Jury Awards $6 Million to Scientist Accused by Colleague of Sexual Misconduct

A scientist who says he was forced to resign after being accused of sexually harassing a colleague has been awarded $6 million by a jury that decided that the scientist was defamed by the colleague.

A jury in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, on Oct. 16 sided with Dr. David Sabatini over his former colleague, Dr. Kristin Knouse, the Boston Globe reported.

“David Sabatini is incredibly grateful that a jury of his peers finally salvaged his reputation,” Lisa Arrowood, Sabatini’s attorney, told The Epoch Times in an email.

Knouse and her lawyer did not return requests for comment by publication time. Ellen Zucker, the lawyer, told news outlets that an appeal is planned.

Sabatini said in a 2021 complaint that he and Knouse began a consensual sexual relationship from April 2018 for about a year. He said he ended the relationship, and she kept trying to engage him.

When she accepted it was over, she began to spread sexual harassment allegations, which triggered a probe of his laboratory at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, where Knouse also has a lab, according to the complaint.

Sabatini also named the institute and its director as defendants.

“By their individual and collective actions, which continue to date, the Defendants ensured that Dr. Sabatini’s professional and personal reputations were destroyed, and his career as a leading scientific mind was effectively over,” the complaint said.

Knouse said in a countersuit that Sabatini coerced her into having sex with him. The document said that the case was “about a paradigm too long pervasive in the sciences, where a young woman, seeking mentorship and training, is subjected to an implicit quid pro quo and a hostile work environment, where she is victimized by a powerful man and when she seeks redress, she faces tired tropes and caricatures of women, women scientists and women leaders, all designed to denigrate her and damage her prospects.”

The investigation launched by Whitehead concluded that Sabatini was not credible, that he interfered with the probe, that he created a lab culture that was rife with fear of retaliation, that he violated Whitehead policy by using inappropriate, sexist, and sexualized language in the lab, and that he “improperly leveraged his status as a preeminent senior scientist and senior member of Whitehead to garner favor, and to facilitate a secret sexual relationship with” Knouse.

A judge dismissed claims against Whitehead and its director before the trial started, ruling that Sabatini had not met the bar to continue pursuing the claims. Whitehead lawyers had said that it had no reason to doubt accusations from Knouse and others, and that Sabatini resigned after the investigation, before Whitehead took any action.

“The Board of Directors of Whitehead Institute has full confidence in the leadership of Director Ruth Lehmann, the Institute’s workplace policies and the process that included the 2021 investigation into Sabatini’s lab, which was conducted by an independent law firm,” Whitehead’s Board of Directors said in an emailed statement to The Epoch Times.

Arrowood, Sabatini’s lawyer, said the jury reached its decision because jurors saw Knouse’s text messages expressing a desire to be with Sabatini and jealousy when he left her for another woman.

“Unlike the Whitehead investigators, this jury had all of those text messages which were consistent with what he has said all along—this was a consensual relationship between them,” Arrowood said. “He hopes to get back to being remembered for his science and not for this controversy.”