Bandy X. Lee

Bandy Xenobia Lee is an American psychiatrist whose scholarly work includes the writing of a comprehensive textbook on violence. She is a specialist in public health approaches to violence prevention who consulted with the World Health Organization and initiated reforms at New York's Rikers Island Correctional Facility. She helped draft the United Nations chapter on "Violence Against Children," leads a project group for the World Health Organization's Violence Prevention Alliance, and has contributed to prison reform in the United States and around the world. She taught at Yale School of Medicine and Yale Law School from 2003 through 2020.

In 2017, Lee organized a conference at Yale on the mental health of Donald Trump with the participation of other psychiatrists including Robert Jay Lifton and Judith Lewis Herman. Following the conference, in March 2017, the American Psychiatric Association released a statement reaffirming the Goldwater rule that restricts comments related to the mental health of public figures without their consent or evaluation. Lee characterized the statement as silencing concerns raised by psychiatrists about the Trump presidency and violating the more important Geneva Declaration.

Lee reconvened the conference the following month, and later in the year edited ''The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump'', a collection of essays warning about the dangers of Trump's mental instability that became a ''New York Times'' bestseller. It was reported that White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly secretly consulted the book as a guide for dealing with Trump. Using this book as an "owner's manual," Kelly was able to intervene to block Trump from ordering the use of nuclear weapons.

In 2017 and 2018, Lee met with over fifty U.S. Congress members who considered the 25th Amendment and in 2019 held an interdisciplinary conference at the National Press Club, which discussed impeachment and was broadcast in full by C-SPAN.

In 2020, Yale University failed to renew Lee's medical faculty position for allegedly breaking the Goldwater rule in her speech regarding Alan Dershowitz and Trump. Lee sued Yale for breach of contract and breach of implied duty of good faith and fair dealing, but after an unexplained change of judges, the suit was dismissed in August 2022. Lee subsequently filed for an appeal, but on June 20, 2023, the appellate court, to which the same judge who dismissed her suit was promoted, upheld the ruling. Lee warned against the silencing of intellectuals and criticized Yale's declaration of ''"''no obligation to academic freedom" in her case as "abandoning its principles in a time of greatest need."

In August 2022, ''Mother Jones'' published an article titled "The Psychiatrist Who Warned Us That Donald Trump Would Unleash Violence Was Absolutely Right". It argues that the events of January 6th are Lee's "vindication".

In late 2023, Lee returned to warning that a third Trump candidacy for president was in danger of succeeding "not by rational persuasion or informed choice, but through the “contagion” of his symptoms." In May 2024, she published ''[https://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Trump-Contagion-Existential-Democracy/dp/B0DG3636J1 The Psychology of Trump Contagion: An Existential Danger to American Democracy and All Humankind]''. In September 2024, Lee organized another interdisciplinary conference at the National Press Club, convening national security experts with mental health experts. She simultaneously released ''[https://www.amazon.com/More-Dangerous-Case-Donald-Trump/dp/B0DJ4JZD2B The More Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 40 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Warn Anew]''. In October 2024, Forbes published an article with a picture of Trump's former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley holding Lee's 2017 book, ''The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump''. Provided by Wikipedia