No, it’s not Dr. Anthony Fauci. Sorry—though that man just needs to go away for inducing this nation into an unnecessary hysteria over COVID. We’re talking about David Sabatini. I didn’t know much about him other than he is supposedly a science god. He was world-renowned for his research on cancer. He had a ton of grants. He loved whisky. He’s described as a “once-in-a-generation” scientist whose life has been laid waste by the Me Too era. Did he do anything wrong? No. Not really. The relationship that spurred the end of his career was consensual. The allegations of “bro culture” in the laboratory seem to be misplaced as well. Sabatini is now unemployed and totally radioactive to the science world. Anyone who is caught even offering an olive branch or lifeline to the guy seems to whip the woke mob into full froth. Suzy Weiss had a lengthy post on Substack about the fall of this man, and what got him in trouble. It’s pretty low-key. It’s not even controversial. It wasn’t illegal. It was a woman, Amanda Knouse, who apparently had some other underlying issues but decided to direct her fire on him when he pulled away.
Here’s the thing, Weiss added that the two agreed on some ground rules regarding their relationship. They could both see other people. He was in the process of getting divorced. She was an incoming laboratory fellow. Both worked for Whitehead Institute. He was a tenured MIT professor as well. Some had him on track to winning a Nobel Prize. It’s the 180-degree twist here that’s frightening. During COVID, this woman just turned, and for no good reason. Look, there might be one, but Knouse refused to speak with Weiss for this story. It’s tragic what happened (via Substack/Common Sense):
The entrance to the wormhole can be found in Rockville, Maryland, at a hotel that Sabatini was staying at while attending a conference about lysosomes and cancer sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. There, on the night of April 18, 2018, after an evening of whiskey tasting—Sabatini is a whiskey aficionado—he and Kristin Knouse had sex. Knouse was an incoming cancer researcher at the Whitehead, where she would also head her own lab; hers focused on liver regeneration. He was 50. She was 29. He had split with his wife, and was in the process of getting a divorce.
The next month they met up at Knouse’s condo near Boston Common where they discussed a few ground rules for their tryst. They agreed they could see other people. Knouse, Sabatini remembers, had ongoing flings with men who she referred to with nicknames like “anesthesiologist fuck buddy,” “finance bro,” and “physics professor,” and she wanted to keep it that way. Also, they wouldn’t tell anyone. Why complicate things at work? It was all supposed to be fun.
But then, in August 2018, the Whitehead adopted a new Consensual Sexual and Romantic Relationships Policy, which stated that lab heads couldn’t have a “consensual or sexual relationship” with any coworkers. “Not going to H.R. right then was my critical mistake,” Sabatini told me.
At the time, Sabatini didn’t think it mattered much. Things were fizzling. He still cared for Knouse, and they were still close—he had a cancer scare in late 2018, and when he found out he wasn’t dying, she was one of the few people he texted. But he was getting involved with another woman, a microbiologist in Germany.
Knouse didn’t want to let go. In January 2020 she texted, in part: “I get anxious when I don’t hear back from you and then I see you post stuff on Twitter and it provides an admittedly small and silly but still another bit of evidence to this growing feeling that you don't care about me in the way that I care about you.” He wrote back: “I am sorry but you are being crazy.” In another text, Knouse admitted feeling “stung.” She added: “I think it’s worth thinking about whether you want someone who matches your passion, intellect, and ambition.” He wrote back: “I have to explore this.” (Knouse declined to talk with me. This account is based on interviews with Sabatini, more than a dozen colleagues of both Sabatini and Knouse, legal filings, text messages, emails, and documents obtained exclusively by Common Sense.)
For a few months, Knouse broke off communication with him. Then Covid hit. In April 2020, she reached out via text. She made a dorky joke about the pandemic and enemas. They griped about Covid safety protocols. She invited him and his son to her family’s beach house on Cape Cod for some “low density private beach and pool action.” She bought a new red Audi and sent him a picture of it. Her grandmother died, and he told her he was sorry for her loss, and they went back and forth about her traveling to Pennsylvania for the funeral. “A big hug,” he texted her, “and a safe travels!”
Then, in late summer or early fall—when the whole country was gripped by protests and riots, and everyone was apologizing and reckoning—something changed.
In October 2020, Knouse texted her friends that she was “unpack[ing] a ton of suppressed abuse and trauma from an obvious local source”—an apparent reference to Sabatini. Knouse’s fellowship at the Whitehead was ending, and she didn’t apply for any faculty jobs there. When the new director, Ruth Lehmann, called Knouse to ask why, Knouse complained for the first time of being “harassed.”
This prompted Lehmann to hire a consulting firm to do an investigation. This led to a law firm coming into the mix after two “bro culture” complaints were lobbed by members of the lab. They were all told to do a survey. The report was 248 pages long. Sabatini knew he was in trouble when he was summoned by Lehmann. His lawyers told him he was going to be terminated. He opted to resign instead as his legal team insisted it could help him with job searches in the aftermath. Sabatini says he regrets that decision. As Weiss wrote, as soon as the law firm was hired, "it was already over for this once-in-a-generation scientist."
The main problem in this report is that he didn’t disclose this consensual relationship. That’s pretty much it. they also framed his whisky tastings in the office as frat parties. That was also not the case when Weiss spoke to former colleagues of Sabatini:
What had David Sabatini been found guilty of that merited this kind of punishment? Chiefly, failing to disclose his consensual relationship with Knouse. On top of that, the report found that Sabatini, in his day-to-day administration of the lab, violated the Whitehead’s Anti-Harassment Policy, since his “behavior created a sexualized undercurrent in the lab.” Sabatini’s relationship with Knouse exacerbated things, given his “indirect influence” over her, which violated the Anti-Harassment Policy and ran afoul of the “spirit” if not the letter of another of the institute's policies.
True, he didn’t supervise Knouse. He didn’t work directly with her. He never threatened her or proposed a quid pro quo. And he certainly didn’t have the power to fire her. But, according to the report, he had “experience, stature, and age” over her. Knouse’s apparent desire to continue their relationship only served to confirm his influence: “That she felt the need to act ‘fun’ to impress Sabatini underscores how Sabatini’s words and actions profoundly impacted her,” the lawyers wrote.
Nor did the lawyers care for the happy hours and whiskey tastings that Sabatini sometimes hosted in his office, which betrayed his “apparent ‘friendliness’ and general propensity to have ‘fun.’” (Knouse, in her counterclaim, says the events were “drunken,” and “conversations quite frequently veered to the sexual.”)
“While we have not found any evidence that Sabatini discriminates against or fails to support females in his lab, we find that Sabatini’s propensity to praise or gravitate toward those in the lab that mirror his desired personality traits, scientific success, or view of ‘science above all else,’ creates additional obstacles for female lab members,” the report concluded.
This was baffling to everyone I spoke to: Nine of Sabatini’s current and former lab employees, a current faculty member at the Whitehead, and half a dozen top doctors and scientists in Sabatini’s field. Most of them would not speak on the record for fear of being associated with Sabatini and derailing their own careers. “It’s impossible to be honest about this and preserve your own skin,” says a scientist who recently worked under Sabatini.
That trainee called the report’s depiction of the lab an “alternate reality,” and the characterization of Sabatini as lascivious and retaliatory “deeply insane.”
“They have the wrong guy,” a female scientist who knows Sabatini and Knouse told me. A female former trainee told me that the climate in Sabatini’s lab was “one of excellence.” She said that Sabatini could be demanding, but he was never demeaning or unfair. “I try to emulate him in my own lab,” another female former trainee said. A third female trainee said the lab could be informal, but it was hardly a locker room. “It just wasn’t in the air.“
I asked a former technician about the notorious whiskey tastings. “These weren’t keggers,” he said. “‘Bench scientists’ and ‘party’ don’t generally overlap.”
Weiss added that in the aftermath, Sabatini split his time between his brother’s house and that of his ex-wife. He could stand hearing the mail flap opening and shutting, all letters from institutions announcing that they’re cutting ties with him. he lost 35 pounds in three months, lost hair, cried, and was utterly ruined. He has filed a suit against Knouse, Whitehead labs, and director Lehmann. Knouse has filed a countersuit.
The post also shows how the court of public opinion is what poisoned his job offer at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Sabatini was an old friend of Dafna Bar-Sagi, the Vice Dean of Science at NYU Langone Health, offered him a lifeline, but the wolves were already out. Even after their legal team read the report, they concluded that Sabatini was essentially railroaded, no due process—but the bad press was just too much. He couldn’t take the job.
We’ll see how the rest of this plays out, but in the wake of the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp trial, this story offers the other side of the Me Too era. It can be devastating to people who have done nothing wrong. No doubt that there are legitimate stories that fall within this category, and plenty of bad dudes have been served justice after overwhelming evidence was presented. This is not one of those stories. The scary part is that liberals think this is collateral damage. Shoring up due process protocols is not a priority when it very much should be. All it takes is one high-profile case of some woman lying, and this game is over.
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