These Bad Bosses Handed Over an Employee’s Job to the Very Person She Complained Was Undermining Her
In 2005, Lauren Pinter-Brown became the first female director of the lymphoma program at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The well-respected scientist’s task was daunting: To revive a faltering program while also teaching at UCLA, seeing patients, and conducting clinical trials. Meanwhile, one of her male colleagues began undermining her and even physically intimidating her while he campaigned for her job, according to court testimony.
When she complained to her supervisors, Dennis Slamon and John Glaspy, they told her that the other doctor’s bad behavior was a symptom of her poor leadership — and then they, too, began to treat her with less respect, she testified.
At one point, Glaspy connected Pinter-Brown with a UCLA doctor who was supposedly designated to field sex-discrimination complaints, but who told her that she had a reputation as “an angry woman” and advised her simply to avoid the problematic colleague, according to testimony.
Slamon and Glaspy also put Pinter-Brown’s academic work under a microscope, she testified, culminating in a year-long suspension for supposed research failings and her removal as program director.
“We don’t want somebody like you to be the face of the UCLA lymphoma program,” Slamon told her, she said in court.
Her replacement? The undermining male doctor.
Pinter-Brown suffered in her reduced role, she testified, feeling depressed and ignored by her bosses. She finally felt compelled to leave UCLA in 2015.
Dennis Slamon and John Glaspy are our Bad Bosses of the Month.
Pinter-Brown filed a complaint against UCLA in California state court, claiming gender-based discrimination and other wrongs. In 2018, a jury awarded her more than $13 million in damages — only for an appeals court to overturn the verdict, saying that the trial judge had shown bias toward Pinter-Brown.
A do-over trial took place in 2024, and this time Pinter-Brown won even more: $14 million. UCLA has said it will appeal.
Until her tainted departure, UCLA had been a force for good in Pinter-Brown’s life. As a kid in junior high and high school in Los Angeles, she hung out on the university’s campus “every weekend,” she testified. She worked as a candy striper at the medical center, helped with lab-rat experiments during college summers, and later went to medical school at UCLA.
Her interest in lymphoma, too, was long-standing. In junior high, she got to know a classmate whose hair was falling out from treatment for a form of the cancer; they stayed friends until he died in his forties.
“I really was puzzled and intrigued … by how that can happen to a kid, and what it was all about,” she told jurors. “It … started my interest in lymphomas and I was only 13.”
By 2005, Pinter-Brown had become an expert in T-cell lymphoma — an aggressive form of the disease — and worked at a medical center affiliated with UCLA, conducting clinical trials and sometimes teaching students at her alma mater. She was an early adviser to several lymphoma foundations, she testified, and was on good terms with the UCLA program’s original director.
The program was a part of UCLA’s hematology-oncology division, overseen by division chief Slamon and assistant chief Glaspy, both cancer doctors. After a period during which the original director moved overseas and the program stagnated, Slamon hired Pinter-Brown to take over.
Pinter-Brown inherited a “ghost town,” she told jurors, and at first, Slamon and Glaspy were impressed by her performance. In court, they described her as professional, diligent, and patient-focused. After long days in the clinic, she’d spend nights evangelizing UCLA’s cancer services to local physicians and sorting through old trials that hadn’t officially been closed, she testified.
But a male colleague in the program, Sven De Vos, soon became a hindrance, initiating long chats with Pinter-Brown during work hours, talking “about nothing” as he “sprawled out” in a chair while her patients waited, she told jurors. When she finally asked him to stop socializing because she didn’t have time, his attitude changed.
“He became very oppositional every time we met as a group,” she testified. “If I had said it was day, he would [say] it was night. He talked over me. He didn’t look at me. … He would get angry and walk around the room. … One time he turned his chair around with his back to me for [a whole] meeting.”
De Vos also failed to follow group decisions, Pinter-Brown testified, and he often committed program resources to new clinical trials without consulting her. After about 18 months on the job, during which she received stellar reviews from her colleagues, Pinter-Brown finally complained to Slamon and Glaspy — saying that she believed De Vos was disrespecting her authority because of her sex, according to testimony.
A UCLA administrative employee who attended many meetings with Slamon and Glaspy agreed with Pinter-Brown. She told jurors that De Vos had openly said he’d never answer to Pinter-Brown; that he was lobbying for Pinter-Brown’s job; and that he seemed both dismissive and angry toward women.
Slamon and Glaspy’s main response, according to testimony: To advise both Pinter-Brown and De Vos to steer clear of each other.
Raising the matter seemed to damage Pinter-Brown’s stature with her bosses. On one occasion, according to court documents, Slamon told her that mutual dislikes are normal and “you just have to suck it up.” During a meeting, according to testimony, Glaspy mouthed to Pinter-Brown, “Everybody hates you.”
Some of Pinter-Brown’s successes went uncelebrated. When a drug that she had championed in trials won approval for use against peripheral T-cell lymphoma, she was “so excited,” she told jurors — yet Slamon didn’t respond to the news at all, while Glaspy curtly replied via email, “Should we care?”
(In court, Glaspy said he didn’t remember the exchange but “it may have been a bad joke.”)
The relationship deteriorated further in 2010, Pinter-Brown testified, when she complained that she was being paid substantially less than her male peers. Slamon and Glaspy said her salary was lower to compensate for an extra nurse practitioner who was needed to handle her heavy patient load, she told jurors — except that, before he hired Pinter-Brown, Slamon had told her that UCLA would cover the cost, she testified.
The following year, Glaspy told De Vos that Pinter-Brown had been complaining about him, according to court documents, and things got even worse.
De Vos chaired a UCLA internal audit committee that began raising concerns about some of Pinter-Brown’s research — which previously had few problems. Although De Vos testified that he believed he “would have” recused himself from any consideration of Pinter-Brown’s work, a witness said he was present for the entire discussion.
The matter escalated to a second UCLA audit committee in which Glaspy played a significant role, according to documents. Meanwhile Pinter-Brown began to feel physically intimidated by De Vos, including an incident during which he yelled and clenched his fists in a “menacing position,” she testified.
“I thought he was going to kill me,” Pinter-Brown told the jury. She ran into an empty room, locked the door, and shoved a chair under the doorknob before starting to sob and shake.
From inside the room, she made several calls before reaching Glaspy, who suggested that she could resign as director and work instead as an individual contributor, she testified — an effective demotion that she rejected. She wanted to lodge a Title IX complaint, she insisted.
Glaspy grudgingly agreed to connect her with the proper person, she testified, and she spoke via phone with an older male cardiologist who mainly told her to go home early. She spent a day writing out a long statement for this cardiologist, who scheduled a longer session to discuss her situation.
This first meeting started confrontationally, she told jurors. The cardiologist opened by saying she had a “rep” at UCLA as an angry woman, she testified, but then he softened and said he’d talk with Slamon and Glaspy and schedule a second session.
The second session started even worse, she testified. “You may be a diva, but you can’t act like that,” the cardiologist said, according to Pinter-Brown. At a later point, the cardiologist held up her statement between two fingers, dropped it into a drawer, and said, “No one needs to know about this,” she testified.
According to testimony, the cardiologist wasn’t a designated Title IX officer for UCLA.
In July 2012, the second auditing committee reached its conclusion: Due to supposed faults in her work, Pinter-Brown’s research privileges were suspended for a year, and she was assigned a mentor — whose conclusion the following year was that Pinter-Brown was “an excellent lymphoma doctor” who was qualified to conduct clinical trials.
Meanwhile, Slamon removed Pinter-Brown as head of the lymphoma program — making his comment about not wanting “somebody like you to be [the program’s] face” — and elevated De Vos, her underminer, in her place, according to testimony.
Dispirited, Pinter-Brown stopped fighting back. On her desk, she told jurors, she kept a framed illustration of how to survive a brown bear attack. It was a reminder, she said, that she needed to “play dead” at work.
“I felt like I was in a hangman’s noose,” she testified. “The more that you struggle, the tighter the noose gets.”
The failed audit and demotion were stains on her record, she told the jury — even though they resulted from an internal UCLA process, not a more-serious FDA audit. It became harder to do research, she said, and she was no longer asked to give lectures.
Ironically, according to testimony, Slamon had himself failed an FDA audit but wasn’t demoted and “never suffered adverse consequences,” in the words of a judge’s opinion.
Pinter-Brown’s thoughts edged toward suicide, she said. After almost 30 years under care for a genetic heart condition, she stopped taking her medication.
“I wanted to die,” she told the jury. “I just wanted to disappear.”
Months at a time passed without her speaking to Slamon — but one day, she testified, she found herself in an elevator with him. She tried to make small talk, she said, but he ignored her except to say, as he exited, “You’re still here?”
Feeling like she had no other option, Pinter-Brown finally resigned. Soon afterward she started a new position at UC Irvine, albeit at a lower salary. She was so damaged by her time at UCLA, her husband testified, that she began to avoid the UCLA campus she had loved all her life — declining even to attend arts events there.
“That was her home,” he told jurors. But “since she left UCLA, she doesn’t want to have anything to do with the place.”
Driving home from UC Irvine one night, Pinter-Brown began sobbing and felt an urge to veer into the median to kill herself, she told the court. She sought psychiatric help, and ultimately was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety — non-economic harms that accounted for a majority of the damages awarded by the 2024 jury, which found that her gender was a “substantial motivating factor” for being illegally pushed out of her UCLA job.
Pinter-Brown’s jury award is being appealed (again) by UCLA, which according to its Web site continues to employ Slamon and Glaspy.
De Vos remains the director of its lymphoma program.
» Read Pinter-Brown’s complaint
» See the bear-safety illustration that Pinter-Brown kept on her desk
The Employment Law Group® law firm was not involved in Pinter-Brown v. Regents of the University of California. We select “Bad Boss” cases to illustrate the continuing relevance of employee protection laws for our newsletter’s audience, which includes attorneys and former TELG clients.
Pinter-Brown was represented by Shegerian & Associates.