Francesca Gino Tells Court Harvard ‘Tries To Completely Sidestep’ The Central Question In Her Case

Francesca Gino lost her Harvard tenure over fraud allegations she denies – and she’s telling a judge only a jury should decide who’s right

A data-fraud watchdog blog accused star Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino of faking data in her research. HBS investigated and found she had committed misconduct. Then Harvard took away her tenure – something it had not done to any professor since it formalized modern tenure rules eight decades ago. Now Gino is telling a federal judge that Harvard still hasn’t proven any of it, and it wants to win her case without ever having to.

That argument is at the center of a new, 28-page court filing Gino’s lawyers submitted on August 26 in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts. It’s her fullest response yet to Harvard’s request to end her three-year-old lawsuit before it ever goes to trial.

Gino’s lawyers say Harvard’s request skips over the most important question in the case: Did Gino actually commit the “grave misconduct” that Harvard used to take away her tenure? “Harvard tries to completely sidestep this issue,” the brief says. “It offers no evidence or argument as to why a jury must resolve that factual dispute in Harvard’s favor.”

HARVARD’S BURDEN, NOT GINO’S

Harvard has not commented publicly on the case. It’s expected to file its own response in the coming weeks. The case is still on track for a trial later this year, and whatever Judge Myong J. Joun decides on Harvard’s request will determine how much of Gino’s case a jury gets to hear – if any of it.

At the center of the filing is a simple point about who has to prove what. Gino’s lawyers say her contract with Harvard promised she couldn’t lose her tenured job unless the school proved she committed grave misconduct or failed at her duties. That means Harvard has to prove its case, not Gino. And because Harvard is asking to win before trial, the bar is even higher: Harvard has to show that no jury could possibly rule against it.

Gino’s lawyers point to a 1987 court ruling, McConnell v. Howard University, arguing that judges don’t have to simply trust a university’s own finding of misconduct. They say Harvard hasn’t offered real evidence – only the findings of its own investigation committee, findings the brief says can’t be used to prove Gino actually faked anything. The witness testimony in the case, Gino’s lawyers write, “uniformly supports Gino’s good motives.” They point to testimony that she walked away from studies when the data didn’t support her ideas, and that she corrected or retracted papers on her own over the years.

5 POLICIES, 1 CONTRACT

A big part of the brief tries to prove that five different Harvard and HBS documents count as contracts, not just internal guidelines Harvard was free to ignore. Those documents are the Third Statute, the Third Statute Procedures, the Tenure Policy, the 2013 Research Integrity Policy, and a newer “Interim Policy” written specifically to handle Gino’s case. 

Gino’s lawyers cite a 2024 ruling from Massachusetts’ highest court, Wortis v. Trustees of Tufts College, which found that tenure agreements are usually “a collection of documents,” not one signed contract. They also cite cases showing that when an employer calls “special attention” to a policy and consistently follows it, that policy becomes binding – even if an employee never formally signed it.

WHERE GINO SAYS HARVARD BROKE ITS OWN RULES

Much of the filing is a long list of ways Gino’s team says Harvard broke its own rules after the Data Colada fraud allegations surfaced in 2021. Among the claims: HBS’s research-integrity officer waited months to tell Gino an investigation had started. The confidentiality rules in the Interim Policy stopped Gino from freely questioning witnesses, while, she says, the investigation committee faced no such limits. A rule letting her use only two advisers kept her from hiring her own data expert to check Harvard’s findings. And Gino says the investigation committee flipped the burden of proof onto her, forcing her to prove her innocence instead of making Harvard prove she’d done something wrong.

The filing also repeats Gino’s claim that HBS Dean Srikant Datar made a secret deal with the Data Colada writers, asking them to hold off publishing their fraud allegations while Harvard investigated. Gino’s team says Datar and Harvard have “falsely denied” that deal ever happened. The brief also says Harvard listing “administrative leave” on Gino’s public HBS profile page – timed to line up with Data Colada’s blog post – was Harvard’s way of telling the world she was guilty before any hearing took place. Large parts of the new filing are blacked out, a sign that the fight over what can and can’t be made public is still going on.

SEX DISCRIMINATION & RETALIATION

Beyond the contract fight, the filing also pushes Gino’s claims that gender played a role in how Harvard treated her, under federal and state discrimination laws. Her lawyers say the many times Harvard broke its own rules are themselves proof a jury could use to find bias. They also point to claims that Harvard has “historically favored men over women” in promotions, and that Datar has a pattern of “disfavoring women professionally.” 

The brief leans on a legal idea called “cat’s paw”: a school can be held responsible for discrimination even if the person who made the final call wasn’t biased, as long as they relied on information from someone else who was. Separately, Gino’s team says the timing itself is telling – Harvard moved to revoke her tenure after she filed her discrimination claims, which they say amounts to retaliation.

THE ROAD TO THIS FILING

The case goes back to July 2021, when the writers behind the academic fraud-tracking blog Data Colada first told Harvard Business School they believed Gino had manipulated data in several of her studies. Gino sued Harvard, Datar and the Data Colada authors for $25 million in August 2023 – just days after he put her on unpaid leave, banned her from campus and took away her named professorship, as Poets&Quants reported at the time.

A federal judge made most of HBS’s internal investigation report public in March 2024, ruling it was part of the court record, as P&Q explained here. That September, the court threw out Gino’s original defamation and conspiracy claims against Harvard and Data Colada, ruling that Gino is a public figure – but it let her breach-of-contract claim move forward, a decision P&Q covered here. Gino later updated her complaint to add discrimination and retaliation claims against Harvard and Datar under federal and state law, and dropped the Data Colada authors from the case.

In May 2025, Harvard formally took away Gino’s tenure, P&Q reported in “Harvard Strips Tenure From HBS Superstar Prof Francesca Gino.” Gino called the decision “clearly wrong” and said she would keep fighting, in a statement to P&Q covered in “After Losing Tenure, Francesca Gino Maintains Her Innocence.” That July, her lawyers filed a 91-page amended complaint laying out her full case, which P&Q covered in “Francesca Gino’s Best Case Against The Harvard Business School.” The next month, Harvard sued Gino back, accusing her of submitting a doctored dataset to investigators – a claim she denies, as P&Q reported in “Claiming Francesca Gino Falsified Evidence, Harvard Sues Her For Defamation.”

The case has also drawn attention from outside the courtroom. Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig started a podcast series arguing Gino is innocent, as P&Q reported in “Taking Off The Gag: A Podcast Series Dives Deep Into The Francesca Gino Tragedy.” And hedge fund manager and HBS alum Bill Ackman said publicly that he believes Gino is innocent and revealed he’s been helping pay for her legal fight, as P&Q reported in “Influential Harvard Business School Alum Backs Francesca Gino.”

DON’T MISS WHY HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL KEEPS PRODUCING RESEARCH SCANDALS and FRANCESCA GINO’S BEST CASE AGAINST THE HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL

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