Bandy X. Lee

Bandy Xenobia Lee is an American psychiatrist whose scholarly work includes a 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 WHO'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 to 2020.

In 2017, Lee organized a conference at Yale on the mental health of Donald Trump. Participating psychiatrists included Robert Jay Lifton and Judith Lewis Herman. After the conference, in March 2017, the American Psychiatric Association released a statement reaffirming the Goldwater rule that restricts comments related to public figures' mental health 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 next month, and later in the year edited The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a collection of essays warning about 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 it as an "owner's manual", he intervened to stop Trump from ordering the use of nuclear weapons.

In 2017 and 2018, Lee met with over 50 U.S. Congress members who considered the 25th Amendment. In 2019, she held an interdisciplinary conference at the National Press Club that discussed impeachment and was broadcast by C-SPAN.

In 2020, Yale University failed to renew Lee's medical faculty position for allegedly breaking the Goldwater rule in a speech about Trump and Alan Dershowitz. 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 appealed, 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 the article "The Psychiatrist Who Warned Us That Donald Trump Would Unleash Violence Was Absolutely Right". It argues that the January 6 attacks were Lee's "vindication".

In late 2023, Lee warned 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 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 and mental health experts. She simultaneously released 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.