A Suffolk County jury began weighing two dueling lawsuits on Wednesday over the workplace relationship that ended David Sabatini’s career at the Whitehead Institute, after lawyers for the scientist and his former colleague Kristin Knouse delivered closing arguments.
The case pits Mr. Sabatini’s defamation suit, filed five years ago, against Ms. Knouse’s countersuit accusing him of coercing her into a sexual relationship and running a lab steeped in sexual talk. Jurors must now sort through thousands of pages of filings and a long trail of explicit text messages between the two researchers, The Boston Globe reported.
Mr. Sabatini rose to prominence as a graduate student at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine with his discovery of mTOR, a protein that regulates cell growth, work that generated talk of a Nobel Prize. He went on to run a Whitehead lab with as many as 40 researchers and a $5 million annual budget.
That ended in 2021, after an internal investigation found he had violated Whitehead’s policy on workplace relationships through an affair with Ms. Knouse, a much younger colleague whose career he was positioned to influence. The case split the scientific world: some saw a smear campaign carried out in the name of #MeToo, others an overdue reckoning.
The two met when he was her teacher and mentor, bonding over science and good whiskey. Their relationship turned intimate at a 2018 conference in Washington, D.C., just as Ms. Knouse was about to start as a Whitehead Fellow, a program that gives young scientists seed money for their own labs. Both agree they had sex in his hotel room that night. He calls it consensual; she says she tried to resist and was coerced.
Mr. Sabatini’s lawyers told the jury that Ms. Knouse texted him the next morning about her run, with no regrets, and that four days later, on April 22, the two were emailing about whiskeys and how to find rare bottles. “Was it stupid for him to have sex with her?” his attorney, Lisa Arrowood, asked the jury on Wednesday. “Absolutely. The biggest mistake of his life. But was it rape? Absolutely not.”
The pair continued a secret relationship for roughly a year and a half, having sex about 10 to 15 times, according to accounts each later gave investigators. Their texts often used the word “consults” for their meetings, and both sides cited the messages at trial — Mr. Sabatini to argue Ms. Knouse pursued him, Ms. Knouse to support her claim that he ran a sexually explicit workplace. When Mr. Sabatini told her in January 2020 that he wanted to pursue another scientist, the affair ended.
Whitehead had tightened its rules in August 2018, five months after the relationship began, barring faculty members, senior managers and principal investigators from sexual relationships with any Whitehead employee, even peers. After complaints about Mr. Sabatini, including from Ms. Knouse, the institute hired outside lawyers, who found he “engaged in and otherwise tolerated sexist and sexualized work discussions” in his lab. He resigned in August 2021 and left a tenured post at MIT the next year.
In her counterclaim, Ms. Knouse alleges he acted as if the rules did not apply to him, drawing female researchers into unwelcome conversations about their intimate lives. “There’s a straight line here, and the straight line moves from Dr. Sabatini’s conduct to the consequences he complains of,” Ellen Zucker, Ms. Knouse’s attorney, said in court on Wednesday. “It’s a straight line. There were rules. He broke them.”
The fallout was public. In early 2022, about 200 graduate students, faculty members and alumni of New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine walked out when they learned the school might hire him, carrying signs that read “No means no” and “Students Against Sabatini!” Cut off from academia, Mr. Sabatini fell into a deep depression and attempted suicide, according to court testimony. He says the allegations cost him $1.9 million in income from 2020 through 2025, and at times he became emotional on the stand.
Ms. Arrowood framed the case against her client as a corruption of the #MeToo movement. “That movement is not meant to be turned into a weapon by a woman who welcomed a sexual relationship with a man, who sought it out, and then used that movement and its worthy goals to destroy a man because he chose another woman,” she told the jury.
On the trial’s final day, the Globe reported, the two sat less than 20 feet apart — Ms. Knouse upright near the front, Mr. Sabatini in a navy suit and burgundy tie at the back, taking notes and fanning himself. In 2023, the hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman and an anonymous donor pledged $25 million over five years to return him to science; he now leads a laboratory group in the Czech Republic, studying growth, metabolism and aging. Ms. Knouse is an assistant professor of biology at MIT and a faculty member of its Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.