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Former Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino has turned to podcasting to tell her story since losing tenure and leaving Harvard after being accused of manipulating data.

Gino and Harvard Law School professor L. Lawrence Lessig have taped four episodes of a podcast series on Gino’s case since June 7, starting two weeks after Gino became the first Harvard professor since at least the 1940s to have her tenure revoked.

On the podcast, Lessig does most of the talking. He called Harvard’s investigation “astonishingly bad,” and said officials employed “bait and switch” tactics through their Third Statute — which includes the procedure for tenure revocation — to make it difficult for Gino to defend herself.

“Yes, spend a year and $3 million building a defense against this complaint, and then, oops, sorry, you need to race in the next month to build a new defense against a new complaint with multiple new charges and new theories and falsification scenarios added in, like icing on a cake,” Lessig said.

Gino does not say much, interjecting mostly factual points when prompted by Lessig.

Gino, who gained fame for her research on honesty and ethics, was accused in 2021 of falsifying data in four of her studies by research blog Data Colada. Placed on administrative leave by HBS in August 2023, Gino then sued Harvard, accusing the University of defamation, mishandling her tenure review process, and engaging in sex-based discrimination.

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After an internal investigation by Harvard determined that Gino had committed research fraud, Gino’s tenure was revoked and she was fired in May 2025. She was the first Harvard professor to lose tenure since at least the 1940s, when the rules for academic protection were formalized.

But the legal dispute between Harvard and Gino is ongoing. In August, the University responded to Gino’s lawsuit with a defamation countersuit against her, accusing her of sending the school a falsified dataset to prove she did not commit data fraud. Gino’s lawsuit is currently in the discovery phase and is scheduled to enter summary judgment in April 2026.

On Lessig’s podcast “The Law, such as it is,” which has been running since 2020, Gino maintained her innocence and charged HBS with committing “grave misconduct” in their investigation of her.

“It felt cruel. It lacked humanity,” Gino said. “I had spent 15 years giving my heart and mind to the institution. I taught, I did research, I mentored and advised. I thought of myself as a good citizen. I am certainly far from perfect and if I were to go back, I would spend time thinking about how to improve the practices in the field. But I did not commit academic misconduct.”

Gino also claimed that HBS did not handle her tenure revocation professionally, sending an email to inform her about the decision rather than calling her, and misspelling her name as “Francesco” in the email.

Spokespeople for the University and HBS declined to comment for this article.

Gino wrote in a statement to The Crimson that she is grateful for the help she has received from Lessig.

“I very much admire Larry for what he is doing, and his courage,” Gino wrote after the second episode. “Doing the two episodes with Larry made me feel deeply grateful, but it also made me realize the depth of the wounds and how hard it is, personally, to revisit how this incredible (and insane) story unfolded.”

Lessig also declined to comment to The Crimson, but on the podcast, he explained that he became extensively involved in the litigation effort over time, first as a friend and then as a pro bono lawyer. Lessig said he submitted an unsuccessful appeal of Gino’s tenure revocation decision to Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 and the Harvard Corporation — the University’s highest governing board.

But he said he decided to help tell her story on the podcast because he believes Gino is “an innocent person, wrongfully called guilty.”

Lessig is also fiercely critical of the University’s committee that concluded that Gino had committed fraud, comparing their final 11-page report to “edicts from Zeus.”

“This document reads like edicts from Zeus, but as we’ll see in the episodes that follow, that this was not the work of Zeus, or at least an omniscient Zeus, because we’ll see the obvious mistakes and flat out falsities that are within this report,” Lessig said.

But he stopped short of criticizing Data Colada, which he instead said was made up of “a fantastic group of data scientists.” Gino accused Data Colada, a blog created by three psychologists, of defamation alongside the University in 2023. Those charges were struck down a year later.

“We should be happy there are people like this in the world. People like this flagging anomalies in academic research helps keep research honest,” Lessig said in an episode taped in November.

But he said the investigation process broke down at Harvard, where Lessig said “it effectively locked the defendant in a room and denied her any effective support to build a case to defend herself.”

In the latest episode, Lessig starts to lay out explanations for data anomalies in Gino’s research outside of her own involvement, claiming that her research could have been muddled by outside influences.

In one of the studies that HBS claims that Gino falsified, Lessig said that the misconstrued data came from “scammers” that hijacked her survey, rather than manual entries on her part. He also said the Investigation Committee never found substantive proof that Gino created this data, making inferences “without evidence.”

“The Investigative Committee made an error that Francesca could have corrected, if she had had her own expert support before HBS concluded she was guilty,” Lessig said. “But she didn’t, because the rules that the Business School imposed upon her forbid her from having expert support before it concluded she was guilty.”

In Gino’s final podcast appearance, she thanked her most vocal Harvard supporter.

“I appreciate the courage that you’re showing and making sure that people know more about my story, my side of the story,” she told Lessig. “But also, I hope that it causes people to pause and reflect on the type of processes that were used here and that that changes.”

—Staff writer Evan H.C. Epstein can be reached at evan.epstein@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X at @Evan_HC_Epstein.

—Staff writer Graham W. Lee can be reached at graham.lee@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @grahamwonlee.