Parasitic Posdoc Tricked me with "mentoring"

Hi all,

I’m feeling anxious after confronting my PI about issues with a postdoc who was previously designated as my mentor. I’d appreciate your thoughts on whether I overreacted.

For context, I’ve worked with this postdoc for over a year and a half without major issues. My PI has a hands-off mentoring style, relying heavily on the academic hierarchy and leaving PhD students to the postdocs.

I knew this right away, so I thougt in order to survive my PhD I should get along with this posdoc. So I started working really hard and sharing everything to him. He doesnt really mentor me on anything, our relationship is more like a boss-employee relationship where I just report my work and he makes some suggestions from time to time. One time I directly asked him for help to set up experiment #1 during my finals and he did so. Experiment #1 led to Experiment #2 and the latter turn into really good results that are worthy of a publication.

A few incidents happened, such as that he just took over on a project that I was doing independently and send his results without my opinion and sending his own grant proposal excluding my name, even though that I send him my draft proposal. Strictly speaking, he can actually do all of this since he is the leader of these projects and he doesnt have to include my name for grants because we can easily share lab stuff internally, but still I felt that I could not trust him.

I decided to confront him about his mindset on authorship for publishing experiment #2 and he said he should be 1st co-author in abosolutely all my research papers. He argued that he leads all these projects, that he started them all and that without his ideas I would not have completed anything.

This upset me deeply, as he made me feel like a mere lab technician working under him. I decided to go to my PI and tell her everything. She seemed surprised and initially defended him but promised to remain fair. She asked both of us to provide a list of our contributions to the project. I thought he wouldn’t have much to show, but I was wrong—he submitted a lengthy document filled with oversized screenshots of our chats, portraying himself as a kind and helpful mentor with many analysis and work made. Basically it was all our conversation for experiment #1, where he once actually helped.

Long story short, my PI said --See, he has done quite a lot for you-- I explained to her that was stuff done in the past and had nothing to do with experiment #2, I convinced her we could actually publish both experiments and he could be first-co-author for one of them. She finally started to believe me, although didnt make a final decission.

After this, I couldnt sleep well and I got the flu. Next day, I woke up and started writing a bunch of stuff and clicked send... Basically I accused him of taking ownership on all my projects and included a bunch of screenshots proving it. She spoke to him and then to me, saying--ok, you've got it and please behave, I don't tolerate unprofessional, rude comments in my lab.

Now, it’s a bittersweet situation: I’ve reclaimed ownership of my work but damaged my relationship with both of them. I feel that Im alone and have all eyes on me. Do you think I acted wrong? how can I fix this?