In 2017, Lee organized a conference at Yale on professional ethics surrounding the mental health of Donald Trump, with major luminaries of psychiatry such as Robert Jay Lifton and Judith Lewis Herman. She withheld her views at the conference,[7] but later she harshly criticized the American Psychiatric Association for what she said was a modification of the ethical guideline called the Goldwater rule, in order to silence concerns professional peers raised about the Trump presidency.[8] In March 2017, the association had reaffirmed the Goldwater rule and explained that it restricts comments related to the mental health of public figures without their consent or evaluation.[9] Lee says this was an alarming "amplification" of the rule which prompted her [10] to convening the conference the next month,[11] and later in the year editing The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a book of essays warning about the dangers of Trump's mental instability that became a New York Times bestseller. She donated all revenues from the book to the public good to remove conflicts of interest and continued to collaborate with ethics specialists to keep with medical standards.[12] Nevertheless, in 2020, Yale University let go of her for breaking the Goldwater rule in her evaluations of Trump.[13] Lee had held a voluntary "clinical" position which is non-tenured. Lee says that 85 % of Yale's medical faculty are untenured. Lee sued Yale for violating her academic freedom,[14] but the suit was dismissed in August 2022.[15]
