On April 12 In 2019, Boston University finally fired David Marchant for sexually harassing Willenbring. (The university said it could not substantiate its claims of physical and psychological abuse.) Marchant released a statement, telling the magazine Science quoted as pledging that he had “never” sexually harassed anyone, “not in 1998 or 1999 in Antarctica or anytime after.” But thanks to Willenbring the word was out.
In the wake of this scandal, the National Science Foundation commissioned an external investigation into sexual violence and harassment at Antarctic research facilities. The lengthy report, made public in August 2022, contained shocking allegations of assault, stalking and harassment. Britt Barquist, the former fuel foreman, had contracted McMurdo at a company now called Amentum. She supervised a crew of about 20 people who did the dangerous work of handling and cleaning diesel and gasoline tanks. One day in late November 2017, she says, she was sitting at a table next to a man who held a senior position at Leidos, the company that manages Antarctic research stations. He had been giving a briefing to staff when he groped her in plain sight.
When she talked to her supervisor about it, he said he witnessed part of the incident himself. His boss reported it to Amentum’s human resources department. ‘I told HR I never want to be around him again. I’m scared of this person,” Barquist says, “and they said, ‘Okay.’”
But in 2020, during another stint working with the McMurdo contractor, she was told she would be attending weekly virtual meetings with that same senior official. Barquist, who needed the job, downplayed it to himself. “It was just disgusting and horrible to have to look at his face and listen to him,” she says, “to see him being treated like a normal man, while in my head I was thinking, ‘This man is a predator. . Why is everyone pretending to be a normal person?’”
The following year, towards the end of almost three weeks of Covid quarantine with a crew in New Zealand, she had scanned the manifest for an upcoming flight to Antarctica and saw the senior official’s name on it. When she called her HR department to complain about a patchy connection, she says she was met with stubbornness by two officials, one of whom had been introduced as a victim advocate.
“I said I still don’t want to be around this guy,” she says, “but they said, ‘So how do you propose we deal with this?’” Barquist becomes emotional as she recalls her conversation with the two women. from her employer. “I thought they would be on my side,” she says. Instead, they kept pressuring her about how scared she felt to be around him.
“I finally thought, ‘Yes,’” she says, “I feel unsafe being alone in a room with him!”’ Then the signal went dead, she says, and she was never able to reconnect with them. to make. Barquist flew back to Antarctica, where she tried to avoid the high-ranking official. But because her team’s safety depended on her almost daily communication with him, she eventually relented.