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The investigation to determine whether the Governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, figured in a picture of the racist yearbook while a medical student was costing his alma mater, Eastern Virginia Medical School, 368,000 dollars, according to invoices obtained following a request from FOIA by The Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk.
Northam initially apologized for appearing in the photo of a blackface man and a man in Klu Klux Klan's costume. When calls began to make him resign, he backtracked and said that he did not believe that it was him on the photo of his directory page.
His alma mater of the medical school then launched an investigation to determine the identity of the men in the photo, among other violations of the protocol that allowed the printing of the photo. They hired the law firm McguireWoods to conduct the investigation. The firm spent 727 hours and revealed that the names of the people in the 1984 photo were inconclusive. The bills reveal that they had charged nearly $ 400,000 to the school.
The school was trying to determine who was in the photo, how this photo allowed the editorial standards to appear on the page of the directory and whether offensive material was listed in other directories, according to a report obtained in May by Fox News.
McguireWoods has contacted more than 80 current and former EVMS students since 1983 and interviewed 30 of them, including faculty, alumni and students, as well as staff members. They interviewed the current presidents of the student body and the student government association, as well as five staff members of the 1984 yearbook. In the 36-page report presented to the public on May 21, there was not enough 'information to' conclusively determine the identity of one or other of the individuals pictured '.
He determined that the blackface photo on Northam's page was not an anomaly – there were three in the 1984 yearbook. A total of 10 photos of Blackface appeared in the EVMS directories of 1976 to 2013.
Northam's political action committee also hired a law firm to investigate the photo, which hired a biometrics and forensic company to perform a facial photo recognition test, but the company said that she "was not of quality for a comparison."
The report revealed that EVMS chairman Richard Homan was aware of the photo while Northam was running for the presidential election and had decided not to make it public.
The company had investigated nine people and charged the school between $ 265 and $ 575 an hour, according to The Virginian-Pilot. The work began three days after the photo on February 4 and ended on June 24.
Homan could not be immediately contacted for comment, but he told The Washington Post in May that the purpose of the investigation was to "discover what administrative control had possibly been exercised".
Northam, after recusing his apology and saying he did not believe it appeared on the photo, admitted to having darkened his face to get dressed in Michael Jackson the same year. "You remember those things," Northam said, according to the report. He also said that he was slim when he was young and that the person on the picture is thicker than Northam remembers. The man in the picture holds a beer in his right hand and Northam asserted that he would usually hold a beer in his left hand.
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