Academic who hounded him and her history of lies
AS the backlash against Sir Tim Hunt gathered pace, its architect Connie St Louis was invited on Radio 4’s Today programme to discuss his supposed crimes against political correctness.
She leapt at the opportunity to shame him publicly.
Two days earlier, listeners were told, Sir Tim had been invited to propose the toast during a lunch for female journalists attending a conference in South Korea.
According to Mrs St Louis, he proceeded to deliver an outrageously misogynistic speech about the ‘trouble’ with female scientists which left his audience in a state of shock. ‘There was this deathly, deathly silence’ after he’d finished, she told the BBC. ‘No one laughed. Everybody was stony-faced.’
So far, so scandalous. Or at least it would have been, were her version of events actually true.
In the days and weeks that followed, it emerged that other witnesses remembered things very differently.
A transcript of the speech, written by an EU official, suggested Sir Tim’s supposedly sexist remarks were in fact intended as a joke – which Sir Tim himself confirmed.
He’d prefaced them with an ironic introduction about what a ‘chauvinist monster’ he was.
And mid-way through, Hunt had said ‘now seriously’, before talking at length about the ‘important role’ women actually play in science.
A recording of the speech, made by Russian journalist Natalia Demina, revealed that it was met with peals of laughter. And a photograph of the event showed Sir Tim and his audience smiling and applauding (rather than sitting, as Mrs St Louis had so vigorously claimed, in stony silence.)
Elsewhere, serious questions were soon raised about the professional credentials of Mrs St Louis, who runs a journalism course at London’s City University, after the Daily Mail revealed her CV on the institution’s website included several false claims.
It said she ‘writes for numerous outlets, including The Independent, Daily Mail, the Guardian [and] The Sunday Times’. However, there is no record of her ever having written for any of those titles, except for The Guardian, which has only ever published two articles by her, one of which was about Sir Tim.
The CV also described Mrs St Louis, 58, as an ‘award-winning broadcaster’ whose career highlights included ‘ securing Bill Gates’ first British interview’.
But her interview with Gates was broadcast in November 1994, by which time he had appeared multiple times in British print, radio and TV interviews. The Microsoft founder’s first appearance on the BBC was in the early 1980s.
And in a second CV, which she published online, Mrs St Louis boasted of being a ‘Member of the Royal Institution’. Yet a spokesman for the education and research organisation said: ‘Anyone can be a member ... it’s simply a service that you pay for which entitles you to free tickets and gives you a discount in our cafe.’ After the false claims emerged City was forced to remove Mrs St Louis’s CV from its website, while a spokesman said it intended to ‘help her update’ the document.
It was republished in late July. All print journalism experience was removed, and details of her radio career heavily edited.
Despite the controversy, Mrs St Louis today remains an employee at the university where, laughably, her duties involve teaching about journalistic ethics.
She also still sits on the board of the Association of British Science Writers, a fact that in October prompted Sir Colin Blakemore, one of the nation’s most eminent scientists, to resign as its honorary president. He called Mrs St Louis’s treatment of Hunt ‘unbalanced, exaggerated, and selective’.
Summing up Sir Tim and Mrs St Louis’s conflicting fates, Nobel Prize-winning scientist Sir Andre Geim said: ‘No vice- chancellor would take on an ethnic-minority militant feminist. Those are not humble Nobel laureates who can be forced to resign quietly.’
‘Unbalanced and exaggerated’