A whistleblower who used to work at MIT Media Lab who is now suing the university for wrongful termination has asked the judge in the case to recuse himself because he formerly worked with one of MIT’s attorneys on the case for more than a decade.
In a filing on Wednesday, the lawyer representing Babak Babakinejad — one of the main subjects in a BBJ cover story last summer about the failed Open Agriculture initiative at MIT — made a motion for judicial recusal for Christopher K. Barry-Smith, a superior court justice in Middlesex County.
Justice Barry-Smith is presiding over a lawsuit filed by Babakinejad in 2021 alleging that MIT ended his research appointment on the OpenAg project in 2017 to 2018 “for complaining about and reporting research fraud and fraudulent fundraising activities.”
There have been more than a dozen pretrial hearings in lawsuit so far, all aimed at setting limits on discovery, the number and type of documents and other information Babakinejad can compel MIT to produce. So far, the judge has not made a ruling on discovery, and MIT has not produced any documents.
In a hearing last month, Barry-Smith disclosed that he formerly worked with Jeffrey T. Collins, now an attorney with Morgan, Brown & Joy LLP in Boston who has been retained by MIT to help defend against the Babakinejad lawsuit. Barry-Smith said at the time that he had not worked with Collins for seven years.
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