{ the Confounding Conserv a tive}


The woman in the room had awakened to an intruder climbing onto her bed. She kicked him and bolted upstairs. The man fled through the window he had entered. ¶ Cuccinelli had never heard a cry so loud and long, so pained and panicked. It became a call to action. He trans- formed himself into a self-taught campus expert and agitator on the problem of sexual assault. He helped establish Sexual Assault Facts and Education (SAFE), a student group that raises awareness about the issue, and designed a brochure on preventing sexual assault. Sur- vivors confided in him. It was emotionally scalding work. ¶ By April 1991, he was standing with a candle in his hand on the steps of the uni- versity’s Rotunda, the historic center of the genteel campus designed by Thomas Jefferson. Cuccinelli was an organizer of dozens of student protesters who occupied the steps for 134 hours — one for each of the 134 alleged victims of sexual assault at the university the previous year — and demanded that the university fund the new full-time position of sexual assault education coordinator. ¶ “The university tried like hell to talk us out of it,” recalls Alexia Pittas, another leader of the demonstra- tion, now a lawyer in Savannah. “I can remember Ken standing next to me. Ken said, ‘Lex, I’ll go to jail with you. I’ll go to jail for this.’ ”


K Pittas was surprised. Cuccinelli


showed signs of being what some cam- pus social anthropologists referred to as the classic “Joe Wahoo,” the preppy, careerist, gung-ho U-Va. male, clad in J. Crew or the equivalent, baseball cap worn backward. Members of this tribe did not collaborate with Women’s Cen- ter feminists such as Pittas, who thought that fraternities should be banned “be- cause of the predatory nature of men drinking in packs.” Cuccinelli was a frat boy by inclination; he rushed a frater- nity but didn’t end up joining because events conflicted with training to be- come a residential adviser. “I said to him, ‘Why are you doing


this?’ ” Pittas recalls. “This isn’t your issue. I remember him looking at me and saying: This is everybody’s issue.” Just hours into the vigil, the uni-


versity proposed hiring a part-time coordinator. The vigil continued for the


full 134 hours. Before the year was out, a full-time coordinator was hired. Victory. “The thing about Ken Cuccinelli


is, there’s right and there’s wrong, and there’s very little of a liberal gray in between,” Pittas says. “If he deems something to be wrong, he will pursue it, no matter the cost.”


over the years, those costs have been measured in lonely stands, partisan de- rision, dismayed allies. Cuccinelli was always willing to pay. He lost a lot of battles, but he won all of the elec- tions. Now, at 42, he stands as one of the most high-profile, active attorneys general in the history of the Common- wealth of Virginia. His willingness to charge into the most monumental and defining issues of the day — including health care, climate change and the na- ture of government itself — has made


14 The WashingTon PosT Magazine | august 1, 2010


en Cuccinelli was at his desk past midnight, laboring over calculus homework, when he heard a long, loud scream. It came from an adjacent base- ment bedroom in the group house he rented with some friends that summer of 1989 in Charlottesville, where he was a student at the University of Virginia.


Above: Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccine Below: The then-state senator from Fairfax, at


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