In June 2023, after an investigation concluded that she had falsified data in her research, she was put on unpaid administrative leave from her position as a tenured professor at Harvard Business School (HBS), deprived of her title as Tandon Family Professor of Business Administration, and removed as head of HBS's Negotiation, Organizations and Markets (NOM) unit.

[14] In or before 2020, a graduate student named Zoé Ziani developed concerns about the validity of results from a highly publicized paper by Gino about networking.

[15] Ziani, together with a collaborator, subsequently alerted Data Colada, a team of three behavioral scientists known for investigating faulty research, who had been independently developing concerns about Gino's work since 2014.

[15] In June 2023, after the internal investigation had resulted in a 1200-page report that found Gino "committed research misconduct intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly," and recommended the university initiate steps leading to her termination, Harvard Business School placed her on unpaid administrative leave.

[20] Neither of the two explanations was accepted by Harvard's investigators, who wrote in the report that "Although we acknowledge that the theory of a malicious actor might be remotely possible, we do not find it plausible," adding that Gino’s "repeated and strenuous argument for a scenario of data falsification by bad actors across four different studies, an argument we find to be highly implausible, leads us to doubt the credibility of her written and oral statements to this committee more generally.

A group of researchers including open science proponent Simine Vazire raised over $370,000 to help cover the legal fees of Data Colada.

[24] On November 8, 2023, the Data Colada defendants filed a motion to dismiss the claims against them, contending that Gino's lawsuit does not meet the pleading standards for a viable defamation action.

[26] In March 2024, judge Myong J. Joun ruled to unseal it (with some redactions) as a judicial record "to which there exists a presumptive right of public access.

"[20] In the view of Vox journalist Kelsey Piper, the unsealed document "makes the allegations of Gino’s misconduct look more warranted than ever.