The Secret Dossier Behind Claudine Gay’s Downfall

I obtained access to the shadowy 6,000 word dossier that helped fuel the Harvard plagiarism scandal, which I am publishing below.

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The rapid downfall of Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard University, who resigned on January 2 over allegations of plagiarism, did not come out of thin air. It was, instead, at least partly the product of an opposition research dossier that was, in all likelihood, produced or funded by her enemies.

Well before the allegations made national headlines, an anonymous source deeply investigated Gay and pitched the plagiarism story to the media – research that appears to have played a crucial role in shaping the events of the last few weeks.

On the afternoon of December 4, a day before Gay's disastrous performance during a congressional hearing on antisemitism, a self-identified "anonymous tipster" sent an over 6,000-word dossier to several journalists laying out dozens of examples of poorly sourced or plagiarized passages from Gay’s career in academia. The tipster, in the email titled “Major Harvard tip: Claudine Gay plagiarism” and blind carbon copied to five journalists and media outlets, suggested that the journalists could raise allegations of plagiarism the following day while Gay testified under oath.

The tipster shared thirty instances in which Gay had allegedly failed to appropriately credit other writers in academic articles she had published. The carefully researched and formatted dossier unearthed examples over three decades and is meticulous in its attention to detail. The anonymous tip included instances from a 1994 article Gay published, "Between Black and White: The Complexity of Brazilian Race Relations;" her 1997 doctoral dissertation at Harvard University; and several more recent articles she wrote for the Urban Affairs Review journal.