Until recently, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Kristin Knouse was seen as not only an eminent biologist in a male-dominated field, but a pioneer of the #MeToo movement.
Now though, her reputation lies in tatters over a false rape allegation which almost destroyed one of the world’s pre-eminent cancer researchers.
Knouse, 38, defamed Professor David Sabatini after a casual, and entirely consensual, relationship ended when he reunited with an ex-girlfriend.
But it took five long years for 58-year-old Sabatini’s name to be cleared.
He was forced to sit and watch his colleagues rush to Knouse’s defense, while his career and reputation was trashed in the most public of ways.
Sabatini was ousted from MIT in 2021 on the strength of Knouse’s allegations and became a pariah in the scientific community, even though he was blameless.
His exoneration only came earlier this fall, when the ostracized scientist fought back by using Knouse’s own text messages to expose her lies in a successful defamation trial.
Sabatini ended up winning a civil defamation case and a $9.6 million payout after jurors said Knouse had inflicted severe emotional, financial and reputational damage on him.
She plans to appeal the ruling – but for the time being, she now faces the very reputational destruction that Sabatini endured at her hands.
Kristin Knouse, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Techology, lied that a famous professor she worked with had sexually assaulted her
Knouse is pictured with Professir David Sabatini. They had a consensual relationship – but when he ended it, she went ‘nuclear’
Despite the legal victory, Sabatini remains devastated by what happened to him. Speaking to the Daily Mail from his new home in Prague earlier this week, he said that Knouse ‘completely destroyed my life.’
So low did Sabatini’s mood sink that he attempted to hang himself at his lowest point. Now Knouse gets to experience her own form of disgrace.
Jurors watched her squirm as a tranche of explicit messages, including one about wanting to ‘feel like’ she ‘had been gang raped’ were used to prove that she and Sabatini had in fact enjoyed a casual sexual relationship for about 12 months.
Contrary to the narrative she had carefully spun for years, it was Knouse who pursued Sabatini.
When he chose to date another woman instead, she began texting a friend plans to get Sabatini, in her words, ‘Weinstein-ed out of science,’ a reference to disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein.
Video obtained by the Daily Mail shows Knouse’s story being picked apart during a deposition.
Sabatini’s attorney, Lisa Arrowood, read Knouse’s damning texts aloud to her, quoting a message that read: ‘I can’t wait to wake up tomorrow and feel like I’ve been gang raped.’
The lawyer then asked Knouse about the text: ‘What is that supposed to mean?’
Kristin Knouse is pictured at work at MIT. The biologist retains her job at the college despite destroying a top cancer researcher’s reputation with lies about rape
Knouse is seen during a videotaped deposition. She was asked about a slew of texts that fatally-underminded her claims of sexual assault against Sabatini.
Sabatini told the Daily Mail that at his lowest point, he attempted to hang himself. He says he still feels a shell of his former self
‘We had been at the gym earlier and had done a bunch of squats,’ the MIT professor replied. ‘I was referring to the fact that I’m looking forward to feeling sore from being at the gym.’
The off-color remark bolstered Sabatini’s case against her.
Arrowood posited that Knouse ‘would tell Dr Sabatini’ that she ‘really liked sex to be hard,’ based on her text messages.
Knouse attempted to avoid the question, saying, ‘I would have to see the cases in which I said that.’
‘I’m asking you, did you say it?’ Arrowood hit back, before the biologist conceded: ‘I imagine that I would say that I was open to more, rougher, sex.’
Knouse was also confronted with text messages that proved she had pursued Sabatini for sex on multiple occasions, including at 1.30am following a glitzy Whitehead Institute work retreat at a New Hampshire hotel.
The biologist previously claimed that Sabatini had made her feel ‘very nervous and scared’ at this retreat by asking her for sexual encounters ‘multiple times’.
She made the claim despite texts she sent admitting she had ‘aggressively’ pursued him for sex at a hotel.
Knouse is pictured at a hearing in December 2025 after being sued for defamation by Sabatini. He won his civil case against her and she has now been ordered to pay him $9.6 million
Knouse, pictured at MIT, remains employed by the prestigious college despite the scandal she has wrought on it
Knouse’s story further crumbled when her therapy notes were presented in court, which showed that she had spoken truthfully about their relationship in private sessions.
According to the notes, she told her therapist that she ‘wanted to keep feeding and fueling validation from such a powerful figure in my career’ when she began her casual relationship with Sabatini, who at that point was on track to win a Nobel Prize.
‘My pursuit of obtaining an unavailable man is the ultimate validation of my perfection,’ Knouse added in notes subsequently entered into evidence during the defamation trial.
Shocking texts Knouse sent to her friends also showed her celebrating as Sabatini, whose pioneering cancer research had won ten international awards, was reduced to a shell of a man.
She told one friend in May 2021 that she had been ‘a victim of egregious sexual misconduct by Sabatini,’ before adding: ‘I think he will get fired… f***ing Weinstein his ass’.
The friend expressed support for her, and she added: ‘My lawyers and I are out for blood… prison is what he should get.’
After Sabatini was wrongly accused of being an alleged sexual predator in the Boston Globe and other publications, Knouse even celebrated in a text message how he had been ‘hopelessly defeated, beyond the violence stage.’
Speaking with the Daily Mail from his new laboratory in Prague, Sabatini said he had found Knouse’s messages celebrating his fall from scientific stardom ‘hard to read.’
Sabatini is pictured with boxes of his work sent to his home after he was ousted from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
‘There is a very strong strain of maliciousness which is very hard for me to read now, given that we were together,’ he said.
Sabatini said it is now clear to him that Knouse began to scheme against him after he told her that he wanted to pursue a relationship with another scientist in January 2021.
He said that his girlfriend, who he ended up marrying, was based in Germany, and Knouse at first thought the pandemic had put an end to their relationship.
However, Knouse ‘went nuclear’ after realizing he had purchased a flight to Germany to visit his girlfriend in October 2020, and reported him to the Whitehead Institute for alleged sexual harassment, he said.
Sabatini said he was blindsided by Knouse’s hate-fueled campaign against him, as he was presented with the allegations only after she had spent months quietly plotting against him, and even convincing underlings in her lab to join her crusade.
He said Knouse’s baseless accusations also exploded on Twitter, and the #MeToo mob came after him without giving him a chance to refute the heinous claim.
In the months that followed, Sabatini was forced to watch everything he had built over 25 years fall apart.
MIT President Sally Kornbluth. She has yet to comment Sabatini being droven out of his job
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is pictured. Staff rounded on Professor David Sabatini after he was falsely accused of sexual assault
He was fired from the Whitehead Institute and from MIT. An angry online mob of New York University students and faculty prevented him from taking up a job that he was in talks about with professors there.
His name was erased from prestigious scientific papers. He was booed out of auditoriums where he was once the star speaker.
Though he is celebrating finally being vindicated in court, Sabatini said his life will never be the same.
His marriage to the woman he chose to pursue instead of Knouse has crumbled, and he moved halfway across the world to escape the baying mob.
‘This has completely destroyed me and completely changed my life,’ Sabatini told the Daily Mail. ‘Nothing that remained from before is still operating. Everything is gone.’
At his lowest point when he said he was forced into hiding, Sabatini tried to end his own life by hanging himself at home.
‘I fell into an extremely deep depression, something I had never had before,’ he told the Daily Mail.
‘I stopped eating, lost a lot of my hair, pretty much stopped talking. Family birthday parties were still happening. What everyone noted about me was that I was catatonic.
‘It was very strange to be the big raincloud of other people’s moments when you’re supposed to be happy, so I felt doubly bad about that.’
Before Knouse launched her campaign to end his career, Sabatini had made huge strides in the science world.
He had won ten international awards for making major breakthroughs in cancer research, and was well on his way to securing the Nobel Prize.
The Sabatini Lab at MIT was a research hub for 46 cellular research scientists, including seven who went on to establish their own laboratories at Harvard.
When asked whether potentially live-saving cancer research had been set back by Knouse’s campaign, he said: ‘Certainly. The work I was doing, that was all destroyed.’
‘We were working on many different diseases, including cancer but also many different degenerative diseases, so that was all lost, and frankly I don’t even know what happened to that work.
‘But the world is large, and you never know where treatments are going to come from. If it were to come from us, it certainly got held back.’
A judge dismissed Sabatini’s claims against MIT itself, and Whitehead Institute president Ruth Lehmann.
Meanwhile, Knouse has retained her position at MIT.
An MIT spokesperson said: ‘The Board of Directors of Whitehead Institute has full confidence in the leadership of Director Ruth Lehmann, the Institute’s workplace policies and the process that included the 2021 investigation into Sabatini’s lab, which was conducted by an independent law firm.
‘Whitehead Institute was not a party to the lawsuit between David Sabatini and Kristin Knouse in which a jury verdict was announced Oct. 16, 2026.
‘All claims made by Sabatini against Whitehead had previously been dismissed by the Court.’
The Daily Mail has contacted Knouse’s lawyers for comment.
