David Sabatini

[kaysixteen]

Anyone read and wish to comment on the case of former MIT prof Sabatini, as chronicled by the Boston Globe Spotlight team in a two part report Sun and Mon of this week (I have no non-paywalled link to offer, sadly)?

[Wahoo Redux]

What's to say?  Another pathological chauvinist-pig harasser bites the dust.  Good riddance.

Best Buy sucks, BTW. 

[Wahoo Redux]

Okay...Sabatini's situation is a bit more complicated than it appears on a cursory Google search.

Here is the article you want to post, K16:

The Free Press: He Was a World-Renowned Cancer Researcher. Now He's Collecting Unemployment.

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.

It would be beneficial to have Knouse's point-of-view included.

So what exactly had those 248 pages [of the report which accused Sabatini of misconduct] said? What had David Sabatini been found guilty of that merited this kind of punishment? Chiefly, failing to disclose his consensual relationship with Knouse [Sabatini's accuser]. 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. 

[Wahoo Redux]

And for the rebuttal (or not), here is the full report:

https://mtorleaks.substack.com/p/the-entire-whitehead-has-sabatini