A Stanford University lab director created a fake sexual harassment investigation as part of a campaign of “acute antisemitism and anti-Israel bias” against an Israeli chemist, according to a federal lawsuit filed on Thursday.
Israeli chemist Dr. Shay Laps alleges his colleagues at Stanford’s Danny Chou Lab created a hostile work environment in the months after Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror spree over his Jewish and Israeli origins. Lab assistants allegedly sabotaged Laps’s diabetes research, prevented him from accessing necessary equipment, and socially ostracized the doctor for being an Israeli Jew, according to a copy of the complaint the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law filed in the Northern District of California.
Dr. Danny Chou, the lab’s director, allegedly fabricated a sexual harassment complaint against Laps and threatened to have him deported after he reported this behavior. When Laps eventually raised the matter with Stanford’s leadership—including president Jonathan Levin and School of Medicine dean Lloyd B. Minor—the university “concluded that the conduct was pursuant to its rules and lawful,” according to the suit.
“From the moment he stepped foot in the lab, he was surrounded by hostility,” the complaint reads. “At first, Dr. Laps kept his head down. He knew that Jews and Israelis were being driven off American campuses.”
Laps arrived on campus on April 1, 2024, just months after Hamas slaughtered more than 1,200 Jews and ignited a wave of violent anti-Semitic protests at colleges across America, including Stanford. Pro-Hamas activists on the California school’s campus stormed the president’s office and injured a police officer during one June 2024 episode.
The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights opened an investigation into Stanford in December 2023 and warned it again in May 2024 that its failure to protect Jewish students from discrimination and harassment had violated federal civil rights laws.
Laps entered the Chou Lab as a postdoctoral appointee tasked with developing “‘smart,’ bodily-responsive insulin that could revolutionize diabetes treatment worldwide,” according to the complaint. He had been “hand selected by Dr. Chou, before October 7, 2023, and the subsequent upheaval on American college campuses.”
Shortly after Laps arrived on campus and entered the lab, a staffer named Terra Lin “introduced herself by telling Dr. Laps to never speak to her.” When the Jewish doctor “tried to sit with colleagues at lunch, [Lin] told him to sit elsewhere.”
Lin, the complaint alleges, also “delayed” Laps’s requests for equipment and materials, “or snapped at him” when he placed requests. She also “redirected her trash duties to Dr. Laps, and had her friends freeze him out in the limited lab common areas.”
The situation allegedly escalated when Lin “tampered with Dr. Laps’ research, secretly producing results that seemed promising but were, in fact, fraudulent—unbeknownst to Dr. Laps.” She then “advised Dr. Laps to buck scientific standards and trash the proof” before he was able to discover the sabotage.
Laps eventually noticed that Lin “socialized regularly with students and others on campus active in anti-Israeli protests on campus.” At that point, it became clear to the doctor that Lin “was hostile to him from the moment of his arrival because she, like the campus demonstrators who incessantly vilified Israel and Israelis, took issue with his Jewish faith, history, and heritage as well as his Israeli national origin.”
In late July, Laps wrote to Dr. Chou about the harassment, but he “took no steps” to remedy the situation, according to the complaint. Instead, on Aug. 26, Chou called Laps into his office for an “urgent” meeting and told Laps that he was “under investigation” for sexual harassment by Stanford’s Title IX office.
Chou fabricated the sexual harassment investigation, the Brandeis Center complaint alleges, informing Laps “that the news had come ‘from the Title IX’ office to make it seem real, when, in fact, Dr. Chou and colleagues had colluded to ‘report’ a Title IX issue without any complaining victim.” Stanford’s Title IX office subsequently confirmed to Laps that there was no investigation.
“Dr. Chou pushed Dr. Laps to flee scrutiny, campus, and the country,” the lawsuit states. “Dr. Chou threatened that Dr. Laps’ career and immigration status were on the line.”
Laps eventually reported the situation to Stanford’s leadership, including President Levin and Dean Minor, who dismissed his case. Stanford “refused to investigate Dr. Laps’ retaliation claim for months, holding the claim hostage” as officials threatened a lucrative grant the Jewish doctor had received for his work.
“Alone against a hostile institution prepared to destroy his career to avoid scrutiny, Dr. Laps had no choice but to resign,” according to the suit.
“Stanford takes any allegation of antisemitism very seriously,” a university representative told the Washington Free Beacon. “In this instance and based on all the allegations that Laps reported directly to the institution, a thorough internal investigation found that they were unsubstantiated.”
Kenneth Marcus, the Brandeis Center’s chair and CEO, said in a statement that Stanford “shrunk in the face of responsibility, took action only when needed to protect itself, and ignored the vehement instances of anti-Semitism plaguing their campus.” The school’s failure, he said, “is gross negligence and utterly unacceptable.”
