When, in November 2013, Stanford University held one of its seminars on sexual harassment, Professor James A. Phills, of the Graduate School of Business, heard a lawyer from the general counsel’s office describe a romance gone sour at a primate-research center. A scientist (“Ed”) kicked his former paramour (“Melissa”) off a project involving monkeys, then slashed her bonus 80 percent, all because she refused to bleep him back at the hotel.

Such a problem, the lawyer declared, could never arise at Stanford. Had Ed worked there, she explained, he’d have had to cede all decisions regarding Melissa to a higher-up as soon as things turned sexual between them. But even before it was time for questions, Phills was sufficiently skeptical to butt in. “So the policy that Stanford has actually says that where such a recusal is required you must notify your supervisor, department chair, or dean,” he said. “What if the person involved is the dean?”

“If the person who is involved is a dean, you should go straight to the provost,” the lawyer replied. “And we will let the deans that are here know that,” she added, prompting scattered laughs from the crowd. She resumed her talk, but before long Phills was at her again. “So suppose Ed were a dean and Melissa was a senior faculty member who was married to another senior faculty member,” he began. “Ed was involved in a relationship with Melissa. Ed would have to recuse himself from making decisions about both Melissa and her husband?”

“That would probably pose a real problem,” the lawyer replied. “Do you know something I don’t know?” she asked playfully.

He might, Phills replied. “Don’t out him or her here!” the lawyer exclaimed. There was more laughter.

“And your expectation would be that the provost or the general counsel, if something like this were to happen, Stanford would be concerned?” Phills pressed.

“Yes,” the lawyer said. “And you and I need to talk outside!” More laughs still.

Phills assured the Stanford lawyer he was “speaking hypothetically.” Only he wasn’t. By the time of the seminar, the dean of the business school, Garth Saloner, had been involved with Phills’s estranged wife, Deborah Gruenfeld, a social psychologist and professor of organizational behavior there, for more than a year. And while Saloner had ostensibly removed himself from all decisions involving either Phills or Gruenfeld, Phills believed Saloner had remained enmeshed in his affairs, penalizing him professionally and injecting himself into his divorce and custody battles, all to drive him out of Stanford.

Some of this was not just conjecture. For three months in the summer and fall of 2012, as the incipient romance between Saloner and Gruenfeld developed, Phills, either sitting at his home computer or manning one of his other electronic devices—including, in one key instance, playing with the cell phone his wife had asked him to fix—had monitored and preserved the e-mails, text messages, and Facebook chats between the two. He’d followed their first walk together, and their first drinks, and their first date, and their first intimacies, real and cyber, fumbled and consummated. And all of this unfolded as he believed the Stanford Graduate School of Business (G.S.B.) was slowly squeezing him out, denying him crucial and lucrative teaching assignments and, by calling for a $250,000 loan to be repaid within less than a year, attempting to force him out of his house on the Stanford campus.

He knew that Saloner had disclosed the fledgling relationship to one of the main authors of the university’s harassment policy, Provost John Etchemendy, as the regulations had required, but doubted whether the dean had done so in a timely fashion or had been fully candid with him when he did. And he knew, at least from what Saloner had had to say about it, how seemingly blasé Etchemendy had been about Saloner’s disclosure. Phills had also come to believe that, with Saloner, the co-author of a textbook on strategy, now egging her on, the normally diffident and indecisive Gruenfeld had suddenly grown more aggressive, even ruthless, in their ongoing divorce and custody disputes.