“M.I.T. Scientist Wins $6 Million in Sexual Harassment Defamation Suit” (New York Times):
The biologist, David Sabatini, was among the most prominent scientists in his field, and ran a research lab at the Whitehead Institute, in Cambridge, for 24 years. His lab studied cellular biology to better understand neurodegenerative diseases, cancer, diabetes, and aging.
He was forced out of his lab in 2021 after an internal Whitehead investigation concluded he had a past sexual relationship with a younger and less experienced colleague, Kristin Knouse, over whom he had a career-influencing role. The investigation also found that his lab had maintained a sexualized atmosphere. Dr. Knouse said that the relationship was coerced.
But Dr. Sabatini denied his lab had an improper atmosphere. He maintained that his relationship with Dr. Knouse had been consensual and that Dr. Knouse had schemed to get him fired and disgraced after he became interested in another woman.
Nearly five years to the day after he filed his defamation lawsuit, a Suffolk County jury agreed with him, finding that Dr. Sabatini had proved in court that Dr. Knouse had defamed him and interfered with his ability to work.
The Whitehead Institute, in a statement after the verdict, said that earlier legal claims against the institution had already been dismissed, adding, “Therefore, Whitehead was not a party to this case, and the decision and judgment only apply to Drs. Sabatini and Knouse, the parties in the case.”
It’s a remarkable day when a Maskachusetts jury doesn’t #BelieveWomen. But who will pay for the $6 million judgment against the survivor? MIT/Whitehead somehow skated free of this lawsuit despite having run a kangaroo court and tossed Sabatini based on statements that a jury found were obvious lies (truth is an absolute defense against defamation so the jury couldn’t have found that the survivor defamed Prof. Sabatini without finding that the survivor lied). Maybe the survivor, Prof. Knouse, has homeowner’s insurance and that means, as with the lies that Amber Heard and the ACLU told about Johnny Depp, we will pay? We might already have paid if MIT funded Knouse’s defense, in which case our tax dollars were used. If homeowner’s insurance paid for the defense then we’ve already paid via higher premiums. On the third hand, this Courthouse News article says that Sabatini was 50 and Knouse was 29 at the time of the sexual relationship. Absent family money, it would be rare for someone in her early 30s to be a homeowner or even a condo owner in Cambridge.
Grok says that MIT/Whitehead skated free because they fired Sabatini for violating a “consensual relationships policy” (maybe he was supposed to file some paperwork and didn’t?). It references this LegalClarity site, which covers some of the twists and turns in the case.
Here’s Kristin Knouse:
Related:
- Amber Heard, as perceived by the Musk family and friends
- Who paid for the consequences of the ACLU-authored, Amber Heard-signed op-ed? You did.
- Don’t let the ACLU write your op-eds and other lessons from the Amber Heard libel trial
Now that Dr. Sabatini has won his judgment against Dr. Knouse, he need to also sue the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Whitehead Institute, and MIT for an even larger sum. After all, HHMI made the decision to fire him, while the Whitehead Institute initiated the internal investigation and wrongly concluded that Dr. Sabatini was at fault.
Ms Knouse of MIT is a redhead just like Ms Craig of Cornell?
fiery, but mostly peaceful
If these lawsuits are pretty much a slam-dunk, but for the other side there should already be a fund or insurance of some sort that she will be able to tap into. That is going to pay for this settlement
I assume if the opposite situation occurs (someone gets fired for making true statements that are lied about to be defamatory, but which are later found to be true), they would be able to tap into this fund too?
As in, if Dr. Krause was telling the truth and they fired her instead of Dr. Sabatani for defamatory claims, the same fund would pay for her too? It sounds like this could empower whistleblowers, which makes me think it wouldn’t work both ways.
time to sue them all! Lehhman , Whitehead Institute, HHMI
DLM: His original lawsuit did include them. MIT/Whitehead had brilliant lawyers, though. Presumably with the advice of counsel, they originally fired the guy for a paperwork violation (not disclosing his after-work coziness with the young lady), not for raping the survivor. So it doesn’t matter whether the rape allegation was true or not. It’s on the same level as Al Capone being busted for tax evasion.
According to Pakistani tribal law, if Dr. Knouse is unable to pay, then she should be given in marriage to Dr. Sabatini. Problem solved!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vani_(custom)
Not much of a punishment, that was her goal the whole time!
Patriarchy is women’s greatest safeguard!
Phil, off-topic here, but I notice this morning that SpaceX stock is up 12% after reporting blowout earnings and providing blowout financial forecasts for 2027 yesterday evening! Given your recently tight relationship with (and adoration of all things) Elon, wondering if next time you would give us all a heads up prior to the next blowout financial results? We’d like to get ahead of the “news” you know. Related, your favorite SpaceX equity analyst (the extraordinarily talented Nicolas Owens at Morningstar) has raised his target price to an eye-watering $70, up from the prior $62. Might his target be off by 10x because he isn’t versed in decimals? Maybe check in with him and see if his mathematics check out.
$162! My Morningstar-based short position is looking worse every day.
https://www.morningstar.com/stocks/spacex-earnings-we-raise-fair-value-estimate-strong-ai-growth
is indeed generous: “We raised our fair value estimate for narrow-moat SpaceX to $70 per share from $62, reflecting its increased near-term success in scaling terrestrial data centers, offset by a reappraisal of the long-term returns of AI services on the hefty investments required to deploy them.”
I should do a separate blog post about this, but I’ve seen some analyses that AI needs to harvest 10% of US GDP in revenue in order for investors to get a fat profit on the data centers and training. With consumers paying $20/month and businesses paying $200/month per employee they’re nowhere near where they need to be.
Interested to see the analysis you reference in a post. FYI, if you haven’t watched it already, you would be interested to hear Elon’s comments on the earnings call (video is posted on X). He made some interesting comments/observations on the current S/D situation for SI data centers and related pricing. Below is a portion of Elon’s comments, but worth listening the entire thing:
“And obviously, our approach is to rent at effectively the spot market rate as opposed to sign these long-term deals. Our belief is that the value of compute per watt will increase over time, not decrease. The reason for that, I think it should be obvious to people, really, is that as you improve the AI software, as the models get better and better, they’re able to — you get more useful intelligence per watt. And the value of that compute is proportionate to the useful intelligence per watt. And that’s why you see things like even old computers like H100s renting for more than they rented when they were new. And I think that’s likely to continue. I think we’re going to face a shortage of super intelligence compute, and that shortage is going to remain for a long time.”
Since we are off topic, it is worth to see how Anthropic is doing:
Anthropic S-1 Shows Red-Hot Growth, Risks and Massive Computing Costs
In a new draft prospectus viewed by the Journal, the AI giant disclosed an $80.7 billion net loss for the first half of 2026 and a long list of risk factors
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-revenue-growth-ipo-accaf0f1
Here’s the WSJ article https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/will-america-spend-9-of-its-gdp-on-ai-the-industry-is-counting-on-it-3501bb4f
Believers in the artificial-intelligence boom need to take a very close look at this number: 9% of GDP.
That is how much American businesses and consumers eventually have to spend per year on the services of companies like Anthropic and OpenAI to justify the staggering sums being committed to the technology right now.
Is it plausible that Americans will spend as much of their income on this one technology as they do on food? Roughly twice what the nation pays for all forms of energy or all computers and software? Seven times what consumers spend on phone, streaming, and internet services combined?
How do we know that these numbers are accurate? They come straight from Mahmoud Khalil, America’s most valuable citizen (100% of lawyers in the U.S. have worked on his case at this point, I think), and his colleagues at Columbia (#QueersForPalestine)
————– WSJ
The figure is courtesy of Columbia University finance professor Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh. His paper, first presented at the Brookings Institution, showed that the AI build-out is now bigger than any investment boom in American history. His more intriguing, and sobering, statistic is how much revenue AI would have to garner to justify that boom.
Van Nieuwerburgh started with the actual plans of today’s builders of data centers and the average cost of a data center, then assumed some data centers would be canceled, that each dollar of revenue produces 50 cents of cash flow, and that builders need an unleveraged return on invested capital of 10%.
He concludes from all this that AI revenue in 2032 would need to be $3.5 trillion, or 8.8% of GDP (which he assumes grows 4% per year, unadjusted for inflation).
George: Thanks for that number. $80 billion loss in 6 months for Anthropic (Sam Bankman-Fried’s pick)? Imagine that the U.S. Department of Defense/War was once considered the world’s most wasteful enterprise.
What’s the best current comparison of AI model capabilities? Is Claude out in front and, if so, by how much? Google said they were giving up on Gemini staying at the frontier, right?
I shared the “roughly 10%” number with a friend who disputed the implausibility of revenue hitting this percentage by pointing out that AI was already making him $100,000 extra per year in his Schedule C work. I asked how much he was paying for AI. The answer was $200/month. (AI revenue was 2.4% of the marginal GDP that he was creating and maybe 0.5% of his overall GDP (income).)
I just asked Grok and the other AIs (I know!) to critique Nieuwerburgh’s paper. I won’t paste the outputs (try it yourself), but they all suggest his analysis uses aggressive/pessimistic and perhaps unreasonable assumptions for: unit costs, realization rates, asset lives, margins, required returns, future pricing power, and utilization.
Contrast this with Elon’s comments yesterday on the earnings call. Elon is in the business, but I’ll grant you that Dr. Nieuwerburgh does have Mahmoud Khalil doing analysis.
George A, your comment on Anthropic’s massive loss YTD in 2026 is definitely notable, but keep in mind that many companies report large losses early in their lives as they invest to build the business. What is of course key is what their future profits/losses and cash flows will be because it is the discounted future cash flows that determine the value of any company. It will be interesting to see Anthropic’s financials when they do actually file their S-1 and to compare them to SpaceX’s (and eventually OpenAI’s #s when that happens-rumored sometime in 2027 now).
At least the redhead was good looking. There are some men who get into this sort of trouble with a woman, and you see a picture of her, and you are left asking yourself if the guy has beer goggles. If I’m going to get in trouble it better be with an actress or beauty queen.
Beware of the Vagina Trap!
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/TIytYaHtlsg
DLM, are you my kind of man?
https://x.com/CirkinAmerika/status/2106622845703127515