Scientist David Sabatini wins $6M verdict against MIT misconduct claims

A Massachusetts jury recently awarded scientist David Sabatini $6 million and rejected the sexual-misconduct claims that had ended his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and shuttered his research laboratory at the Whitehead Institute. The jury’s seven women and six men brought a measure of objectivity and decency to the facts that the leaders of MIT and Whitehead could not.

Sabatini’s case is a perfect example how DEI and the rest of the left’s political crusades are so destructive to America. The verdict vindicates Sabatini, who has long maintained that his accuser, Kristin Knouse, had lied. But the legal fight took years of his life and nearly ruined him financially. And it shouldn’t be the end of the story. The trial exposed how thin — and how rotten — MIT’s and Whitehead’s case against Sabatini had been all along. MIT and Whitehead owe the public a reckoning. The Trump administration must investigate MIT and Whitehead.

Before 2021, scientists revered Sabatini as one of the greatest molecular cell biologists alive. He ran a major lab at Whitehead, held a professorship at MIT, served as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and received tens of millions of dollars in federal funding. Sabatini’s ” groundbreaking ” research could yield new cancer and aging therapies and save countless lives. Predictions swirled that he’d one day win the Nobel Prize.

It all came crashing down. Evidence at trial shows that Knouse — who led her own lab — launched a campaign she termed “covert operation dethrone” to topple Sabatini after he ended their roughly year-and-a-half-long relationship. She messaged one friend that Sabatini was going to be “Weinstein’ed out of science” ; another that she was “out for blood.”

Knouse told colleagues that Sabatini had harassed and assaulted her, and in the fall of 2020 took her claims to Whitehead’s new director, Ruth Lehmann. Lehmann proved an eager audience. After one meeting, Knouse reported that Lehmann acted “as if she wants a formal reason to fire” Sabatini. After another meeting, Lehmann “indicated she plans to fire him.” “If I don’t do this,” Lehmann reportedly said , “how can anyone ever believe I’m committed to changing this place?” Lehmann denied making the comments in a later deposition.

Whitehead eventually hired a law firm to conduct an investigation, but later reporting and trial evidence indicate the investigation had a largely predetermined outcome. The firm’s final report reached no conclusion on whether Sabatini’s and Knouse’s relationship had been consensual. Mostly it faulted Sabatini for not reporting his relationship with Knouse to HR and for a “sexualized undercurrent” in his lab –an environment which it deemed, along with the relationship, to violate an anti-harassment policy.

Perhaps most shocking, though, the report took umbrage with Sabatini’s focus on “science above all else” and his “propensity” to “praise or gravitate” toward those demonstrating “scientific success.”

The fallout was immediate. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute quickly fired Sabatini; that same day, after Whitehead told him it would dismiss him, he resigned.

Which might leave you wondering: Did administrators have no sense of proportionality, no sense of the gravity of removing Sabatini — that it would wreck not just one man and one career but an entire research ecosystem?

But then it’s always easier to destroy than create.

Lehmann was, after all, a DEI warrior. She ranked “diversity and disparities,” alongside research, as one of the areas most “important for science.” As Whitehead director, she hired DEI officers and instituted a new DEI Council, DEI Seminar Series, DEI Heritage Email series, and an internship program targeting “historically underrepresented groups.” And she oversaw both a DEI strategic plan that pledged to hire “diverse talent” and the publication of Whitehead’s first DEI report, which touted the “increasing diversity in our community” alongside statistics showing a decrease in the percentage of white employees between 2020 and 2022.

After Sabatini’s removal from Whitehead, Nergis Mavalvala, MIT’s dean of science, was part of a three-member committee that convened to consider his tenure at MIT. It was a solemn assignment: revocations of tenure anywhere are exceedingly rare, and there’s no public record of a single case ever at MIT.

Nevertheless, Mavalvala testified at trial that the committee hadn’t spoken to any former members of Sabatini’s lab about the veracity of the accusations against him — including the 34 who had written in his support. In early 2022, the committee recommended that MIT revoke Sabatini’s tenure. Under intense pressure, Sabatini resigned.

What explains the committee’s actions? Here, too, trial evidence is damning.

On the day Whitehead gave Sabatini the law firm’s report, Mavalvala wrote to Lehmann about its contents and assured her that “there is complete alignment between our viewpoints on this whole sordid affair.” She then added : “I find myself say[ing] ‘Yeah, go Ruth!’ almost every time you speak. You are at the vanguard of cultural change, and that is never easy or quick.”

Cultural change . Not the pursuit of science. Not academic excellence. Not moral leadership.

Her later emails heap exuberant praise on the Whitehead director, with lines such as : “OMG, you are a trailblazer Ruth.”

On the stand, Mavalvala said that her committee’s investigation into Sabatini was unbiased and independent of Whitehead. Questioned about her emails, she retorted that her “alignment” with Lehmann concerned processes only, not the desired outcome of Sabatini’s case.

The jury laughed.

In the end, 13 ordinary citizens from a deep-blue state humiliated MIT and Whitehead by upholding due process and the dignity of every individual — regardless of race or gender. Their verdict is the latest sign that public trust in our academic institutions has collapsed.

So what next?

Thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Fair Admissions v. Harvard and the Trump administration’s crackdown on unlawful DEI practices, Whitehead has purged its website of materials that once touted its diversity initiatives. But insiders report that DEI is alive and well. Sabatini now runs a lab in Prague and, more recently, a Czech-affiliated one in Boston. To satisfy the demands of wokeness, America gave Europe one of our best scientists.

Knouse directs a lab at MIT, and the National Institutes of Health recently awarded her a large grant. Lehmann and Mavalvala continue in their posts. And neither MIT nor Whitehead has signaled any willingness to examine its conduct regarding Sabatini, to reconsider his employment, or to sanction anyone involved in this debacle.

MIT and Whitehead receive over a billion dollars annually in taxpayer funds. The public deserves an accounting of whether MIT and Whitehead used our money to further “cultural change,” the degradation of science, and the ruin of a man on a sham pretext. An investigation into the weaponization of DEI would right a deep wrong and signal a return to an America-first pursuit of scientific excellence. It would send the message that we should level our condemnation not against scientists who pursue “science above all else,” but against those who offer little but destruction in the name of progress.

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