I wrote an draft for an abstract that was saved on the conferenced website. I discussed the draft with my PhD supervisor, who told me he feels it's still too early in my PhD for me to think about presenting at conferences. So I left the draft abstract there on the website server for a few days hoping he would change his mind. When it came to the deadline for abstract submission I wrote to the conference organisers and asked for the unsubmitted abstract to be deleted. I was disappointed but it wasn't a big deal - there will be others. I forgot about it and moved on.

But my supervisor then came to me this week upset because apparently he checked up on me - he somehow obtained a copy of this draft from the conference organisers and started to accuse me of intending to submit the document without him knowing so. He said he was not happy with what was written and I would be damaging his reputation by sending it in. I at no stage received any receipt confirming I had submitted any documents, and the organisers can confirm for me that everything saved was deleted. I'm surprised by his reaction because I specifically checked with him about what I wrote in the draft, and when he said no, I deleted it.

Did I do anything wrong here? If anything hasn't my supervisor breached some kind of data protection legal act to have somehow obtained my draft from the conference server, and now using my expired draft against me when it was never meant to be submitted? I feel slightly uneasy about this whole situation.

I think I have screwed up pretty bad and am too afraid to speak to my friends and colleagues about this situation, it would be great if someone could share some experience and perspective with me. I am a PhD student coming to the end of my first year and the relationship with my supervisor has deteriorated to the point beyond repair. I feel really bad about it, but the harder I try to make the project work the more it worsens.

He gave me a high risk project without any fallback plans at the start of the year, and reassured me it was going to work. Not knowing any better I took it on, performed experimentally well, only to find out it the project failed experimentally 7 months into the PhD. Instead of helping, my supervisor took sick leave for 6 months, and stranded me with a stressed out post-docs trying to push their own experiments, having no time to trouble-shoot my project. Friction with lab members started during my supervisor's absence as I grew frustrated. Ultimately I independently came up two fallback projects that were just now getting results. When my supervisor came back, initially he played along with the alternative projects I proposed. However when he saw that the initial results were promising, he distributed these results behind my back to my post-docs, to help them publish papers. I was upset with him not discussing this with me and confronted him, which ended up with him taking me to HR and dismissing me for disruptive behaviour in the lab.

On the side it turns out that he took sick leave because he had legal problems, and was diagnosed with mental illness.

At this stage I am more than happy to change supervisors, but do you think other supervisors in the university will be scared to take me on as a student? I have my own funding, performed well experimentally, but I have developed a bad reputation now which precedes me.