Yale University fired a professor after she made remarks about former President Donald Trump’s mental health, a recently filed lawsuit reveals.
The lawsuit, filed against the Ivy League school by psychiatrist Bandy Lee, alleges that her firing last year was an “unlawful termination … due to her exercise of free speech about the dangers of Donald Trump’s presidency.” Lee’s complaint came after a Jan. 2020 tweet in which she declared that “just about all” of Trump’s followers suffer from a “shared psychosis.”
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Lee added that Alan Dershowitz, one of Trump’s top legal advisers at the time, had “wholly taken on Trump’s symptoms by contagion.” Dershowitz responded by asking Yale to investigate Lee for a violation of the ethics rules of the American Psychiatric Association. Dershowitz contended that because Lee had never met him, she was unable to evaluate his mental health.
Dershowitz, according to court filings, wrote that the psychiatrist had “publicly ‘diagnosed’ me as ‘psychotic,’ based on my legal and political views, and without ever examining or even meeting me.”
Lee later responded that she would not “cower” or “compromise” on her opinions. Lee was fired several months later, following a Yale investigation.
In her filing, Lee admitted that she had violated the APA’s so-called Goldwater Rule banning the diagnosis of public figures. But, she added, she believed it did not apply to her because the rule conflicted with her “duties, responsibilities, and role in the interest of public health in light of her belief that Donald Trump posed a dangerous threat to this country and the world.”
Lee, the author of the 2017 book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, frequently criticized the former president in mainstream news outlets, including CNN and the New York Times. After her firing, her Twitter attacks became more pointed.
“Donald Trump is not Adolf Hitler,” she wrote last fall in a now-deleted tweet. “At least Hitler improved the daily life of his followers, had discipline, and required more of himself to gain the respect of his followers. Even with the same pathology, there are varying degrees of competence.”
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Lee told the Yale Daily News that she sued the school “with a heavy heart.”
“I love Yale, my alma mater, as I love my country, but we are falling into a dangerous culture of self-censorship and compliance with authority at all cost,” she said of her firing.
