3 Women Accused a Harvard Anthropologist of Harassment and Retaliation. Now They’re Suing.

Three graduate students sued Harvard University on Tuesday, alleging that the institution failed to protect them from sexual harassment and threats of retaliation from a prominent anthropology professor, John l. Comaroff.

The doctoral students’ complaint, filed in a federal court in Massachusetts, targeted Harvard’s process for investigating their claims of misconduct, as well as its decision to hire Comaroff a decade ago. It alleges that Harvard allowed the professor to ruin their careers. The students — Margaret Czerwienski, Amulya Mandava, and Lilia Kilburn — had already accused Comaroff of sexual harassment and threats of retaliation, as first reported in detail by The Chronicle in 2020. The university investigated those claims and, last month, a Harvard dean said the professor had violated the college’s sexual-harassment and professional-conduct policies. Comaroff was placed on unpaid leave for this spring semester, and his teaching and advising were limited for another year.

The 65-page complaint contains explosive charges against both Comaroff and Harvard. Harvard declined to comment on the lawsuit. Through his lawyers, Comaroff denied ever harassing or retaliating against any student. Here are some of the allegations:

• According to the complaint, faculty members and graduate students at the University of Chicago, where Comaroff worked before transitioning to Harvard in 2012, considered the professor a “predator” and a “groomer.” At least one professor shared these concerns with Harvard while Comaroff was being considered for a job there, the complaint says.

• The complaint alleges that Comaroff abused several University of Chicago students who are not named in the document. In a 1979 incident, he allegedly invited an undergraduate to his home to discuss her thesis, where he “forcibly hugged her, ran his hand down her back, and groped her buttocks without her consent.” Between 2006 and 2007, Comaroff sent another graduate student “violent pornography without her consent, commented on her choice of underwear, and assaulted her in his office,” the complaint says. He then pressured her to delete the explicit emails, according to the complaint.

• The complaint alleges that in the spring of 2017, Czerwienski and Mandava learned that Comaroff was making ongoing sexual advances toward another Harvard graduate student, who is not named. The complaint says, “he forcibly kissed her, groped her buttocks, and, upon information and belief, sent her early-morning texts demanding to know with whom she had slept.” Czerwienski and Mandava allegedly reported this to faculty, and the unnamed student allegedly reported the harassment to Harvard’s Title IX Office. But, the complaint says, Harvard “stood by while the abuse continued unchecked.”

• Comaroff, the lawsuit says, got a hold of a copy of the unnamed student’s complaint and “read portions of her complaint back to her verbatim.” According to the lawsuit, that “intimidation tactic” pressured her to withdraw her complaint and dissuaded her from participating in other investigations.

• When the plaintiff Kilburn complained to Harvard’s Title IX office in May 2019, Harvard took no “meaningful action” other than “to admit that Harvard had known about Professor Comaroff’s behavior for years,” the complaint says. The Title IX resource coordinator referred Kilburn to the unnamed graduate student, according to the lawsuit.

• The complaint alleges that Harvard’s Office for Dispute Resolution — the office that conducted an investigation into the three students’ allegations — obtained notes from Kilburn’s psychotherapist, taken during the therapist’s sessions with Kilburn. The Harvard office did this without Kilburn’s consent, the complaint says, and then shared the notes with Comaroff as part of the office’s draft report.

Comaroff’s lawyers said in a statement that he “was never the subject of any Title IX or other complaint at the University of Chicago.” The professor did not think that students or faculty members there considered him a “predator” or a “groomer,” and he denied the allegations regarding the University of Chicago students.

He also denied making advances on the unnamed Harvard student who allegedly filed a complaint. Comaroff said that “no such student has ever sought an investigation of claims against him. The only students whose complaints Harvard has notified him of are the plaintiffs.”

He also denied ever threatening Mandava or Czerwienski, saying he “consistently made every effort to assist these students and to advance their careers.”

The complaint also sheds light on the final stages of Harvard’s investigation into Comaroff, which the university had previously been vague about in its public statements. The lawsuit says that the Office for Dispute Resolution made no findings on Mandava’s and Czerwienski’s allegation that Comaroff had threatened retaliation against them. The students alleged that the office ignored certain aspects of their testimony. The students appealed the decision, but it was upheld, the complaint says.

But the complaint also says that the Office for Dispute Resolution found that Comaroff had sexually harassed Kilburn when he described how she “‘would be raped’ in certain parts of Africa.” Kilburn had alleged that at an advising meeting Comaroff had, unprompted, described several places in Africa where, because she was in a same-sex relationship, Kilburn would be “raped” or “raped and killed” if she went there for her field work.

Comaroff’s lawyers called that conversation with Kilburn “a necessary conversation for her safety, and numerous faculty witnesses in the Title IX process attested that his advice was appropriate.” According to the lawyers’ statement, the Title IX investigation found that Comaroff “was motivated only by concern for Ms. Kilburn’s well-being and had no romantic or sexual intention, but that the advice nonetheless constituted sexual harassment.” He disputed that conclusion, saying it would “cripple faculty members’ ability to use their best academic judgment in advising students about essential safety issues.”

The lawsuit also says that after the Office For Dispute Resolution finished its final reports, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, its liberal-arts college, conducted a review to determine whether allegations made by all three students had violated its professional-conduct policy. In December, an external fact finder concluded that Comaroff had threatened Mandava in violation of the policy, according to the complaint.

Dueling Letters

The new lawsuit is the latest development in a yearslong case against a powerful professor. It has divided Harvard’s faculty, who have circulated dueling letters about the investigation into Comaroff’s misconduct and the decision to sanction him.

One letter, signed by 38 Harvard faculty members, admonished the university for conducting a second investigation after the Title IX process was completed. It also took issue with Harvard’s finding against Comaroff for the conversation he had with Kilburn about how she would be raped. The letter lauded Comaroff for his reputation as “an excellent colleague, adviser and committed university citizen.”

Other faculty members were disturbed by their colleagues’ response to the sanctions. They worried that such a response would discourage vulnerable people at the university from coming forward with complaints about powerful people, especially without full knowledge of the facts of the case. They wrote a letter of their own, which one professor said had 73 signatures on Tuesday evening.

The three graduate students hired the law firm Sanford Heisler Sharp, which also represented nine women who sued Dartmouth College in 2018.

The lawsuit against Harvard says that Harvard’s “failure to act on repeated reports of harassment against Professor Comaroff — until spurred to do so by the media — demonstrates an institutional policy of indifference.”

It’s a system, the complaint says, that is “designed to protect the university, its reputation, and the faculty who sustain that reputation at the expense of its students.” In the end, the plaintiffs say, it is about an abuse of power.