To make a long story short: this researcher was considered one of the leading scientists in the fight against cancer. His team recently made some groundbreaking discovery in researching how tumors form. Now he's an unemployed, stay-at-home dad.

He was having a sexual relationship with another researcher for awhile. He was married but he was in the process of getting a divorce when he started with this other woman. At first it was casual; he wasn't trying to be in a serious relationship with her and she had other FWBs.

His research institution implemented a policy that basically says its employees cannot date one another, which almost seems illegal in and of itself, but fine. He didn't report his relationship with the other researcher in part because it was coming to an end. She started getting clingy. She sent him some really clingy message about how it drives her crazy when she doesn't hear from him and all that.

He ended the relationship as he was seeing someone else. She tried getting him back, it didn't work, then she started complaining to people about feeling harassed and abused by him. This prompted the institution to send out some kind of anonymous survey where two people reported feeling like there was a "bro-culture" in the lab. They hired a law firm who investigated and determined the following:

[quote] What had David Sabatini been found guilty of that merited this kind of punishment? Chiefly, failing to disclose his consensual relationship with Knouse. 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.

Nor did the lawyers care for the happy hours and whiskey tastings that Sabatini sometimes hosted in his office, which betrayed his “apparent ‘friendliness’ and general propensity to have ‘fun.’” (Knouse, in her counterclaim, says the events were “drunken,” and “conversations quite frequently veered to the sexual.”)

“While we have not found any evidence that Sabatini discriminates against or fails to support females in his lab, we find that Sabatini’s propensity to praise or gravitate toward those in the lab that mirror his desired personality traits, scientific success, or view of ‘science above all else,’ creates additional obstacles for female lab members,” the report concluded. [/quote]

Mind you, the woman he was in a relationship with was THIRTY YEARS OLD at the time.

He wound up having to leave that institution, but he knew someone at NYU who was considering hiring him, but then all these other bitter, angry women who feel like it's their job to fight other people's battles for them started protesting on- and off-line, so they passed on hiring him.

I understand this is apparently the shitty world we all want to live in (/sarcasm), but can we at least stipulate that when people talk about MeToo backlash and it being more about weaponizing assault than actually giving a voice to women who historically were not heard or taken seriously...THIS is the kind of thing people are talking about?