Civil Court Rules Against Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Researcher
by Jon Cohen on 20 December 2011, 4:30 PM
Embattled researcher Judy Mikovits lost an important round in court
yesterday in a civil suit that her former employer filed against her
over alleged "misappropriation" of laboratory notebooks and computer
data.
Mikovits, who rose to fame in 2009 for a disputed study that linked a
mouse retrovirus to chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), appears to have
frustrated a Nevada judge, who asserted that she had "flouted" his
order to return the disputed property to the complainant, the
Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease (WPI) in Reno.
Mikovits, who is also facing related criminal charges for possessing
stolen property, returned some of the notebooks and a laptop after
being briefly jailed. But WPI filed an affidavit from a computer
expert that said all the files had been recently deleted on the
laptop. WPI attorney Ann Hall further asserts that Mikovits returned
only 18 of the notebooks, withholding half a dozen more that include
experiments done between 2006 and 2009. Mikovits's attorneys did not
respond to interview requests.
After a flurry of motions were filed by each party, Judge Brent Adams
in the Second Judicial District Court in Washoe County ruled in favor
of WPI, which fired Mikovits in September for insubordination. In
essence, the judge's "default judgment" rejected Mikovits's replies to
the complaint and upheld all of WPI's claims, which include breach of
contract and misappropriation of trade secrets. "It is so surprising,"
Hall says of the judge "striking" Mikovits's reply, noting that that
the judge emphasized that he had never taken this action in his 22
years on the bench. Typically, judges offer a point-by-point ruling on
the merit of a defendant's answers to a compliant. Mikovits attended
the hearing but did not testify.
In court documents, Mikovits pled the Fifth Amendment, the right not
to testify against yourself. Hall charges that the Fifth Amendment
defense "was overly broad and kind of an abuse of the process."
Hall says it's unclear whether WPI will ever retrieve the property it
seeks, and the civil case will now focus on damages. WPI has yet to
tell the court the value of the property at issue, and no future court
date has been set for the damages hearing.
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