THE FAMOUS "DOCTOR SMITH" CHECKS IN ON M-LIVE ARTICLE COMMENT THREAD

The Brendan Gibbons scandal at the University of Michigan was exposed in very large part due to the independent web site "Washtenaw Watchdogs" and the online testimony of former UM Professor Douglas Smith. Smith made a public statement regarding the lack of movement on the Gibbons case at a Board of Regents meeting in 2011.

While I came across the web site a few months ago, many people seemed to be caught off guard by this story when it broke last week. Most of those who reported prior knowledge of the case in comment threads referred to the "Washtenaw Watchdogs" web site. So the work of Dr. Smith has proven to be a key element in the public processing of the case.

But nothing more has been heard from Smith about this situation...until now. The latest M-Live article tracking the story had over 400 comments, and one of them came from the famous doctor. Here is the text of his comment:

"I was a professor of Pathology at UM from 2006 to 2009. I was a "Clinical Professor" which is different than a tenured professor in that I had a 3 year contract and they could decide not to renew it for whatever reason. They did not renew my contract and I decided to retire (I had worked at U of Nebraska, U of Oklahoma, Baylor Univ. Medical Ctr. before coming here). I filed a grievance against my boss because he wanted to keep 200k of my money. In the process of filing FOIA's I found out what the University does to whistleblowers. I settled my grievance with the University but I became well known for helping whistleblowers ( I helped Dr. Borisov get acquitted on criminal charges and win $550k in a settlement with UM, I also helped another persecuted post doc at NYU and others). I decided to set up the WW website to cover stories that I thought other news media was not covering. I file a lot of FOIA requests and I try to post all of the documents so that readers who doubt my take on the story can read the documents themselves and make up their own mind. I cover primarily UM, county gvt and local police and I look for corruption, violations of civil rights and wasting taxpayers money. I hope that others will eventually join me to cover more Washtenaw County governments such as Ann Arbor, Saline, Chelsea, etc. For the time being I am a one man operation (a little retirement project)."

While Smith and his work is not literally "germaine to the case", we provide this quick background as a reference for those interested in this individual.

Key Note: The statute-of-limitations for sexual assault in Michigan

ranges from six years to 10 years, meaning the victim may

still ask to press charges for several years to come.

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