A Lawsuit Accuses Harvard of Ignoring Sexual Harassment by a Professor

The controversy surrounding John Comaroff, an anthropologist, has divided the faculty, with scholars like Jill Lepore and Henry Louis Gates Jr. supporting their colleague.

For her first day of graduate school at Harvard, Lilia Kilburn arrived at her adviser’s office by bike. She said she felt a tremor of discomfort when the adviser, John Comaroff, a respected anthropologist and an expert on South Africa, complimented her on her helmet.

She remembered, she later said in an interview, how he had planted a kiss on her mouth during another campus visit. So she told him that she had gone on a trip with her partner that summer, she said, and made a point of using female pronouns to describe her partner, to deflect unwanted attention.

In the interview, she recalled how Dr. Comaroff launched into a harangue about how she could be subjected to “corrective rape,” or even killed, if she were seen in a lesbian relationship in certain parts of Africa. But he said it with “a tone of enjoyment,” Ms. Kilburn said, adding, “This was not normal office hours advice.”