NEW HAVEN — A sexual harassment case that has been unfolding without public notice for nearly five years within the Yale School of Medicine has roiled the institution and led to new allegations that the university is insensitive to instances of harassment against women.
The case involves a former head of cardiology who professed his love to a young Italian researcher at the school and sought to intervene in her relationship with a fellow cardiologist under his supervision.
A university committee recommended that he be permanently removed from his position, but the provost reduced that penalty to an 18-month suspension.
After that decision, The New York Times obtained extensive documents related to the case and interviewed 18 faculty members who expressed anger at how it had been handled, with no public acknowledgment of wrongdoing. After The Times contacted Yale last week, the university announced that the former cardiology chief, Dr. Michael Simons, “had decided” not to return to his post.
The case involving faculty at one of the nation’s leading medical schools comes as dozens of colleges are under scrutiny by the federal government for their handling of sexual misconduct allegations against students.
Dr. Simons began his advances to Annarita Di Lorenzo, the Italian researcher, 18 years his junior, on Feb. 12, 2010, by slipping her a handwritten love letter in effortful Italian.
Dr. Di Lorenzo told him that the letter was unwelcome and insulting to her, her new boyfriend and Dr. Simons’s wife. But Dr. Simons told her that she was choosing the wrong man since he was in a position to “open the world of science” to her.
In 2011, Dr. Di Lorenzo moved to Cornell. But her boyfriend, now husband, Dr. Frank Giordano, remained at Yale, and asserts that his career stalled after Dr. Simons disparaged him and froze him out professionally.
Finding no help within the medical school, the couple filed formal complaints to the University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct, and the committee ruled last year that Dr. Simons had sexually harassed and created a hostile work environment for Dr. Di Lorenzo. The committee found that Dr. Simons had publicly derided Dr. Giordano but it stopped short of saying negative actions like removing him from a grant had been retaliatory since so many factors, including subjective ones, come into play in a cardiology chief’s decisions. It did find that Dr. Simons had exercised improper leadership and compromised decision-making regarding Dr. Giordano. They are both 57.
In interviews, Dr. Di Lorenzo, now 39, and Dr. Giordano said they had suffered as a result of poor treatment by the university.
In response to their complaints, the committee recommended Dr. Simons’s ouster as chief of cardiology and a five-year bar from any high administrative position.
But the provost, Ben Polak, planned to allow him to return as chief and never removed him from his posts as the director of the Yale Cardiovascular Research Center and as a co-director of the Yale University College London Collaborative. Both the provost and Yale’s president, Peter Salovey, declined to comment. Many professors remain angry.
“There will be continued concern by the faculty as long as Michael Simons is allowed to continue in his positions,” said Dr. John Schley Hughes, a professor of medicine.
Responding to The Times, Dr. Simons acknowledged in a written statement that he had pursued a junior colleague.
“For this error in judgment I have apologized, and I genuinely regret my action,” he said.
Still, he said that he had never abused his position at Yale to punish or retaliate against any faculty member, and that his decisions had always been based on professional criteria.
The faculty complaints go beyond the Simons case to broader concerns about the climate for women at the medical school.
Over all, Yale University has made progress in its treatment of women, especially undergraduates, since 2010, when fraternity members on the quad chanted, “No means yes, yes means anal” — leading to an investigation by the federal Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. That investigation is over, and the university has a Title IX coordinator responsible for ensuring gender equity and a sexual misconduct committee, which heard the complaints against Dr. Simons. Yet at the medical school, many faculty members say little has changed.
A dozen faculty members — male, female, senior and junior — talked with a Times reporter last week about their distress over the school’s handling of the Simons case on the condition that the conversation be in a group and that most participants not be quoted directly.
One participant, Joan Steitz, a prominent molecular biologist, was an exception, saying that in recent years, she had been “very disappointed” by what she sees as the medical school’s lack of progress in ensuring equality for women on the faculty and its lack of openness on decision-making.
Some medical school professors question the value of the universitywide committee, even with its outside fact-finders and trained members from across the university’s different schools, given that the provost can overturn its recommendations, without disclosing them or saying why he rejected them.
Dr. Simons and the school have their defenders: As word spread last week about The Times’s queries, two women on the faculty at the research center contacted The Times to say that he had been an outstanding leader who had promoted women, and that the accusations had been blown out of proportion.
Since the reduced suspension of Dr. Simons was announced last November, senior women on the faculty and, separately, junior women in the cardiology department had taken their concerns about his expected return in June 2015 to Dr. Salovey, the university president.
In a follow-up letter to the president, the senior women said the climate for women at the medical school had “substantially deteriorated under the current leadership.”
“We expressed concern about the lack of transparency or honesty in the communication announcing Dr. Simons’s leave, and particularly the absence of any suggestion that there had been wrongdoing,” the letter said, referring to their meeting. “The communication could easily have been interpreted as Dr. Simons being awarded a special academic leave relative to some important work.”
This past summer, Dr. Salovey reappointed the medical school’s dean, Dr. Robert J. Alpern, to a new term.
Among the unhappy faculty, many fault Dean Alpern. Some question the involvement of the provost, formerly the chairman of Yale’s economics department, where Dr. Simons’s wife, Katerina, was a faculty member.
Last month, a majority of senior faculty from the department of medicine — by far the school’s largest division — attended a town-hall-style meeting with the dean, requested by the professors, to discuss the medical school’s expectations of professional behavior, the climate for women and recent complaints of sexual harassment. In the last two weeks, the same issues were raised at smaller meetings.
Some faculty members said they had emerged from the meetings unconvinced of Dean Alpern’s commitment to women’s advancement.
Some saw the dean as being dismissive when he announced the formation of a new task force on gender equity, saying it was necessary because some women felt there were problems. Dr. Daniel C. DiMaio, a genetics professor, said it was not just women complaining. The dean replied, “O.K., Dan and some women think there’s a problem.”
In an interview last week, Dean Alpern said that he was a strong believer in equality for women and that his remark had been a clumsy effort at humor.
Several of the faculty members who attended the meetings said that while they could not recall the dean’s actual words, the message they had come away with was that he seemed confused by the standards for sexual harassment, and thought brilliant researchers who attract grants might be given extra latitude.
Faculty members hypothesized that Dr. Simons wins enough grants — including $5 million a year from the federal government in the last two years — that university administrators’ eagerness to keep the money flowing might make them inclined to relax the standards.
“I do not believe in a double standard,” said Dean Alpern, whom many faculty members consider to be Dr. Simons’s strongest supporter.
The dean has told faculty members that he did not try to influence the committee findings, and knew no more than what he had read in emails and announcements.
Dr. Thomas Duffy, an emeritus professor of hematology, asked, “Whose responsibility is it, if not the dean’s, to know what’s going on?”
The long sexual harassment saga springs from a friendship gone sour: Before Dr. Simons left Dartmouth to come to Yale in 2008, he had been friendly with Dr. Giordano, and tried to recruit him to Dartmouth. Dr. Giordano first became friendly with Dr. Di Lorenzo in December 2009, when both took the same train to New York City to attend a dinner given by the Simonses.
On Feb. 12, 2010, Dr. Simons handed Dr. Di Lorenzo his love letter, saying he wanted to kiss her lips in Liguria, and “every part of your body in every continent and city of the world.”
Over the next years, Dr. Giordano’s career languished. He has said his advancement was stalled by his exclusion from important meetings and assignments. He has not received tenure.
His relationship with Dr. Simons became so difficult that Dr. Jack Elias, then Yale’s chairman of medicine and now dean of Brown’s medical school, took over his direct supervision to protect him from Dr. Simons, the committee reported.
Dr. Margaret Bia, a nephrologist at the school for four decades, said the faculty outcry over the case has been unprecedented. “The senior faculty of medicine has never mobilized like this around an issue that everyone is fired up about,” she said.
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