Francesca Gino Wins A Round In Her Continuing Courtroom Drama

After losing her claims of defamation against a trio of academic bloggers, former Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino has won a a round in her ongoing legal battle over alleged research misconduct.

A federal judge ruled that she would not have to pay the legal expenses for three professors whose Data Colada blog first detailed accusations of research fraud in several of her academic studies.

The Data Colada authors — Professors Uri Simonsohn from ESADE Business School, Leif D. Nelson from Berkeley Haas School of Business, and Joseph P. Simmons from the Wharton School — had accused Gino of using fraudulent data in a research paper. They then notified Harvard Business School of their findings before publication, a step that led to the HBS investigation that resulted in Gino’s loss of her job at HBS. The trio then published a series of posts alleging a more extensive trail of data manipulation in her work.

JUDGE FOUND GINO’S DEFAMATION CHARGES WEAK

District Court Judge Myong J. Joun rejected a motion filed by the three bloggers to require Gino to foot their legal bills to defend themselves against her charges that their articles were evidence of defamation.

“While it is true that federal courts possess inherent power to sanction bad-faith conduct,” Joun wrote, “it is also true that that power must be exercised with restraint and only where it is clear a party has acted in bad faith, vexatiously, or for oppressive reasons.”

Even though Joun had found Gino’s defamation claims against the bloggers and Harvard Business School “weak,” the judge said he believed that Data Colada’s filings did not prove that Gino’s suit met that legal threshold.

DATA COLADA LAWYERS CALLED GINO’S LAWSUIT FRIVOLOUS AND PUNITIVE

Calling Gino’s case frivolous and punitive, Data Colada’s lawyers asked the judge to impose sanctions against Gino and her former attorneys at Nesenoff & Miltenberg in two months ago in May. During that month, Harvard took the unusual step of taking tenure away from the professor.

“Her claims attacked the Data Colada Defendants merely for engaging in scientific inquiry, and they cast a chilling effect in derogation of important First Amendment principles,” attorney Jeffrey J. Pyle wrote in a filing to the judge. Pyle claimed Gino filed her lawsuit against Data Colada without “any reasonable hope of prevailing on merits.”

After being stripped of tenure last May by Harvard University, Gino has maintained her innocence, strongly denying allegations of academic fraud. Her loss of tenure from Harvard Business School, she says, had made her “deeply sad and disappointed.”

GINO WILL CONTINUE HER LEGAL BATTLE AGAINST HARVARD

“From the start, I have said that I did not commit any academic misconduct and I want to reconfirm that statement,” Gino tells Poets&Quants. “And from the very start, Harvard has blocked me from defending myself publicly. First, HBS forbade me from discussing the case while their process was underway. Later, the University forbade me from discussing the case during their process to revoke my tenure.

“I am deeply sad and disappointed that the University has concluded as it has. But now that this process is over, I am free to show why its conclusion is so clearly wrong. I will continue the fight and do everything in my power to right this wrong. I will share whatever I can publicly over time. Stay tuned.”

DON’T MISS: If Harvard Succeeds In Revoking Francesca Gino’s Tenure, It Would Be History Making or Harvard Business School’s Damning Unsealed Report On Francesca Gino

 

 

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