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A Brilliant Scientist But a Very Stupid Man
David Sabatini was (so the story goes) one of the world’s most brilliant cancer researchers and a tenured professor at MIT. He headed up a team of cancer researchers who were working on a breakthrough understanding of the cellular mechanism that triggers cancer in the body. There was talk of a Nobel Prize. Then, he met a woman.
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 (deleted, rhymes with cuck) 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.
So this Sabatini fellow was thinking, “This is awesome. I get to screw a younger chick with no expectations for any kind of commitment. And there’s no way it can ever go wrong because we have a mutual understanding. I love modern sexual mores.”
Some two years later, he lost interest in the relationship at the same time his sex partner decided she wanted him to commit to her. Wow, who could have seen that coming? He broke things off, and she accepted the situation with dignity and took it as a “live and learn” moment. Just kidding, she filed a complaint with the HR department. She would claim that her texts and messages indicating that she was having a good time with the guy were actually symptoms of her abuse and trauma; an explanation so stupid only university officials or lawyers would believe it.
The institute’s administrators immediately hired lawyers to open an investigation.
The law firm Hinckley, Allen & Snyder (conducted) an investigation on “gender bias and/or inequities and a retaliatory leadership in the Sabatini lab.” The Whitehead never told Sabatini what he was accused of. Former lab members told me their co-workers were sobbing when they came out of meetings with the lawyers, saying that the lawyers had put words in their mouths. “They had a very strong agenda,” one of them told me.
Sabatini was not the woman’s supervisor, he didn’t even work directly with her. He never threatened her or proposed a quid pro quo. There was no indication that he had violated the institution’s sexual harassment policy. It didn’t matter. A woman had cried.
In the 24 hours after the report came out, Sabatini’s life fell apart. MIT put him on administrative leave. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, another prestigious non-profit that funds biomedical research and was paying Sabatini’s salary, fired him. He resigned from the Whitehead, and eventually MIT, at the advice of his lawyers who thought it would help him secure his next job. (“I one hundred percent regret that,” Sabatini told me).
Soon, the biotech startups he’d helped found— Navitor Pharmaceuticals, KSQ and Raze Therapeutics—started severing their relationships with him. Sabatini was axed from professorships, fellowships, and professional societies. Awards and grants were pulled. His income disappeared.
Wow, quite a price to pay for getting your rocks off, wasn’t it?
Feminist/Sexual Liberation propaganda holds that rules about monogamy, marriage, and fidelity were all made up by ‘the Patriarchy’ to oppress women and alphabet people. Nothing could be further from the truth. These rules about sex and relationships exist because unlimited sexual license is a recipe for disaster. These societal rules exist to protect both sexes from this kind of things.
Somewhere, Mike Pence is smiling.
Published in Culture
Make that four of us. But, I don’t think enough scorn is being heaped on this woman for violating the terms of her leftist, feminist, sexual revolutionary ideology. If she was truly an advocate of women’s equality, she’d take the break-up like a man and move on. Instead, she’s acting like a weak and helpless woman.
From a more conservative, Christian perspective, they both committed grave sexual sin. But, she’s the only one who, rather than repent and atone, set out to destroy the man’s life. She deserves all the opprobrium she gets. And then some. He may be stupid, but she’s evil.
No question about that. She’s abhorrent.
Are you for real?
The whole thing is bizarre, especially people not being more frightened by the statement: “While we found no evidence…”
The only thing that explains it is that people evidently believe Sabatini’s treatment of Knouse was in some way similar to the way a man is acting when he cheats a hooker out of money or a favor he owes her for services rendered. Though Sabatini’s involvement with Knouse wasn’t against any rules during the time they were involved, I guess people rationalize their decision to avoid taking any risks with their own careers by objecting to him being fired by telling themselves Sabatini treated Knouse shabbily. Then too, there is the possibility that, prior to the change in the workplace rules, Sabatini had other affairs with women he worked with or near that left them feeling used and dumped, isn’t there ? If that’s true, again, those affairs might have occurred before the work place rules changed. But the affairs would have affected how people felt at work (I mean, it must be lovely to find out your not someone’s only…you know) and that would make people eager to see him gone, or even more unenthusiastic about taking risks to stand up for him.
Bingo. And so is the culture in which she and her ilk marinate and fester, both symbiotically and codependently; and which supports and enables their pathologies. That needs to go.
Okay, I’ll go ahead and be annoying…
“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
If there’s a lot of truth in that ancient saying (I think there is, and I think feminists who deny it are lying to us and themselves.) Then women aren’t changing anytime soon. So, maybe the Sabatini types should smarten up and have only honorable relationships with women, relationships that aren’t any secret.
Vice President and Mrs Pence would think so.
Old, but not super-ancient. William Congreve, about 1700:
Not annoying, and I don’t really see your reach as devil’s advocacy. There is a lot of truth there (and the opportunity for some fruitful discussion about the love/hate opposition, and what actually is on the obverse of both the love and the hate coin. Elie Wiesel, call your office! C.S. Lewis, too.)
Human nature hasn’t changed for millennia and then some. Guys gonna guy. Girls gonna girl. That’s why I’m less interested in expressing surprise or outrage over the sexual peccadilloes of either Sabatini or Knouse (although, yeah, guys, smarten up and keep it in your pants; always a good idea; and unmarried ladies, keep your knees together) than I am in dismantling the hateful, destructive and entirely artificial and idiosyncratic constructs which have grown (especially in academia) to surround us; to stifle any behavior which doesn’t conform to the momentary demands of the woke mob; and to completely destroy anyone who deviates from the party line or transgresses the new normal. I think the right needs to get its act together and unite on that.
I wish I had a hundred “likes” for this.
By the way, I also get the feeling that Sabatini waited until after he had been to bed with the woman to have that talk about exactly how open he understood the sexual relationship, if it continued, to be.
Why would you think he wouldn’t lose his job in that version?
Contracts don’t help. They can claim coercion or what-not.
Well, the wife, or newly x-wife might want alimony or child support. So, maybe she wouldn’t try to get him fired.
Check out the stats on age of marriage. There may be a too early to marry AND a too old. Too early just doesn’t know themselves. Too old is too set in their ways with too much baggage.
They were separate cases. Trump’s attorney (Michael Cohen) did pay Daniels from his own money in the original matter, before it became a “case.” That original case is what led to the “was this an illegal campaign contribution” issue which raised questions in Congress.
Subsequently, the ambulance chasing fraud Michael Avenatti encouraged his client to sue Trump for defamation (I think because Trump claimed something along the lines of “I never had an affair with Stormy Daniels, nor would I ever have wanted to,” and after Avenatti had done so, and when things weren’t going so well, Daniels said that Avenatti had “filed the suit without my permission and against my wishes.”
It’s hard to keep up when there are so many problematic and unpleasant folks on all sides. But, yeah. Right. MOAR popcorn!
But it still comes down to the same thing: Daniels didn’t get paid and go away. It’s certainly hard to believe her story that Avenatti was acting without her permission. Sounds more like she discovered she hadn’t given permission when things weren’t going well.
😂😂😂
Yup, Jimmah’s legit. We can only hope that one day he is able to put his unique parenting philosophy into practice.
You mean like how any sexual contact which the woman later regrets, turns into rape?
Yes.
Though I would just change that to “…which an irresponsible and dishonest woman later regrets, turns into rape”.
You dont have to be powerful
Sadly, I think it’s as simple as Proverbs 16:18. “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”
Becoming rich and/or powerful/influential brings with it a great opportunity for pride and haughtiness. Add to it some flattery and sexual attraction from a woman, and the outcome can be devastating.