The Big Lie

The chemistry professor and his wife argued often in those days, as their marriage was coming to an end and a custody battle brewed over their two young children. Then, one summer night, things got so heated that the police were called to intervene.

Brian and Stacey McNaughton had bought their single-family home in Fort Collins, Colo., six years earlier for $525,000. It was the sort of place, situated on an oversize corner lot in a neighborhood filled with doctors and lawyers, that projected the kind of solid middle-class status that the couple had achieved after years of study. Brian McNaughton, once a first-generation college student, was on the tenure track at Colorado State University, and his wife was a nurse anesthetist.

But all of that risked being torn asunder because of the big lie — a lie that they shared, and that Stacey McNaughton was now threatening to expose. She would recount to the police how she had signaled plans to call her husband’s boss, reveal his deception, and derail his career. The couple struggled for control of a phone, and the professor pleaded with his wife to reconsider, before Stacey McNaughton ran out the back door screaming for help. She jumped a fence and took refuge with some neighbors who were having a backyard campfire.

On that night and many thereafter, Brian McNaughton feared that his wife would tell people at Colorado State how he had fabricated a job offer from another university. It was a simple scheme, one designed to earn him the kind of money and respect that is often so elusive for early-career professors. As McNaughton had hoped, the fake letter spurred a counteroffer, forcing his dean and department chair to reconsider what he might be worth.

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In July 2015, police responded to a domestic disturbance at the McNaughtons’ home. An officer’s body camera captured interviews with the couple and a secret recording that Stacey McNaughton had made of their argument. Source: Fort Collins police

Not long before, Stacey McNaughton had started secretly recording all of the couple’s conversations. In audio from that summer night, which she shared with an officer, she can be heard saying, “You wrote that letter, Brian — that lie. I told you don’t submit it.”

But he had done it, and there was no turning back.

When he was hired at Colorado State, in 2009, McNaughton considered himself lucky to be employed. He and his fellow postdocs at Harvard University, where he had worked for the two previous years, entered the job market at the worst possible time. The bottom had fallen out of the economy, and universities were slashing budgets.

But Colorado State’s chemistry department was hiring three new tenure-track faculty members, and talking about growth. McNaughton, whose research is related to cancer and HIV treatment, stood out as a candidate who could raise the profile of chemical biology in a department where little such work was being done.

Almost out of the gate, McNaughton landed a $330,000 grant. His dean was impressed. Quickly, though, McNaughton began to question how he was being treated. In hundreds of pages of emails, which the university provided, and documents from other sources, a portrait emerges of McNaughton as an ever more discontented professor.

He perceived a series of slights and, then, a larger pattern of unfairness. In his third year on the job, McNaughton’s frustration escalated when he was denied teaching relief after the birth of his first child — an accommodation that he said had been extended to a colleague not long before.

McNaughton trained much of his anger on Ellen R. Fisher, who was chair of the chemistry department when he was hired at Colorado State. He told his dean that Fisher was a bully who played favorites among faculty members.

“I have been amazed to see the ease with which Ellen demeans and demoralizes my colleagues,” McNaughton wrote in an email to Janice L. Nerger, dean of the College of Natural Sciences.

Fisher, who is now Colorado State’s senior faculty adviser for research, declined an interview request. So did Nerger.

By late 2013, McNaughton sounded furious. He was convinced that money he had been promised had gone to another professor. Now, he said, his lab was broke. He turned to Nerger, describing his treatment as “unreal.”

“My lab is totally shut down,” he wrote to the dean. “We are out of pipette tips and cannot sequence DNA we make — we literally cannot run experiments during the most critical time of my young career.

“What’s particularly disgusting, in the face of this, is how thousands of dollars are spent to buy equipment for ‘special’ members of the faculty.”

Within days, Nerger had secured bridge funding for McNaughton’s lab — a down payment on a professor in whom she said she deeply believed.

“My money’s on you,” she wrote. “Very confident in fact.”

McNaughton would regularly trumpet his successes to the dean, shooting her emails about a promising new grant or a research breakthrough. Bit by bit, he carved out a reputation for himself as a valuable commodity — someone who might well be snatched up by another university.

McNaughton was a good scientist, his former colleagues say. But some viewed him as a needy one, too.

“I considered Brian to be somebody who needed to be told he was good,” said P. Shing Ho, former chairman of the department of biochemistry and molecular biology, where McNaughton had a joint appointment.

At home, McNaughton got no such reinforcement. His wife, he recalls, criticized his shortcomings as a provider for their family, dwelling on the fact that she was the bigger breadwinner.

The academic bureaucracy seldom bent to the professor’s will. One of McNaughton’s central ambitions at Colorado State was to establish a multidisciplinary program in chemical biology, but the project was mired in disagreements with other departments over scheduling and curricula. It never came to fruition.

After five years on the job, McNaughton was still chasing tenure, still battling for money for his lab and for himself. Despite some success, he discerned that he had very little political capital. The professors with real influence — those who could push through a new program or direct the department to hire in particular areas — were those with stock high enough to be poached by another university. In effect, they were worth more.

McNaughton believed he was such a professor. He had been courted, albeit informally, by other institutions. What was the real difference between these flirtations, he pondered, and a genuine offer from another university?

Not much, he decided. So he made one up.

As the idea took shape, McNaughton did a Google search for University of Minnesota letterhead. The fake offer had to look real.

He filled the document with details, which together amounted to a wish list for a career that he thought he deserved: Minnesota would give him a $107,500 salary — a nearly $30,000 bump, 3,000 square feet of lab space, and $1.7 million in research support.

But there was a bigger idea to sell — the idea that McNaughton was a scientist in high demand, batting away suitors whose entreaties grew in volume and appeal with each passing day. In an email to Charles S. Henry, who was then his department chair, McNaughton wrote that he’d interviewed with, and had a verbal offer from, the University of Michigan’s chemistry department and had been invited to apply for senior-level faculty jobs at a handful of other universities.

The chair of Michigan’s chemistry department declined to discuss the matter in any detail but told The Chronicle in an email that McNaughton had interviewed for a position and “did not receive an offer.”

If Colorado State could meet McNaughton’s modest needs, the professor argued, he could stop wasting time fielding all of these offers. “I don’t see this stream of opportunities coming to an end anytime soon,” McNaughton wrote.

Laying out his demands in an email to his chairman, McNaughton argued for benefits considerably less generous than those he claimed to have been promised by Minnesota. Comparatively, Colorado State could retain him for a steal.

“I want enough money to fund new research efforts in my lab,” McNaughton wrote. “I think $500K will do. I’m firm on this number; I’m being more than reasonable. I also want a vote on my tenure ASAP, as well as a pay raise.”

The ruse worked. Colorado State administrators scrambled to keep him. As Nerger, the dean, worked to hammer out a deal, she pleaded with McNaughton to remain in Fort Collins. “Suggested mantra,” she implored in an email, “STAY AT CSU.”

McNaughton got less than he asked for but still came out ahead. A $5,000 raise brought his salary to just above $83,000. He secured new equipment for his lab, money to hire a postdoc, and a promise to remodel space in the chemistry building as a lounge for his graduate students.

The dean also assured McNaughton that a vote was forthcoming on tenure, which he was later granted.

On paper, the agreement was a coup. But it did little to repair McNaughton’s problems at home. Tensions escalated when his wife discovered his frequent texts with another woman. Money was a regular source of conflict, even though the couple did not want for much. More than once, the police showed up. And more than once they heard how Stacey McNaughton was threatening to get her husband fired. She told them that he had changed and even that she feared him, but the officers found no proof of physical abuse.

Stacey McNaughton did not respond to interview requests.

The McNaughtons divorced late in the summer of 2016, and Stacey McNaughton moved to Leesport, Pa., with their two children. Five months later, an anonymous letter detailing the professor’s scheme arrived at the provost’s office.

It didn’t take much for Brian McNaughton’s deception to fall apart.

When Colorado State officials asked Thomas S. Hays whether he had ever offered McNaughton a job at Minnesota, the former interim dean of the College of Biological Sciences affirmed that he had not. That was not Hays’s signature on the letter. There had been no promise of $1.7 million in research funding.

“Quite shocking indeed!” Hays wrote in an email.

As the walls closed in on McNaughton, he acted incredulous. He wondered if an email from a university grievance officer, who was asking to meet, might be some sort of prank. It wasn’t, his dean said.

“I am in hopes you have an explanation that will enable the process to end with a positive outcome,” Nerger wrote in July of last year.

McNaughton saw no choice but to come clean. In an exhaustive, five-page letter, he confessed and pleaded with Nerger for empathy and mercy. He described in detail the failure of his marriage and his belief that his ex-wife had sought to destroy him by exposing his misdeeds. It was she, McNaughton was convinced, who had tipped off the provost.

“I gave in to enormous pressures, frustration, and my own ego, and foolishly delivered the letter featured in your evidence,” McNaughton wrote. “I made an enormous mistake, one that brings with it the highest level of embarrassment and deepest regret.”

McNaughton described to them a shaming existence, in which he was never able to live up to expectations. His wife, he said, would often complain about his salary and lament that “she was the only woman (mom) on our street who worked.” His income, he continued, “was a constant and significant concern of hers, amplified by the birth of our first child — and then the second.”

McNaughton wrote that his ex-wife had promised to damage him “both personally and professionally.” By lying to his employer, he said, he had given her the tools to do just that.

In his letter, the professor owned up to his mistakes. But he could not resist lashing out. He had been “thrown under the bus,” he said, by Colorado State administrators, who had contacted Minnesota officials rather than confronting him privately. Now McNaughton’s fake letter risked being widely known in his small, scientific community. He groused about perceived inequities that still ate at him: Remember those two other professors who had come up for tenure before him? Even now, he said, he made less money than they did.

With a threat of termination looming, McNaughton sought a quiet resolution. He would resign in a year, he offered, giving himself enough time to line up another job and allowing his graduate students the opportunity to follow him.

The offer, Nerger said in an email, had been discussed “at the highest levels of the university” and rejected given the “severity of this matter.”

The dean put a new deal on the table: Give me your resignation letter by Friday, Nerger told him, and I can buy you seven weeks to get your house in order. And no one has to know about this mess.

McNaughton didn’t take the deal. Instead he hired a lawyer.

As the university worked toward a resolution, Nerger received an email from a person who was identified as “Dr. James Miller.”

“Good morning,” the email read. “I see you have done nothing about the fraud that Dr. Brian McNaughton committed. I’m going to give you one more chance to get this right.”

The email warned the university not to be misled by the “bull story about his ex-wife being crazy.”

“This scumbag is a liar,” “Dr. Miller” continued, “and you seem not to care that he committed fraud.”

It would take nearly nine more months — during which time McNaughton took family leave to care for his mother, who was dying of leukemia — before Colorado State reached a deal with the professor.

According to a separation agreement, which was signed by the university’s president, McNaughton would resign his position as an associate professor on April 27 this year. He would then be rehired as a “special associate research professor,” a role that would allow him to oversee his lab through July 15. McNaughton would admit no wrongdoing but would pay back to the university all of his ill-gotten gains, to the tune of $16,000.

The terms allowed McNaughton, who is 40, to line up a job at the University of Delaware, where he would be an associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry with the expectation of an expedited tenure vote. Seven graduate students planned to move with him across the country.

It was over. Or so the professor thought.

Final as it seemed, the separation agreement never envisioned a person like Kyle Strunk. A private investigator and fiscal hawk, he would not rest until McNaughton’s lie was exposed.

The website for Flatirons Private Investigations describes Strunk as a retired military intelligence officer who speaks Arabic and German. According to his biography, Strunk maintains a secret security clearance, and his two decades of sleuthing have sent him to the Middle East, Oceania, and Asia.

But the assignment that has most animated Strunk of late started closer to home, near his Broomfield, Colo., headquarters. In Strunk’s telling, Stacey McNaughton first contacted him to ask if the private investigator would surveil her ex-husband when their children were visiting him in Fort Collins. Strunk says he never did that particular snooping. But he took a keen interest in what he learned about Brian McNaughton, a public-university professor who had defrauded the taxpayers of Colorado and seemed to have gotten away with it.

This was just the sort of thing that got a rise out of Strunk and his buddies, a group known as the Colorado Society of Private Investigators.

“We investigate public corruption,” Strunk says, “and this kind of met that test.”

This past spring, Strunk sent a records request to Colorado State for correspondence related to McNaughton. What he found angered him. This wasn’t some employment dispute that could be quietly worked out by lawyers, he concluded; it was felony forgery. But that crime, Strunk was convinced, had been swept under the rug by the university.

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Jason Dobbins, a detective with the Colorado State U. police, recorded his phone call with Thomas Hays, a former interim dean at the U. of Minnesota, who confirmed he had never offered Brian McNaughton a job. Source: Colorado State U. Police Department

The records Strunk obtained, including a recorded phone call, showed that Jason Dobbins, a detective with the university police, believed he had an “open and shut” case of identity theft and forgery against McNaughton. But the police appeared to sit on the case for 10 months, during which time McNaughton negotiated with the university as if the criminal matter had been shelved.

It was only after Strunk and others mounted a campaign, pressuring public officials to bring the hammer down on McNaughton, that the university police referred the case to the Larimer County district attorney.

“The whole state of Colorado,” Strunk says, “was flooded with letters saying, ‘This person did this; why aren’t you doing anything about it?’ ”

University officials will not say what compelled the police to act on the case, beyond asserting that Colorado State’s “personnel process influenced the timing of the conclusion of the police investigation.”

Strunk took more than a passing interest in McNaughton. Months before the professor was charged, Strunk was nosing around Colorado State’s campus, where the private investigator says he hoped to catch a glimpse of McNaughton.

“Sometimes you just want to look at somebody,” Strunk says. “I was curious. Would I have said anything? Maybe not. I just wanted to look at him.”

After visiting the chemistry building, where Strunk told a skeptical employee that he had come to “visit a friend,” the private investigator proceeded to the university police department to inquire about the state of its investigation into McNaughton, police records show. There, Strunk met with Dobbins, the detective who had assisted in the police inquiry.

When Dobbins asked Strunk why he was so interested in the case, Strunk said he was “a taxpayer and concerned citizen,” according to a police report. The answer, Dobbins reported, sounded “very calculated and rehearsed.”

The “oddness and uniqueness” of the meeting, Dobbins said, prompted the detective to do some digging into Flatirons Private Investigations. What he found marked one of the strangest twists in the McNaughton saga: a Twitter account tied to a dead man.

It wasn’t enough that the professor had lost his job. Now it appeared that someone wanted to ruin his career.

In May, just days after McNaughton had signed his separation agreement with Colorado State, whoever was running the @AlbertoQRuiz4 Twitter handle started targeting McNaughton’s entire professional network, tweeting elliptical references to the professor’s misdeeds. In a tweet to the American Chemical Society, for example, Ruiz asked whether it would be “unethical” to forge an offer letter. When the society replied that it would be “very unethical” to do such a thing, Ruiz forwarded the response to an account that McNaughton managed for his lab.

More tweets critical of McNaughton followed, alerting the University of Delaware and its vice president for research that McNaughton had “significant ethics issues.”

McNaughton deleted his lab’s Twitter account, but “Ruiz” did not relent. In an email to the professor, a person identified as Ruiz wrote, “I guess you aren’t on Twitter anymore. ACS seems to think the same way I do, that it’s [sic] members should be ethical in word and deed.”

By this time, McNaughton had learned of Strunk’s involvement in the case, and he suspected that the private investigator and Stacey McNaughton were behind the smear campaign. The professor contacted Colorado State’s police department, reporting the tweets and emails as harassment.

After some digging, McNaughton had discovered that a man named Alberto Ruiz Jr. had at one time lived in Greeley, Colo., which was the Twitter user’s listed location. But Ruiz had been shot and killed a year earlier in what the police suspected may have been a road-rage homicide. The photo that ran with the Twitter account matched one from Ruiz’s obituary.

“It didn’t go unnoticed by me that this person had died in a violent death,” McNaughton said. “This is sick.”

Dobbins, the detective, confirmed in his report that there appeared to be connections between Strunk and the Ruiz identity. For example, a person identified as “Alberto Ruiz” had written a glowing online review of Strunk’s private-investigation firm. So had “Timothy Stenton,” McNaughton discovered, which was a second name that had been used in threatening emails that were sent to the professor.

Strunk, in an interview with The Chronicle, said he knew nothing about the Twitter account and had never heard of Ruiz or Stenton. He suspected that the trolling might have been the work of one of his fellow private investigators, who were interested in the case and “playing a prank on me.”

The online harassment put McNaughton’s professional future at risk. He had not disclosed the details of his deception to his future employers at Delaware. Colorado State officials had told him, he said, that the matter had been resolved and had no bearing on his next venture. He could say, truthfully, that he wanted to move to Delaware to be closer to his children.

Now the story, which the professor thought he had contained, was seeping out on social media.

Even so, McNaughton thought his job at Delaware was safe. He never imagined, he says, that he might still be in legal jeopardy. So he stuck to his plan.

Moving trucks were scheduled to transport McNaughton’s lab to Newark, Del., where one of his graduate students was already waiting to receive DNA samples and other temperature-sensitive materials. McNaughton had found an apartment near the university, and one of his graduate students had even purchased a home.

It was all for naught.

Just before the July 4th holiday, McNaughton learned that the Larimer County district attorney planned to charge him with attempting to influence a public servant, a felony punishable by up to six years in prison.

The fallout was swift. Days before the McNaughton lab was scheduled to make the 1,700-mile move to Delaware, a Colorado news station reported that the professor had been charged. The confessional letter to his bosses, in which he laid out the grisly details of his failed marriage and owned up to his terrible decision, was soon published, too.

There was no more running from the big lie.

The University of Delaware rescinded its offer. There would be no moving trucks, no second iteration of McNaughton’s lab. There was only an unfurnished apartment in Newark, and a chemistry professor out of a job.

Brian McNaughton is still trying to make sense of how things went so wrong. On a recent afternoon, during an interview with Chronicle reporters, he looks tanned, having spent time at a pool during a visit with his children. He is still waiting for the cable guy to show up at his Delaware apartment, so he passes the time watching old Anthony Bourdain shows on his computer.

When the subject of his fake letter comes up, McNaughton appears exhausted and frustrated. He doesn’t want to talk about why he did what he did. He keeps repeating that there’s no justification for what was clearly a major breach of ethics. He fidgets with a paper coffee cup until he has practically shredded its rim. He tugs at his dark beard.

But over the course of seven hours of conversation, a few glasses of cabernet and a Yuengling, McNaughton unspools a larger story that is endemic to his profession. Hardly any scientist will ever win a major prize or successfully develop a cancer drug. The odds of that are even more daunting for one who toils away at a midtier public research university. So the focus shifts to smaller wins: a congratulatory email from the dean, a steady stream of pipette tips, a few extra square feet of lab space. Maybe, if everything goes just right, there’s a new interdisciplinary program or an article in a major journal.

These tiny battles for resources and validation can consume a professor, but they do little to answer what became for McNaughton an essential question: What am I worth? He’s still asking that question, the one that got him into this mess in the first place.