A Seattle-based family doctor, Harrison Kalodimos, is apologizing to a prominent Ivy League professor and physician, admitting that he grossly mischaracterized remarks the professor, Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, made in a 2016 class lecture.
"I offer my sincere apology," Kalodimos said in a statement posted to his Twitter account last week, noting that he falsely and without evidence alleged that Goldfarb, a kidney specialist and former associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, encouraged students to "lie" about whether they had been victims of sexual harassment and suggested that Goldfarb was "forced out of Penn."
Kalodimos’s 2019 tweets, which have since been deleted, came in the wake of a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Goldfarb pushing back against moves by medical bodies, including the American College of Physicians, to take positions on political issues like gun control and climate change.
Kalodimos did not respond to a request for comment. Reached at the golf course, Goldfarb declined to comment.
Kalodimos, who at the time of the class lecture was a Penn medical student, according to his LinkedIn profile, took to Twitter to slam Goldfarb, alleging that Goldfarb had reprimanded students for reporting sexual harassment to an accrediting body for medical schools and told them that "we should lie about these experiences … because it would hurt Penn’s reputation."
"In fact, he did not say those words, nor did he imply that," Kalodimos said in the statement, which he posted alongside a link to the lecture in question.
Oops.
The dust-up appears to have stemmed from the young doctor’s confusion over Goldfarb’s pithy remarks explicating the difference between the basic English terms "insult" and "discrimination."
"Now, I could insult everybody in this room right now, I could just go one after another, and I would have insulted all of you, but I would not have discriminated. Discrimination is not insulting," Goldfarb said, adding that "uncivil," "thoughtless," "stupid," and "ridiculous" comments are not necessarily discriminatory.
Goldfarb is the author of the forthcoming book Take Two Aspirin and Call Me by My Pronouns, a likely New York Times bestseller, and the proud father of Washington Free Beacon chairman Michael Goldfarb.