On Friday, October 23rd, I spoke with David Sabatini, 58, a scientist who formerly held positions at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, the Howard Hughes Medical Institution, and MIT. He had been on track to win the Nobel Prize right up until early 2021 — which he told me was his “last moment of happiness” — when his life and career were upended. The woman he had engaged in a consensual sexual relationship with between 2018 and 2019, Whitehead fellow Dr. Kristin Knouse, accused him of sexual assault and rape, and began claiming he was the ‘Weinstein of science’ — but only after he ended things and she found out he had moved on and was seeing another woman. He was later accused of perpetuating a “bro culture” in his lab.

As a result, he was fired from the Howard Hughes Medical Institution, which had funded his work at MIT, and forced to resign from the Whitehead Institute immediately. He was also placed on indefinite leave at MIT, from which he resigned in 2022 after a committee of three faculty members recommended his tenure be revoked. When NYU’s Grossman School of Medicine tried to hire him, student and faculty protests led him to withdraw his name from consideration. Things turned around somewhat in 2023, when Bill Ackman and an anonymous donor pledged $25 million to fund his research, and he was able to attempt to rebuild his career at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague — he was even able to open a Boston branch of his new lab in 2024. Still, he told me, it was never the same, especially with the jet lag and fatigue from all the travel this arrangement required of him.

Exactly two weeks before we spoke, on October 16th, a jury of seven women and six men found that Knouse had defamed Sabatini and interfered with his work. The jury rejected all of her counterclaims against him. He was awarded $6 million in damages, which comes out to $10 million with interest. Knouse is appealing the decision.

What follows is a lightly edited version of our conversation. As I exited our video call, all I could think was: here is a scientist who has made some of the biggest breakthroughs of our age — a man who is exceptional, definitionally abnormal in the best sense of the word. Here he is, begging for “normal.”

The people who put him in such a position — including Kristin Knouse — remain employed by the Whitehead Institute.

—Neeraja Deshpande

Neeraja Deshpande: Do you feel vindicated?

David Sabatini: Yes. I’d been saying that once someone looks at all the data, at all the documents, they will come to a different conclusion. And I think a jury trial — seven women, six men — is the gold standard for adjudicating things in the world.

It really made me so proud to be an American and to see how a jury trial operates — the formality, the care, the attempts to remove bias, the protocol. I hadn’t experienced those things.

But I’m really fundamentally upset that a jury of 13 people, 13 citizens who didn’t know me, and didn’t know her, looked at everything and came to a dramatically different conclusion than the Whitehead Institute and MIT. And why did they? For a simple reason: we, over years of litigation, obtained all the documents [of correspondence with Knouse], while the Whitehead Institute and MIT looked at 5% of the documents.

And so, the analogy I make is: here are scientific institutions that use the scientific method. It’s like writing a research paper and ignoring 95% of the data you have and just focusing on 5%. Are you likely to get the right story? You’re not. Everyone can understand that. The jury understood that.

Now, in terms of those five years, I’m very happy with the Ackmans and how they’ve treated me, with the students I’ve managed to hire in Prague, the postdocs and technicians, and what we’ve managed to build here in Boston. I’m eternally grateful for them.

Has it been an easy time for me? No. Is it the worst time of my life? Unequivocally the worst time, there’s no comparison. I’ve lost most of my hair. When I see old pictures online, I don’t even recognize myself. I was a different person.

But that’s what they wanted, they wanted me to suffer, they wanted pain, and they did it. They were very explicit in what they wanted. Thankfully, they wrote it all down, so that’s what the jury saw.

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