This is my shocked face.

According to [Connie] St Louis, who was in the crowd, their meal was ‘utterly ruined’ by the ‘sexist speaker’. She claimed that Sir Tim, having been asked to deliver a toast, embarked on a surreal rant in which he boasted of being a ‘male chauvinist’.

‘Let me tell you about my trouble with girls,’ it purportedly went. ‘Three things happen when they are in the lab. You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them, they cry.’

According to St Louis, Sir Tim then took the odd step of claiming that ‘single-sex’ science laboratories were preferable to ones in which men and women work together.

‘Really, does this Nobel laureate think we are still in Victorian times?’ she asked.

So began an extraordinary course of events that saw her tweet shared more than 600 times, kick-starting a viral scandal which resulted in the 72-year-old academic, famed for his pioneering work on cell division, being vilified across social media.

Sir Tim, screamed critics, was the epitome of an unreconstructed misogynist; an ‘out-of-touch a***hole’ to quote one of many hostile tweets, who should have no place in modern academia and whose comments laid bare the institutional sexism that allegedly pervades the world of science.

Within hours, Sir Tim was being hauled across the coals in newspapers and TV bulletins across the world. Unable to defend himself, since he was travelling back to the UK, the bespectacled professor’s only response was delivered via a voicemail message to Radio 4’s Today programme recorded in haste via mobile telephone in Seoul airport. […]

Troubled by Sir Tim’s fate, a collection of eminent scientists, including eight other Nobel Prize winners (and several senior female academics) chose to speak out publicly in support of him.

Many professed outrage that, in the echo-chamber of social media, a single careless remark, just 37 words long, could apparently derail the career of a pioneering scientist. Several added that they believed his fateful toast had been delivered off-the-cuff and taken out of context. Though the comments about women scientists were certainly misjudged, Sir Tim’s supporters claimed they were intended as an ironic joke (albeit one which misfired). He’d intended to satirise, rather than endorse, sexism, they argued. […]

Then, early this week, the simmering dispute took a further, seismic twist.

It came courtesy of The Times newspaper, which revealed the contents of a leaked report into Sir Tim’s fall from grace compiled by an EU official who had accompanied him to the Seoul conference.

This individual, who has not been named, sat with him at the lunch and provided a transcript of what Sir Tim ‘really said’.

Crucially, it presented a very different take to the one which had been so energetically circulated by Connie St Louis. […]

The report began by confirming that Sir Tim had joked about falling in love with women in laboratories and ‘making them cry’.

However, it said he’d prefaced those comments with an ironic introduction, joking that they would illustrate what a ‘chauvinist monster’ he was.

The report then revealed the existence of an entire second half of the controversial toast.

In it, Sir Tim was said to have told his audience that his remark about ‘making them cry’ was, indeed, an ironic joke.

He purportedly said, ‘now seriously . . .’ before going on to speak enthusiastically about the ‘important role’ women scientists play. He ended by joking that his largely female audience should pursue their trade, ‘despite monsters like me’.

The report’s author added: ‘I didn’t notice any uncomfortable silence or any awkwardness in the room as reported on social and then mainstream media,’ going on to describe the speech as ‘warm and funny’.

All of which, for quite understandable reasons, sparked further angry debate. Supporters of Sir Tim felt he had been vindicated. Among them was Professor Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, who said the leaked memo’s contents showed Sir Tim to be ‘the reverse of a chauvinist monster’. […]

However, Sir Tim’s critics remained unmoved and disputed the EU report’s contents. Importantly, given how the scandal had originally emerged, they were led by Connie St Louis.

She stood by her remarks and told the Mail that she explicitly denied that the scientist’s toast ever contained the words ‘now seriously’.

He said/she said, right? The old white guys are obviously the liars …. but since there is no tape or transcript, who is the credible person here?

Here, on a page outlining her CV, she is described as follows:

‘Connie St Louis . . . is an award-winning freelance broadcaster, journalist, writer and scientist.

‘She presents and produces a range of programmes for BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service . . . She writes for numerous outlets, including The Independent, Daily Mail, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, BBC On Air magazine and BBC Online.’

All very prestigious. Comforting, no doubt, for potential students considering whether to devote a year of their lives (and money) to completing an MA course under her stewardship. Except, that is for one small detail: almost all of these supposed ‘facts’ appear to be untrue.

For one thing, Connie St Louis does not ‘present and produce’ a range of programmes for Radio 4.

Her most recent work for the station, a documentary about pharmaceuticals called The Magic Bullet, was broadcast in October 2007.

For another, it’s demonstrably false to say she ‘writes’ for The Independent, Daily Mail and The Sunday Times.

Digital archives for all three newspapers, which stretch back at least 20 years, contain no by-lined articles that she has written for any of these titles, either in their print or online editions. The Mail’s accounts department has no record of ever paying her for a contribution. […]

Elsewhere on the City University web page, readers are led to believe that St Louis has either become, or is soon to become, a published author.

‘She is a recipient of the prestigious Joseph Rowntree Journalist Fellowship to write a book based on her acclaimed two-part Radio 4 documentary series, Raising Ham,’ it reads.

But that is not the full story. In 2005, St Louis did, indeed, receive the liberal organisation’s ‘fellowship’. She was given £50,000, which was supposed to support her while she wrote the book in question.

However, no book was ever published. Or, indeed, written. An entire decade later, the project remains a work in progress. […]

In an email, one of the prominent scientists who have publicly supported Sir Tim Hunt tells me: ‘What you have discovered is very alarming. False claims about publications are taken very seriously by universities. Perhaps even more seriously than reports of dodgy, sexist speeches!’

In our new age of post-Western intellectualism where feelings trump thinking and perception is everything (even if falsely claimed), I don’t expect the Hunts to ever be made whole or St Louis punished.

In the words of Harry Reid, “We won, didn’t we?”

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