Tomorrow is Joe Thomas’s 35th birthday. And earlier this week, he received quite a birthday present, even if it wasn’t intended that way: Thomas earned a $33.75 million payout from a lawsuit he filed against Duke University six years ago.
As Retraction Watch readers may recall, Thomas was the whistleblower in a case alleging scientific misconduct that Duke settled yesterday for $112.5 million. Our Ivan Oransky has an exclusive profile of him — including how he “celebrated” the settlement — at Medscape.
P.S. Interested in learning more about how such cases work? Read a three-part series with Thomas’s lawyer, John Thomas, aka his brother, from 2015.
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So they settled for $112.5 million, this sounds a lot, but as the case involved $200 million in grants they still haven’t done badly out of it.
Does Joe have to pay taxes on a whistleblower settlement? At what rate?
What a great way to become a millionaire at 35!