Smithsonian bans admitted sexual harasser

In June 2011, a visiting scientist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) lured a younger research student into an isolated hallway and groped her. Over the past five years, the student — whom we called by the pseudonym “Angie” in an extensive investigation of her case published last week — has fought a frustrating battle to get museum officials to protect her from her harasser, a bat researcher named Miguel Pinto.

On November 1st, Angie was finally given the protection she sought. As of that date, the museum has banned Pinto from its laboratories and collections, ending his status as a “research collaborator” and deactivating his entry badge. Museum officials declined to explain their decision: in a terse statement to The Verge, NMNH communications chief Sarah Goforth said only that “Miguel Pinto is no longer affiliated with the Smithsonian.”

The move is directly related to the harassment charges

But sources at the museum say the move is directly related to the harassment charges, as well as similar allegations against Pinto that have surfaced more recently. These include his recent admission to The Verge of a 2008 harassment episode at Texas Tech University, where he did his masters studies, and allegations by another former student that Pinto had harassed her in 2010 and 2011. Those latter incidents allegedly took place while both that student and Pinto were graduate students at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City.

Nancy Simmons, a bat expert at the AMNH who was Pinto’s co-advisor at the time, laments that she did not do more. “I wake up in the middle of the night wishing that I had known, that I had been more observant and proactive about Miguel Pinto and his behavior,” she says.

Pinto did not respond to requests for comment. But Angie says the Smithsonian’s decision does not necessarily demonstrate that it is now serious about protecting women from harassment. “This shows that the Smithsonian will protect women from sexual predators only if publicly shamed into doing so,” she says. Indeed, earlier this week, Congresswoman Jackie Speier (D-CA) wrote to the Smithsonian to urge that it launch its own investigation of the case and closely examine its sexual misconduct policies.

“Sexual harassment needs to end right now, period.”

“We cannot change the past,” Simmons says, “but we can change the future. Sexual harassment needs to end right now, period.”

Conrad Labandeira, a paleobiologist at the NMNH who has closely followed Angie’s case, praises the decision to ban Pinto. But he says that it “should have happened some time ago.” Labandeira says that Angie’s long struggle for justice illustrates the need to tackle sexual harassment on two levels. The first, he says, is that of the individual harasser. The second “is the institutional role, establishing a workplace that is free of harassment and other kinds of inequities.” The two approaches, Labandeira stresses, “have to be linked.”

Not everyone sees the banning of Pinto as a happy ending, however. “I am very torn in this situation,” says one scientist who asked not to be identified. “The idea of whether Miguel can be reformed seems to have been lost in favor of pushes to repudiate him as a human being, beyond condemning his terrible behavior.”

Pinto now has a research position in his home country of Ecuador, at the National Polytechnic School in Quito. Thus he would only have visited the NMNH on occasion. But scientists who know him say that being banned from the museum is likely to seriously affect his research. The NMNH, with 140,000 specimens, has the largest bat collection in the world.

By Smithsonian bans admitted sexual harasser

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