Francesca Gino has filed a $25-million defamation lawsuit against the scholars who have accused her of fabricating research data, as well as against Harvard University, where she is a professor at the business school.
In a 100-page lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court in Massachusetts, Gino denied ever falsifying data. She accused Data Colada — a blog written by a trio of business-school professors who have been digging into her studies — of making false and defamatory statements about her work, amounting to a “vicious, defamatory smear campaign.” Gino also accused Harvard of failing in its investigation to produce substantial evidence that she had committed research misconduct, and said the sanctions it handed down were “unwarranted and excessive.”
In her lawsuit, Gino said that she had been placed on a two-year administrative leave on June 13, which bars her from campus and strips her of her salary, teaching duties, research responsibilities, student mentorships, and titled professorship. She also alleged that the allegations have “sullied if not destroyed” her career, and have delayed a book deal.
“I want to be very clear: I have never, ever falsified data or engaged in research misconduct of any kind,” Gino said in a statement on LinkedIn. “Today I had no choice but to file a lawsuit against Harvard University and members of the Data Colada group, who worked together to destroy my career and reputation despite admitting they have no evidence proving their allegations.”
She added, “While claiming to stand for process excellence, they reached outrageous conclusions based entirely on inference, assumption, and implausible leaps of logic. They created and perpetuated a false narrative about my ethics and integrity, which has had a devastating impact on my friends, colleagues, collaborators and, most of all, my family. I stayed quiet to focus my effort on meaningfully defending myself and my career.”
As The Chronicle first reported on June 16, Gino went on administrative leave at Harvard following an investigation that the university had been conducting into her research. Starting the next day, Data Colada rocked the behavioral-sciences community with a series of blog posts about what they called “evidence of fraud” in four of her studies, adding that they believed that these were not isolated incidents. The problems identified by them, and by subsequently published retraction notices, include anomalously sorted data; participant data apparently being swapped between test groups; data that was seemingly altered; and instances of original data sets failing to match published data sets.
Two of those papers have been retracted and a third retraction is forthcoming. A fourth paper was already retracted in 2021 due to a separate instance of data fabrication, and Harvard is seeking to update that retraction notice, as The Chronicle has reported.
A Harvard spokesperson declined to comment. Leif Nelson, a University of California at Berkeley professor and one of the Data Colada authors — along with Uri Simonsohn of Esade Business School and Joe Simmons of the University of Pennsylvania — declined to comment, saying that as of Wednesday afternoon, they had not had time to read the newly filed lawsuit.
Gino, an expert in dishonesty and other topics related to leadership and workplace behavior, said in her lawsuit that she first learned of the allegations against her research on Oct. 27, 2021, from Harvard Business School’s research integrity officer, and that Harvard was investigating on April 15, 2022.
She claimed that Harvard did not give her ample time to review and respond to a draft of the findings — three weeks, she said, at a time she was going on a two-week trip to Italy. She also claimed that she was not allowed to review the underlying documentation produced by a forensics firm hired by Harvard. On June 13 of this year, according to her lawsuit, the Harvard Business School dean told her that he was accepting the panel’s conclusions.
Gino’s lawsuit states that Harvard determined that Gino was responsible for misconduct based on “speculation” and “inconclusive” observations of discrepancies. According to Harvard policy in place at the time, a finding of research misconduct required the investigative committee to prove that she had “‘intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly’ falsified or fabricated data,” the lawsuit states.
“Instead, the investigation committee reversed the policy’s stated burden of proof, and found Professor Gino guilty of misconduct because she had not disproved the allegations against her,” the lawsuit states. It claims that the policy was “newly created” specifically for her case, and replaced a previous policy that would have allowed her more time and freedom to respond and seek assistance.
The lawsuit claims that Harvard didn’t establish that Gino was the one responsible for the perceived anomalies, or prove she intended to fabricate data. According to the lawsuit, Gino’s attorney told Harvard that in all of the studies in question, Gino “did not run the studies or sort or handle the data,” nor was there evidence that her lab “incentivized or motivated research assistants to manipulate data.”
Gino’s attorney also told Harvard that the original data was unavailable for three of the studies — published in 2012, 2014, and 2015 — because “data retention policies indicate that records older than six years do not need to be retained,” according to the lawsuit. Some data, the lawsuit asserts, had originally been collected on paper and entered onto a computer spreadsheet in no particular order — hence the apparent “anomaly” of some participant data being out of order, as Data Colada had written.
The lawsuit claimed that in requesting the retraction for the fourth paper, published in 2020 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Harvard erroneously relied on a file that it called the original data, when it was not.
In their first blog post on June 17, the Data Colada authors revealed that they had informed Harvard of their concerns about Gino’s four studies in the fall of 2021, and submitted a report with “the strongest evidence of fraud.”
The first paper they wrote about, published in 2012, was retracted in 2021 because of a separate instance of data fabrication within that same paper that has been linked to another co-author. “Two different people independently faked data for two different studies in a paper about dishonesty,” the Data Colada authors added. And they added: “We believe that many more Gino-authored papers contain fake data. Perhaps dozens.”
Gino’s lawsuit said that these statements — and similar claims published in the following weeks — were baseless, and that Data Colada had no evidence to support that any of her papers, let alone dozens, had fake data. It was false and defamatory, the lawsuit asserted, to equate perceived “anomalies” and “discrepancies” with “fraud.”
At the end of its posts, the Data Colada authors note that it is their policy “to share drafts of blog posts with authors whose work we discuss,” to ask for feedback, and to invite them to write a response attached to the post. But in the case of their analyses of Gino’s work, they wrote that they had chosen not to for several reasons, including that “the claims made here were presumably vetted by Harvard University,” that retraction requests had been issued for the studies in question, and journalists were already writing about these issues, “making a traditional multi-week back-and-forth with authors self-defeating.”
In the lawsuit, Gino noted that she was never contacted by the Data Colada authors about what she alleges were their false accusations.
Gino also argued that Data Colada’s scrutiny of her — and Harvard’s treatment of her during the investigation — amounted to gender discrimination.
Gino’s lawsuit described her as “a working mother of four young children and the breadwinner in her family,” and someone who has “received praise by her female colleagues and collaborators for serving as a role model for other women at HBS.” She wrote that the Data Colada authors “have targeted the work of prominent female academics and subjected it to an exceptionally high level of public scrutiny.” She cited the case of Amy Cuddy, a former Harvard Business School professor whose work on “power posing” was criticized by Data Colada and who subsequently left Harvard.
