Three women who accused now-former Harvard University professor John Comaroff of sexual harassment, and of retaliating against them for reporting it, have agreed with Harvard to drop their lawsuit over the situation. No settlement agreement has been made public.
The women, who worked with Comaroff as graduate students, sued the university in February 2022, accusing it of indifference to their allegations and of overlooking “a decades-long pattern of harassment and retaliation” stretching back to when Comaroff worked for the University of Chicago. Their complaints against the prominent professor of African and African American studies and anthropology made national news, and students protested against him and against Harvard’s handling of the accusations.
After Harvard returned Comaroff to teaching in September 2022—following two years on administrative leave related to allegations of forced kissing, groping, inappropriate comments and more—protesting students chanted, “Professors who harass shouldn’t be in class!” The Harvard Graduate Students Union rallied against him.
The women—Margaret Czerwienski, Lilia Kilburn and Amulya Mandava—sued Harvard in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. They didn’t name Comaroff as a defendant. On Wednesday, about two and a half years after the case began, lawyers for the women and the university filed a motion agreeing to dismiss the case “without costs.”
Some media outlets have reported that there is a settlement, but its details haven’t been publicized. Many of the case files aren’t public. Neither Harvard nor the women’s attorneys responded to requests for comment Friday.
A lawyer who represents Comaroff said, “We don’t have a comment on the dismissal.” In a long statement on his website from July 7, Comaroff wrote that he retired June 30 after he took the university up on “a one-time faculty retirement option to all tenured professors 73 years of age or older.” He said he was about to turn 80.
Comaroff wrote that “although it had no bearing on my decision to retire, it is no secret” that “a cloud was cast over me.” He said he was “falsely accused” by the students of harassment and of threatening retaliation, and that Harvard’s investigations only found him “responsible” for “one instance of verbal impropriety” and one of “unprofessional conduct.” He also said that, “as a further result of the lawsuit, an ugly, ferocious campaign had been waged against me at Harvard by a small group of activists.”
