Controversial chronic fatigue researcher Judy Mikovits is in police custody in the US and facing allegations relating to a civil lawsuit filed by her former employer.
The (WPI) in Reno, Nevada, has accused Mikovits of appropriating lab notebooks, a laptop and other electronic data following her sacking on 29 September. On 7 November, it won a restraining order requiring Mikovits to return the alleged material and forbidding her destroying, deleting or altering it.
Mikovits was arrested on 18 November as a , and denied bail.
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The arrest is another twist in a saga that began in 2009 when Mikovits鈥檚 team claimed to have found a link between a mouse leukaemia virus and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). Several teams failed to repeat the results and some authors on the original paper retracted their contribution blaming contamination.
Mikovits鈥檚 lawyer said she does not have any items from WPI. As 麻豆传媒 went to press a hearing was set for 22 November to extend the restraining order.
Update: In a new development yesterday, the Whittemore Peterson Institute filed a alleging that the missing notebooks were taken on behalf of Judy Mikovits by one of her former colleagues, Max Pfost. The document alleges that Pfost has confessed to taking the notebooks, 鈥渁t Mikovits鈥檚 behest, following her instructions and using her research office and desk keys that she provided to him for this purpose鈥�.
