"I went into the deepest, blackest despair I had ever experienced," Lighton says. "Everything I had worked for . . . was shattered. . . . I would see normal [people going about their lives] and think to myself, ‘Don’t people realize how vulnerable they are? What is the point of trying to do something when everything you’ve ever accomplished in your whole life could be so easily swept away?’ "

Lighton looks a lot different today than he did five years ago. He’s bearded, burly, 70 pounds heavier, and commendably informed on everything from Jupiter’s moons to the poetry of Percy Shelley. He has a modest deferential manner and he speaks with a soft South African accent. Accepting a job offer from the University of Utah, he says, was "one of the biggest mistakes of my entire life."

       Lighton, who was a native of South Africa, had come to the United States in 1984 to study comparative physiology under the legendary UCLA biologist George Bartholomew. Bartholomew was a driven, aloof, loved, feared task-master, master psychologist, and a shrewd judge of people. Lighton was his last student, and, in many ways, perhaps his best. When the University of Utah offered Lighton a job, Bartholomew was adamantly opposed. The school was second-rate. It would be harder for Lighton to get papers published, said Bartholomew. After much soul-searching Lighton took the job anyway. "I thought I could use the school as a staging post," he says. "I was determined to make a name for myself and re-enter the job market after getting tenure there." In the meantime, he’d recreate in Utah the same "brash, can-do, high-energy environment" he’d found so inspiring at UCLA.

It never happened. For one thing, Lighton, despite all his gifts, wasn’t Bartholomew. And for another, the University of Utah definitely wasn’t UCLA.

"Bartholomew wouldn’t have given the time of day to the people I had in my lab," says Lighton. "Bart had people sense and no trace of that strange vein of empathy (pity? wish for approval?) that was my tragic flaw. I gave chances to people who didn’t have a first-rate record. I thought if they wouldn’t motivate themselves I could do it for them. Instead they turned on me."

Lighton had no reason to suspect his career was taking a fatal turn when in the early summer of 1993 a South African postdoc by the name of Dr. Laura Fielden called to ask if she might spend a few months working in his Salt Lake City lab as a visiting scientist. As Lighton was more than happy to have a volunteer, he sent her an invitation and Fielden arrived in August of 1993. To help her save on rent, Lighton invited her to stay with him and his wife Monika.

Fielden was a slender 5’4" with long dark blonde hair, hazel eyes, a deliberately calm manner and a gracefully "twitchy" way of moving that only barely hinted at the "coiled spring" she was inside. And by the end of the first week, Lighton says, Fielden had made it clear she was attracted to him. "She was warm, witty, flirtatious, engaging. She used her attractiveness as a finely honed weapon." During a walk one day Fielden told Lighton that her husband back in South Africa had told her he intended to have an affair while she was gone. "She told me she had been hurt by his comment," says Lighton, "and had decided to have an affair of her own." (Through her attorney, Fielden declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Although Lighton was married at the time, he considered himself a free man. He had asked his wife for a divorce, he says, but she was hoping for a reconciliation and refused. In the meantime, they hadn’t slept together for nearly a year. ("I loved her—and still do—but we had grown apart," says Lighton.)

Lighton had planned a trip to Zzyzx to study solphugids and he asked Fielden to come along. Solphugids are large segmented carnivorous spiders with over-sized heads. "They are really very interesting," says Lighton. "Their physiology is unknown. I did the initial paper on the way they breathe. At night they run around, attacking anything that’s not more than twice their size. They have huge twin jaws with which they eat their way through anything they bump into. It’s really rather gruesome to see."

At Zzyzx, Lighton and Fielden spent their days running experiments on solphugids (for all their aggressiveness they’re so fragile that they die if they get within ten feet of an electrical line) and then around midnight they’d go swimming au naturel in Zzyzx’s tiny swimming pool. The longer they stayed at Zzyzx, the more erotic the mood became. "[She would] stare at me with parted lips," says Lighton, "assume poses of languid grace, bathe in the gray moonlight naked. She was throwing the book at me." By the end of the first week, nature had taken its course. Or as Lighton puts it: "We were both naked and I rose to the occasion."

Contrary to the accepted wisdom in such matters, their sexual affair didn’t so much derail their scientific collaboration as make it more effective. Fielden knew a lot about ticks, the principal source of Lyme Disease and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. Lighton, in turn, was at the very forefront of practical respirometry. Together they came up with what Lighton regarded as some "extraordinarily interesting" results, including the first explanation of how ticks can survive up to 20 years between feedings (they absorb water from the air’s humidity and lower their metabolism by reducing their respiration rate to a single breath per hour.)

Lighton thought the work was important enough to ask the NIH to fund more research. If the grant application were successful, Fielden would come back to work on the grant for the next three years. In the meantime, she returned to her husband in South Africa. And to tell the truth, Lighton was more than a little glad to see her go.

"After she and I had become intimate," says Lighton, "she behaved in ways that I thought were very bizarre. She was intensely jealous of any attention I showed to anyone else, including [my wife]. She made numerous highly disparaging remarks about her husband’s anatomy. And she continually told me, ‘I love you. I love you,’ [which] made me highly uncomfortable, because I did not love her in the least. It was simply an affair that had been instigated by her, and I felt trapped. . . . She insisted that she loved me. She kept on insisting that I should love her back. I told her ‘This is a pleasurable affair. We’re friends. We do not love each other. Stop talking like that.’ She would go into sulks."

In June of 1994, the NIH notified Lighton that it had awarded him $300,000 over three years to study tick respiration. Although Lighton wasn’t particularly pleased at the thought of having Fielden back in his lab again, given her "jealous, moody, and demanding" nature. On the other hand, he says, rioting had broken out in the Bophuthatswana homeland (at the time her husband was chairman of the University of Bophuthatswana biology department) and she "begged" Lighton to invite her to work in the United States.

"She felt whites had no future in South Africa," says Lighton. And she was "terrified of car jackings. She told me she would drive around with her windows shut in hot weather. She said her dog had been trained to attack black people. She told me that she had frequently dreamed about being attacked and raped and cut to pieces in her home." In response to her "keen" desire to leave South Africa, as soon as his grant came in, Lighton invited Fielden to come to the United States. He felt he was doing her a favor, says Lighton. "Which I was."

After that, things moved very fast. Fielden and her husband, Yigal Rechav, arrived in Utah the last week in July (Rechav only stayed till Fielden was settled, then he returned to South Africa.) "We helped them out quite a bit," says Lighton, co-signing a credit application, providing transportation, helping them with their laundry. "We basically treated them as members of the family and trusted friends."

In early August, says Lighton, Fielden invited him out for lunch. "I was nervous about the conversation," he says, "because it was not a conversation that I either wanted to have or believed should have been necessary." After a few pleasantries, "I said to her, ‘Look, we both realize that our affair is over and I just want to tell you I’m glad it happened, but I’m also glad it’s over because we have to get on with our lives.’ "

Fielden, says Lighton, turned very pale. "She said, ‘You are seeing someone else, aren’t you?’

"I didn’t like the way the conversation was going. I said, ‘What I’m doing is not relevant. I’m just saying it’s not fair to the other postdocs in my lab [for you to have] a privileged relationship with me. We have to keep our relationship on [a professional basis]. You’re here as a postdoc [to learn how] to become an independent scientist, and you can’t do that if you’re involved with your supervisor.’

"And she just said again, ‘You are seeing someone else, aren’t you?’

"I said, ‘I am seeing someone else. Her name is Jean and I like her very much but that is not the reason I’m saying this.’ "

Prior to this conversation, says Lighton, things had been going exceptionally well. "My career was taking off. I was getting grants, awards, recognition, invitations to attend symposia and contribute book chapters. Journal editors were asking me to write invited papers." He had also recently won major grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and a prestigious $500,000 fellowship from the Packard Foundation (widely regarded as the scientific equivalent of the McArthur "genius" Award).

After that luncheon, says Lighton, nothing was ever the same again. It wasn’t just fallout from their conversation—Fielden was also suffering from culture shock. Having grown up as a member of the white minority in South Africa, Fielden had become used to a kind of privilege that simply didn’t exist in Salt Lake City. At home, says Lighton, Fielden had servants to do her laundry and clean her house. In Salt Lake she had to do it all herself. In South Africa, says Lighton, Fielden was virtual co-chair of her husband’s department. In Utah, she had to order her own supplies and set up her own equipment. She seemed to consider it beneath her dignity to handle the ticks or calibrate the respirometer, says Lighton. "She had this notion that she was the idea person, and other people should deal with the mechanics."

There was something else that annoyed Lighton. She tended to speak to him in a calm but preemptory manner—"John, you must set up my equipment. John, you must order my supplies." Then when Lighton would tell her to do it herself, she’d erupt in "inarticulate fury."

"I couldn’t understand why she was having so many problems," says Lighton. "She was familiar with the equipment. She’d done the same experiment the previous year."

One problem frankly was that Lighton was so multi-talented he didn’t always realize how difficult they could be to someone without his abilities. Unlike many scientists, Lighton was very much a hands-on researcher who not only often designed and built his own equipment but then went ahead and wrote the software to run it automatically. His view was, if Fielden had technical problems setting up her experiment, she should do what he did, which was "start with first principles." If she couldn’t solve the problem, she should ask one of the more technically competent postdocs. And if she still couldn’t solve it, she could come to Lighton, who at that point would be more than happy to help. He just didn’t want her running to him without having exhausted all the alternatives on her own.

One reason was strictly pedagogical—if you’re going to be a research scientist, you have to learn to solve your own problems, not rely on someone else. In addition, Lighton was already extremely busy running the lab (he had three major grants to fulfill) and helping another postdoc, Barbara Joos, set up a flying-insect experiment. As it was something neither of them had ever done before, it required a lot of time. Seeing Lighton spending so much time with Joos made Fielden jealous. She said that Joos had "most favored nation status," says Lighton, and she demanded that Lighton fire Joos (something he refused to do).

Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, Fielden pretty much cut herself off from the rest of the lab. She spent most of her time in her second-floor office. On the few occasions when she was in the main lab, Barbara Joos would later say, she "conveyed an air of preoccupation with her own affairs." If anyone tried to speak to her, she "displayed a pronounced startle response—wide open eyes, head jerking upright." Lighton found it difficult to communicate with her except through notes, letters, or in a couple of instances, phone calls. Even the simplest request became grounds for a confrontation.

One wasn’t long in coming. In January of 1995, the biology department’s accounting/facilities maintenance manager sent around a memo asking all faculty members to inventory for insurance purposes all capital equipment (items worth more than $500). As part of his lab’s inventory, Lighton in turn asked Fielden to provide proof of ownership for a $10,000 LiCor 6262 gas analyzer (used for measuring tick respiration) that Fielden’s husband had shipped to her from South Africa.

This wasn’t the first time the question of the LiCor’s status had come up. Shortly after Fielden had arrived the previous fall, says Lighton, she asked him to write to the University of Bophuthatswana stating that the LiCor had been "damaged beyond repair" (in the homeland riots of March, 1994) and had to be "scrapped." The purpose of the letter, Lighton says Fielden told him, was to "facilitate" insurance payouts on the LiCor.

Thinking there was something "fishy" about the request—Fielden was very "vague" about the ownership of the LiCor, saying only that it came from South Africa—Lighton refused to write the letter. (What he didn’t realize at the time, he now says, was that it would have been impossible for Fielden to "regularize" the status of the equipment anyway, given that four months previously "her husband had reported much of it as stolen" or damaged beyond repair.)

Fielden was furious, says Lighton, telling him "You don’t know how vulnerable you are." Thinking she meant she was planning to tell Lighton’s wife Monika of their 1993 affair, "My thought was, ‘Be my guest,’ " he says. In the meantime he still had to complete the inventory. On February 7th, 1995, he left Fielden a final note: "Please tell me who owns these analyzers."

Fielden never did get back to Lighton on that issue, but she did contact someone—at the suggestion of the undergraduate woman’s studies major who served as the university ombudsman, she hired an attorney (Roger Hoole, a Salt Lake City lawyer who has represented plaintiffs in recovered-memory cases) and proceeded to file a harassment claim.

Although Lighton knew none of this at the time, it was clear to him that that something was afoot. Two weeks earlier the chairman of the biology department, James Ehleringer, had called Lighton into his office to tell him that he "just happened" to be talking to the university’s counsel, Karen McCreary, and McCreary had told him to write a letter of reprimand regarding Lighton’s "harassment" of Fielden to put in his file.

Lighton strenuously objected to any such letter, given that no one had even asked to hear his side of the story. As he saw it, Ehleringer had the matter exactly backwards, it was Fielden who had been harassing him, by leaving declarations of love on his answering machine, insisting that he respond in kind, demanding that he write a letter to facilitate questionable insurance payouts, and demanding that he fire co-workers she didn’t like.

Suddenly a light went on over Lighton’s head. "Are you talking about sexual harassment?" he asked.

"Ehleringer said, ‘No,’ but [I knew] he was lying," says Lighton. "When you know someone as well as I know Ehleringer, it is easy to tell when he is lying—he stretches out his vowels. There was a lot of vowel stretching going on that day."

Like most male professors on college campuses these days Lighton knew full well the consequences of such an accusation. Sexual harassment wasn’t just another campus complaint—it was the neutron bomb of accusations. And once someone used the weapon, there was no appeal, no going back, and no way to halt its horrific impact on your career. "It works like this," says Glenn Ricketts, president of the New Jersey chapter of the conservative National Association of Scholars:

"You are told you have been charged with sexual harassment. You may not know your accuser. You may not know the charges. You may not have an attorney. You can’t testify in your own defense. The fact that you are a man can and will be used against you."

Frantic with worry and desperate to stop this train before his career went completely off the rails, Lighton left repeated messages for the associate legal counsel, Karen McCreary, but she never called him back. (At the time, says Lighton, he was naïve enough to think that McCreary was an ordinary apolitical university attorney who would defend his interests without an agenda. In fact, he later learned, she was a sex -discrimination specialist and political bedfellow to radical feminist Catharine ("all-sex-is-rape") MacKinnon.)

When Lighton finally he did reach her, he says, "I told her, ‘Look. I need advice. I have a really difficult situation with a postdoc.’

"She said, ‘I have no advice to give you.’ "

When Lighton asked again, McCreary simply repeated, "I have no advice to give you." Then she added, "We take Laura’s complaints very seriously." And hung up the phone.

It was another four weeks before Lighton learned what the charges against him were. On March 13, 1995, McCreary came by his office to tell him he’d been charged with "quid pro quo sexual harassment"—an offense that Lighton didn’t even know existed. Furthermore, McCreary now told him, Fielden had "an extremely strong case."

According to Fielden’s complaint, which she filed with the Anti-Discrimination Division of the Utah Industrial Commission on March 30, 1995, the whole problem began when she told Lighton on her second day on the job that she "no longer wished our previous affair to continue." In response, Fielden said, Lighton waged a relentless "retaliation" campaign against her, making "threatening" phone calls, writing two "hurtful, vindictive and inflammatory" letters to her, periodically threatening to fire her for failing to tell him "good morning in a polite enough manner," hiring a lab worker without informing her, isolating her in her own lab, posting an advertisement for her job on the lab door, upbraiding her for not exchanging Christmas presents even though he knew "my husband was Jewish," "putting a virus" on her hard drive, reading her private correspondence with her husband, and trying to get her to go with him on another a ten-day "field trip" to Zzyzx, only to cancel the trip once he realized she had no intention of sleeping with him.

As if these were not enough, Lighton’s departmental chair added the accusation that Lighton had tried to get the university to change its leave policy because Fielden had once asked him for a "single day’s sick leave." And, for her part, associate legal counsel McCreary charged that Lighton had violated the university’s consensual leave policy.

Lighton was dumbfounded at the accusations, which in his opinion bore little or no resemblance to his recollection of those events. Despite what Fielden seemed to suggest, he never privately invited her to go alone with him to Zzyzx. He’d invited the entire lab, publicly, during a barbecue at his house attended by Fielden’s husband. By the same token, Lighton did not post an advertisement for Fielden’s job on her door. He posted it on the door to the lab where everyone would see it and, in any case, it wasn’t for her job. It was an ad to replace another postdoc who moved out of state and who had been proficient in electronics, computer programming, and instrument assembly—all areas in which Fielden was noticeably lacking.

It was true that Lighton had hired an undergraduate student without first informing Fielden first, but what was wrong with that? After Lighton asked Joos to do the inventory she asked for someone to help her. "It’s astonishing to me to think Laura felt she had to be consulted before I could hire an undergraduate to work with someone else on a temporary project," Lighton would later say.

The charge that Lighton had written Fielden two "hurtful, confrontational and inflammatory" letters couldn’t be more misleading. Far from being hate mail, he says, the letters were mild-mannered, deeply temperate, carefully phrased, and even complimentary. Furthermore, says Lighton, the letters, which had been written on the advice of Human Resources, were vetted by its director, Joanne Brown. Their purpose wasn’t to hurt anyone—it was to get "normal behavior out of a postdoc who was behaving impossibly badly."

As for the notion that he would put a virus on his own lab computer as a way of getting back at Fielden, that simply makes no sense, says Lighton, given that any damage caused by a virus would hurt his career (he was Principal Investigator on the grant) far more than hers. For another, other people had used the computer during the time Fielden had claimed the machine was infected and it worked fine for them. This is not to say Fielden couldn’t have had some sort of problem, says Lighton. Computer literacy was not her strong point. "She could barely use the DOS commands."

It was true that Lighton had read a letter from Fielden to her husband, but that was in no way prying. Fielden had written a letter to her husband on her office computer and then brought the disk up to the main lab to print it out. Only she forgot to close the file. The next time Lighton opened WordPerfect on the lab computer, it gave him an error message—"unsaved document." Thinking there might be something amiss with the data files, Lighton opened the file and discovered Fielden’s letter, which contained unflattering references to his professional abilities. But when he complained to Fielden, she accused him of reading her "personal and private correspondence to my husband."

As for the rest or the charges, Lighton did not put her off in a lab by herself as punishment. It was to protect the other workers from her ticks, which were escaping from their containers. Lighton, of course, knew that Rechav was Jewish, but Fielden herself wasn’t (and normally exchanged Christmas gifts with other people). Contrary to Ehleringer’s claim Lighton had never tried to get the university to change its leave policy as a way of punishing Fielden (he only asked what the policy was). Fielden was taking off time from work (in one case she flew to England) without either asking permission or notifying Lighton of her intentions in advance. As for Lighton’s supposed violation of the university’s consensual-relationship policy, the policy didn’t exist in 1993 when he and Fielden had an affair. But even if it had, it wouldn’t have applied to Fielden, who was merely a visiting scientist on a tourist visa, not a covered student or employee.

Although Lighton felt he had valid answers to every charge, he couldn’t tell anyone what they were. When McCreary told him Fielden’s case against him was extremely strong, he says, she also forbid him to say anything about the case—" You won’t talk to anyone. You won’t talk to Fielden. You won’t attempt to supervise her. You will stay away from Fielden."

Astounded and perplexed that the university’s associate legal counsel would take Fielden’s accusations at face value, Lighton prepared a long letter listing seventeen people, many of whom worked in the lab and, who in Lighton’s opinion, could refute her charges. But McCreary merely told him any such efforts to line up defense witnesses could be construed as further "retaliation."

It was now obvious to Lighton that he and McCreary were not on the same side. But when Lighton told her it looked like he needed his own lawyer, McCreary tried to dissuade him. "You will not get an attorney," Lighton says she told him. "If you get an attorney, you are immediately going to be seen as guilty, you are going to be seen as admitting to Fielden’s charges, you are going to be acting in opposition to the university and your indemnity to damages will be voided.’"

Lighton left his office a shaken man. He walked home, opened a bottle of wine and "thought about suicide."

Everything he’d ever accomplished, every pleasant memory he ever had as a child, every hope he’d had for the future, now felt sullied and gray. "I really felt bereft of hope," he says. "I was coming moronically into work trying to concentrate on things that needed to be done. Instead I found myself sitting in my office and staring into space. I was always close to bursting into tears. I had this continual feeling in the pit of my stomach like the feeling you get when you open a door and find there’s nothing there but a five-floor drop to the street below."

As a biologist, Lighton knew exactly how he would commit suicide too. "I would get a hold of potassium cyanide (used in labs for stopping metabolic reactions—killing insects). You just take half-a-teaspoon in your mouth. It would take effect in a second or two. You would experience nothing but blackness."

As a result of seeing a psychiatrist and taking anti-depressants, Lighton subsequently overcame and dropped the notion of suicide, but he never overcame his resentment at the university for not investigating whether Fielden was telling the truth or not. Although McCreary would later claim that the university had done a "thorough" investigation of Fielden’s charges, in fact, says Lighton, their vaunted "thorough" investigation consisted of talking to one administrator and four external staffers, at which point they ran "out of people who knew nothing about the situation." And in any case, Lighton would later say, McCreary would later admit during depositions that finding out "who was telling the truth and who wasn’t" had never been her goal anyway.

What had been her goal?

McCreary never said—and she declined to be interviewed for this story—but it was clear enough to Lighton. She was trying to minimize the university’s exposure by "rolling over" to Fielden’s demands—agreeing not to contest the charges while simultaneously overlooking anything that might contradict Fielden’s claims or cast her in a bad light (such as Lighton’s receipt of a long fax from the University of Bophuthatswana confirming that it indeed was the rightful owner of the equipment in question and expressing amazement that it had ended up in Lighton’s lab, given that the university had been given the impression it had been stolen or damaged beyond repair).

Lighton had received that fax just two days after he had found out he was in deep trouble, whereupon he rushed over to Karen McCreary’s office and left it with her secretary. "Later that day," says Lighton, "I got a call from Karen McCreary in which I was ordered in an almost hysterical fashion in no way whatsoever to act on this information. In other words, I was ordered by a university attorney to conceal evidence of a felony."

Lighton thought he knew the reason, too. McCreary was desperate not to bring up anything that might irritate Hoole into demanding more money or, worse yet, take the case to trial. Earlier that year, the University of Utah had been forced to pay a $900,000 fine to the federal government, one of the largest fines ever levied against a university, for covering up evidence that one of its professors was faking data to win grants. The university would do anything to avoid a repeat of that highly humiliating and expensive experience, which besides the $900,000 fines also cost taxpayers $3.5 million in legal fees.

In late spring of 1995, McCreary began pressuring Lighton to sign an settlement agreement which she had hammered out with Hoole in which Fielden would get $20,000 in exchange for dropping any claim against Lighton and the University of Utah. And Lighton, among other things, would promise not to disparage Fielden in any way.

Lighton wanted nothing more than to get this legal albatross off his back so he could return to his research, but the thought of signing the agreement filled him with rage and loathing. It wasn’t just that he considered the entire settlement a lie, he also resented the below-the-belt way he was being pressured to sign it. One day, Lighton’s wife, Monika, got a call from a woman who claimed to "be a friend of someone who owes you a favor. Your husband, John Lighton, has been having an affair with Barbara Joos and that is why he hired her." (Lighton wasn’t having an affair with Joos, he says, though as is not unusual in the profession, he and Joos had indeed slept together at a biology convention years before.)

More pressure came from Fielden’s attorney, Roger Hoole, who, Fielden says, told her to bring her lab notebooks to his law office (as they contained all the results of Fielden’s experiments, they were essential to Lighton’s writing the progress report for his NIH grant). Then, Lighton was told, he says, that he would get the notebooks back after he signed the settlement contract. Outraged at what he considered blatant "extortion" Lighton appealed to both the NIH and the University’s Vice President for Research who, says Lighton, quickly realized the seriousness of the matter and quickly arranged for Lighton to get copies of the data. Ehleringer subsequently wrote a sunny letter to the NIH, blaming the controversy on a failure of "internal communications."

In early April, with Lighton still refusing to sign anything which would imply he’d done anything wrong, Ehleringer and McCreary met with Lighton to say that unless he signed the agreement they would begin "internal investigations" on their own. When he protested that he hadn’t done anything to warrant internal investigations, he says, they exchanged meaningful glances, "smirked" at his naiveté, and were otherwise "openly, ghoulishly amused."

("You should get Karen McCreary to do her ghoulish chuckle for you sometime," says Lighton. "It’s not pretty.")

By May the pressure was getting intense. On the 14th, Lighton’s departmental chair, Jim Ehleringer, sent Lighton a letter which, Ehleringer claimed, had been approved by everyone from the Vice President of Research to the University President, ordering Lighton on pain of dismissal to (1) sign the settlement, (2) not contact the NIH, and (3) not say anything about Fielden that might damage her reputation or hold her up to disrepute. (Ehleringer declined to be interviewed for this story.)

But in the end it was McCreary who delivered the coup de grâce to Lighton’s scientific career. In a Friday phone conversation in early June with Lighton’s attorney, Bob Wilde, she announced that if Lighton didn’t sign agreement over the weekend, he says, he’d "be cleaning out his desk Monday morning."

On June 10, 1995, still clinging to the hope that by signing the contract the whole depressing mess would somehow "go away," Lighton scrawled his name on the settlement deal. Then, full of shame and self-loathing, he drove to Zzyzx for a previously scheduled field trip.

It was a much-needed relief to be out in the field after so much pressure at the lab—and to his surprise he got some publishable results (though owing to the stress he was under, he never tried to publish them). But the moment he got back he heard the startling news that Fielden’s attorney was now claiming that Lighton had broken the non-disclosure agreement (by failing to mention that he had talked to certain people in South Africa about Fielden) and thus Fielden was no longer bound by the contract’s terms.

Lighton felt profoundly betrayed. He had told McCreary about these conversations with people in South Africa two weeks prior to the signing of the settlement agreement, but she failed to relay that information to Hoole until the agreement had been signed (apparently for fear of derailing it). It put Lighton in a terrible predicament. He had signed the settlement agreement, he says, to protect himself from what McCreary said would be "massive lawsuits" from Fielden and "an alienation of affections" suit from her husband, Yigal Rechav. Now as a result of McCreary’s failure to tell Hoole about Lighton’s South African contacts before the contact signing, he was now in greater danger than if he’d never signed at all.

It was at this point that Lighton gave up. If the university could force him to "conceal criminal activity" (the irregular status of the LiCor) and "commit fraud" (require him to pay Fielden with his federal grant money for two months after she quit coming to work), it was clear, says Lighton, "they could trump up any charges and convict me of them, no matter how fantastic. They could [say] I was a child molester, I masturbated in public, I was a sheep rapist, I was a purple teapot from Mars. It didn’t matter what I was. I was unable to defend myself against it."

Deciding he’d rather leave on his terms rather than theirs, Lighton appealed to an old friend at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who found him a one-year appointment there teaching anatomy and physiology to undergraduates. In late June, Lighton resigned from the University of Utah and moved what remained of his lab to Las Vegas. The last thing he did was prepare a graph showing the (large) number of scientific papers he published in recent years compared to the much smaller average number published by his biology-department cohorts. "The results were revealing, almost cruelly so," says Lighton. "Then I scrawled, ‘So this is why I had to go?’ and left it in my vacated office."

Most professors, when falsely accused of sexual harassment (or in Lighton’s case of quid pro quo sexual harassment), go gently into that good night. They neither have the money nor the heart to fight back and in any case, says Lighton, given the deeply humiliating ordeal they’ve just been through—"you feel profoundly devalued and dirtied as a human being"—they only want to find some obscure academic outpost where they can blend into the undergrowth.

For his part, Lighton realized that he made a lot of mistakes. Someone of his ability and training never should have settled for the University of Utah. He shouldn’t have tried to make research scientists out of graduate students who in some cases only wanted a painless degree. And he should not have begun an affair with a colleague who was staying in his own house at a time he was married to someone else.

On the other hand, none of these were exactly impeachable offenses either. And, says Lighton, unlike some of his University of Utah colleagues, he never had an affair with any of his students and he certainly never retaliated against anyone for not having sex with him.

Despite all the recent problems Lighton had in his career, there was one way in which he was luckier than other academics charged with sexual harassment. He had a regular outside income. During all those years when he was furiously publishing papers and winning all those grants, he taught himself software programming and circuit design. Eventually he started manufacturing computer-controlled turn-key systems for measuring the metabolism of everything from harvester ants to killer whales. To market these products, Lighton and Monika together founded a small scientific equipment supply company, Sable Systems (Monika was president, Lighton chief designer.) By 1996 Sable Systems was bringing in enough money that Lighton could set aside $50,000 to hire an attorney to sue Fielden, McCreary, Ehleringer and the University of Utah.

After spending so many years not being able to defend himself, for Lighton, the depositions, which started earlier this year, have been a kind of catharsis. "I feel truly transformed into something tougher, sharper, clearer," he says. He was especially pleased with the place in McCreary’s testimony where his attorney asked her if she had ever referred to Lighton as a "bastard" or a "liar." McCreary wasn’t sure about the "liar," she said, but she knew she never called him a "bastard." Unbeknownst to McCreary, Lighton had made a secret tape recording of a meeting where she had used those exact words. "Juries love tapes," he says gleefully.

The trial begins in February, but already it’s obvious, says Lighton, what the Attorney General’s trial strategy will be. "They are going to use an interestingly archaic, Victorian, ad hominem defense. They are going to say I am a white heterosexual male with a functional penis and [thus] beyond the pale of civilized society."

If anyone thought otherwise, it was cleared up, says Lighton, when Mark Ward, the Utah Assistant Attorney General defending the university against Lighton’s suit, brought in the state’s risk manager (the person who evaluates the state’s possible financial exposure) to listen to Ward ask Lighton about his sexual history for the last eight years. "You could really feel the slime dripping off Ward," says Lighton. "There were pools on the floor under his seat."

There was another reason it made Lighton so angry to be grilled like that. He knew from personal experience that, when he was at Utah, some of his colleagues were violating the university’s consensual-relationship policy every day. He in turn had never done it even once, yet he was the one who had lost his reputation and his career. "There were times when I wanted to call up the (risk manager) and say, ‘I really want to know,’ " Lighton said after that deposition. " ‘Do you get your thrills going into depositions that have a sexual theme? I want you to be able express yourself really frankly on this subject. Now I would like to describe some of the intimate details of what some of these women and I did in the privacy of our bedroom. Have you got your trousers off yet?’ "

Despite his case not having gone to trial yet, Lighton already has a kind of partial exoneration from the Utah’s Office of the State Auditor, which, after examining documents from both sides in the LiCor matter, concluded that the University of Utah took "inadequate" action to determine ownership of the LiCor. Instead, said state auditor Austin Johnson, in a July 1998 letter to the university’s Acting VP for Academic Affairs, the university first told Lighton "to do nothing." Then it turned around and drafted a settlement agreement that allowed Fielden to take the equipment out of state. Such actions, the auditor noted, "could" constitute a violation of the Utah Code (committing "theft" by "concealing, selling or withholding" property" from its rightful owner).

Although no one in Utah (including the Attorney General’s office) seems much interested the matter, there was some movement in South Africa—the insurance company which paid the claim on the (allegedly destroyed) LiCor filed a "theft and fraud" claim against both Fielden and Rechav with the Johannesburg Central Police Station’s Fraud Division, which in turn referred the matter to Interpol. (According to Fielden’s deposition, her husband’s attorneys are now in negotiations with Bophuthatswana University regarding the matter.)

In the meantime, Lighton is still faced with one enormous over-riding problem—the total loss of his research career, which he spent ten years of his life preparing for and which was gone in barely the wink of an eye.

What school, he asks, is going to take the risk of hiring anyone found "functionally guilty of sexual harassment?" (When he applied to one school, says Lighton, they replied that they "didn’t want to inherit Utah’s problems." Another let it be known his application was "dead in the water.") But even if Lighton could find a university willing to give him a chance, he might not be able to take the job—"I start to hyperventilate when I’m alone in a room with a female graduate student." Also, says Lighton, the stress he was under may have caused permanent neural damage to the part of the brain that controls emotions. There was a time, says Lighton, when ideas used to come to him in "showers of sparks." Now, "if I were to go off medication, I’d go into severe depression. The only reason I’m able to carry on a normal conversation at all is that I’m on Effexor (a more powerful kind of Prozac)."

While Lighton’s academic career has essentially ended (he’s mainly working for Sable now), Fielden’s has continued to escalate. With her $20,000 settlement in hand she moved to Georgia where she obtained a position at Berry College, a private Christian school. She has since made a grant application to the NSF in the same area in which Lighton had once been the country’s leading authority. And she’s shortly expecting a baby.

On the other hand, Fielden’s collegial relations are perhaps not everything they could be. One of Fielden’s Berry College colleagues recently complained that she won’t talk to him, says Lighton. And people who worked with Fielden in South Africa have now come forward to say that, when Fielden was at Medunsa medical university, her blatant public affair with department chair Rechav, who was married at the time, caused so much dissension in the department that some faculty members circulated a petition asking that it (and other matters stop). Instead, said the petitioners, Rechav blamed them for being "rude" to Fielden, who in turn began isolating herself "in her office [all] day."

Ironically, considering all the problems Fielden caused Lighton by accusing him of sexual harassment, her deposition might still very well be the one that does him the most good. During her examination by Lighton’s attorney, Fielden admitted that she knew the LiCor belonged to the University of Bophuthatswana, said her attorney told her to take the NIH notebooks, testified that she couldn’t recall Lighton’s ever having made any sexual advances on her, volunteered that most of the time Lighton was "very kind" and "very positive" toward her, and admitted leaving phone messages for Lighton saying how much she missed him.

At the end of the deposition, apparently irate that Fielden’s testimony turned out so unexpectedly favorable to Lighton, Ward angrily announced that from this point forward "the possibility" that he would make a financial offer to Lighton "was zero."

"Fine," replied Lighton. He never wanted money anyway—he wanted "exoneration," no matter at this point how unlikely that might be.