Steven Hatfill

Steven Jay Hatfill (born October 24, 1953) is an American physician, pathologist and biological weapons expert.

Hatfill was born in Saint Louis, Missouri, and graduated from Mattoon Senior High School, Mattoon, Illinois (1971), and Southwestern College in Winfield, Kansas (1975), where he studied biology.

Hatfill was enlisted as a private in the U.S. Army from 1975 to 1977.

A brief marriage, from 1976 to 1978, to Eschtruth's daughter, Caroline Rush Eschtruth, produced one daughter.

He worked as a medical missionary in Kapanga, Zaire under a mentor, Dr. Glenn Eschtruth, who was murdered there in 1977.

In 1978, Hatfill settled in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and entered the Godfrey Huggins Medical School at the University of Rhodesia in Salisbury (now Harare).

(His claimed military associations during this period included assistance as a medic with the Selous Scouts and membership in the Rhodesian SAS, but according to one journalist the regimental association of the latter is "adamant Hatfill never belonged to the unit".) After failing in 1983, he graduated in 1984 with a M ChB degree and, in 1984 to 1985, completed a one-year internship at a small rural hospital in South Africa's North West Province.

The South African government recruited him to be medical officer on a 14-month tour of duty, from 1986 to 1988, in Antarctica with the South African National Antarctic Expedition (SANAE).

In 1988, he completed a master's degree in microbiology at the University of Cape Town.

Two years later, he worked toward a second master's degree—in medical biochemistry and radiation biology—at the University of Stellenbosch, while employed as a medical technician in the university's clinical hematology lab.

A three-year hematological pathology residency at Stellenbosch from 1991 to 1993 followed.

Hatfill also conducted research toward a Ph.D. between 1992 and 1995—under the supervision of microbiology professor Ralph Kirby at Rhodes University—on the treatment of leukemia with thalidomide.

Hatfill later claimed to have completed a Ph.D. degree in "molecular cell biology" at Rhodes, as well as a post-doctoral fellowship (1994–95) at the University of Oxford in England and three master's degrees (in microbial genetics, medical biochemistry, and experimental pathology), respectively.

Some of these credentials have been seriously questioned or disputed.

Hatfill submitted his Ph.D. thesis for examination to Rhodes University in January 1995, but it was failed in November.

Back in the United States, another of Hatfill's post-doctoral appointments commenced at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1995.

He then worked in 1997 to 1999 as a civilian researcher at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), the U.S. Department of Defense's medical research institute for biological warfare (BW) defense at Fort Detrick, Frederick, Maryland.

There, he studied, under a National Research Council fellowship, new drug treatments for the Ebola virus and became an authority on BW defense.

(In 1999, during an interview with a journalist, he claimed to have been a "captain in the U.S. Special Forces", but a subsequent investigation revealed that, according to the Army, he had never served with the Special Forces. ) Following his Army discharge, Hatfill qualified and worked as a medical laboratory technician, but soon resolved to become a doctor.

In January 1999 Hatfill transferred to a "consulting job" at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), which has a "sprawling campus" in nearby McLean, Virginia.

The corporation did work for a multitude of federal agencies.

Many projects were classified.

Hatfill designed BW defense training curricula for government agencies.

By this time there had been a number of hoax anthrax mailings in the United States.

He became the subject of extensive media coverage beginning in mid-2002, when he was a suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks.

His home was repeatedly raided by the FBI, his phone was tapped, and he was extensively surveilled for more than two years; he was also terminated from his job at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).

At a news conference in August 2002, Hatfill denied that he had anything to do with the anthrax letters and said "irresponsible news media coverage based on government leaks" had "destroyed his reputation".

He sued the New York Times Company and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof for defamation, defamation per se, and intentional infliction of emotional distress in connection with five of Kristof's columns in 2002.

The courts dismissed this suit, finding that Hatfill was a limited purpose public figure.

He filed a lawsuit in 2003, accusing the FBI agents and Justice Department officials who led the criminal investigation of leaking information about him to the press in violation of the Privacy Act.

In 2004, Hatfill filed lawsuits against several periodicals and journalists who had identified him as a figure warranting further investigation in the anthrax attacks.

In 2007, Hatfill settled a similar libel lawsuit against Vanity Fair and Reader's Digest for an undisclosed amount, after both magazines agreed to formally retract any implication that Hatfill was involved in the anthrax mailings.

During a later investigation, officials at Rhodes maintained that their institution had never awarded him a Ph.D. In 2007, Hatfill's lawyer Tom Connolly – in his lawsuit against former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and the FBI – admitted that his client had "[p]uffed on his resume," falsely claiming he had earned a PhD and had "[f]orged a diploma" for the PhD.

In 2008, the government settled Hatfill's lawsuit with a $4.6 million annuity totaling $5.8 million in payment.

The government officially exonerated him of any involvement in the anthrax attacks, and the Justice Department identified another military scientist, Bruce Edwards Ivins, as the sole perpetrator of the anthrax attacks.

Jeffrey A. Taylor, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, wrote in a letter to Hatfill's lawyer that "we have concluded, based on laboratory access records, witness accounts and other information, that Dr. Hatfill did not have access to the particular anthrax used in the attacks, and that he was not involved in the anthrax mailings."

In 2010, Hatfill was an independent researcher and an adjunct assistant professor of emergency medicine at the George Washington University Medical Center.

He has criticized the response of health authorities to the Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa and suggested that it is possible that Ebola could be transmitted by aerosol, a position which other experts have criticized.

In 2020, he became a coronavirus advisor to the Trump White House, where he strongly promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat the virus despite FDA objections to the drug.

After the 2020 election he became part of Donald Trump's attempt to overturn the election results.