved with the notorious financier; the multi-hyphenate entertainer who’s unsuccessfully hiding behind a Bible on an attempted redemption tour. They may not end up killing anybody, but deep down, in my opinion, they believe they’ve done nothing wrong. They think they deserve what they stole from those women, and that they deserve their prior success. Most importantly, they believe that they are in control of the narrative.
They’re the ones who decide what they can and can’t do with women’s bodies. They decide who gets to leave the marriage and on what terms. They decide how the public will view them. And when the people they’ve outraged and harmed tell them “no”—that they are no longer allowed in the workplace, in the public sphere, in the marriage—their dominant reaction is rage.
Justin’s sense of entitlement led him to believe that he was the real victim. As a result, he had a sort of narcissistic collapse. The demise of his political career upended his life, and it enraged him.
This is an even more intractable problem than colleges being allowed to adjudicate sexual assaults and courts making it onerous for women to physically separate from their partners. Men who cannot handle accountability, cannot admit that they’re wrong, cannot actually face the hard work of self-examination and repair, are dangerous to everybody.
There are a lot of them out there right now. And unlike Justin, some of them do actually get elected president.
Thank you for reading.
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This one took a lot out of me, but don't worry, I'll go back to skewering billionaire oligarchs shortly.
Elizabeth