A jury has awarded $14 million to a former UCLA hematologist who said she was forced out of her job as director of the medical school’s lymphoma program because a male-dominated administration ignored her complaints of gender discrimination.
The Los Angeles Superior Court panel reached its verdict Thursday in a retrial of Dr. Lauren Pinter-Brown’s longrunning lawsuit originally filed against the UC Regents in June 2016.
Pinter-Brown, now 69, won $13 million in the first trial of the case in 2018, but the verdict was overturned by a panel of the Second District Court of Appeal in 2020 on grounds of judicial error. Among other things, the appellate justices noted that the first trial judge told the prospective jurors that “the arc of the moral universe is long,” quoting Martin Luther King, and that “if you are selected as a juror, your job will be to help bend that arc toward justice,” a remark potentially prejudicing jurors against the UC Regents.
In their court papers, UC Regents denied any wrongdoing on the part of their client.
“In 2011, UCLA began investigating plaintiff’s clinical research after routine audits revealed serious issues with (her) record- keeping and management and plaintiff failed to offer timely responses to audit findings,” the UC Regents lawyers contended in their court papers. .
In late 2015 or early 2016, when Pinter-Brown left UCLA to work at UC Irvine, the plaintiff had all her research privileges and was receiving her full salary, the UC Regents attorneys further stated in their pleadings.
But Pinter-Brown, an expert in T-cell lymphoma research, testified in the first trial that conditions for her became nearly intolerable at UCLA.
“I lived in a state of terror, basically,” she said. “I was anxious all the time.”
Pinter-Brown testified she was repeatedly berated for her clinical trial work by a subordinate physician, Dr. Sven De Vos, who also once turned his back to her during a meeting and often interrupted her when she spoke.
“I was trying to establish myself as someone who was respected,” Pinter-Brown said. “It was like the butt of a joke.”
Asked by her lawyer, Carney R. Shegerian, if she ever tried to resolve her differences with De Vos, Pinter-Brown replied, “He wasn’t approachable. He’d shut me up pretty quick.”
In contrast, De Vos was “very collegial” with male doctors, Pinter-Brown said.
Pinter-Brown, who was given the lymphoma program directorship in 2005, was later replaced by de Vos.
Pinter-Brown said conducting a clinical trial with the right patients is crucial so that drug companies will trust the physician in charge. But she said that when she successfully obtained FDA approval of a particular drug for lymphoma treatment, a male colleague replied, “Should I care?”
Asked by Shegerian if the drug saved lives, she replied, “Yes, it did.”
Another male colleague said Pinter-Brown should move her practice outside the university and help patients with ovarian cancer, even though her expertise was in the field of lymphoma, she said.
Pinter-Brown said she made as much as $250,000 less than her male counterparts, but was told by one physician that her pay was below what men received because she had the assistance of a nurse practitioner.
Outside the university setting, Pinter-Brown was praised for her work at medical conferences and doctors and patients from around the world consulted with her, she said.
“It was like night and day,” she said.