Jury finds David Sabatini's accuser lied and awards him seven-figure payout

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Scientist wins payout after jury rules his colleague lied dailymail.com

A jury has ruled that the harassment accusation which ended biologist David Sabatini's career was a lie, and awarded him a seven-figure payout, the Daily Mail reports. The claim came from Kristin Knouse, a much younger colleague. What it cost him was tenure at MIT, his laboratory at the Whitehead Institute, and fourteen years of work on the mTOR pathway, the cell-growth mechanism at the center of aging research.

Sabatini was among the most cited names in his field when the accusation arrived. A laboratory of that standing takes a decade to assemble and a committee meeting to dissolve. The institutions acted while the claim was unproven, and when a jury rejected it, the decisions stood and the institutions carried no cost. The only party whose losses were total from the moment the accusation became public was the man it named — and the only one who could recover anything, on the condition that a jury agreed, years after the fact, that he was guilty of nothing.

A verdict can attach a number to a false claim. It cannot reattach a tenure decision, restaff a laboratory, or reopen the calculations that funders had already made in the years when the accusation stood unchallenged and no defense had been heard. For a university, acting on an unproven claim is the cheap move: the accused leaves, the headlines pass, and the decision is never re-examined against what a court eventually finds. The bill for being wrong has, in this affair, been presented to nobody who made one.

MIT and the Whitehead Institute quietly moved on years ago. The payout is the only part of Sabatini's career the legal system was able to price.