A settlement agreement has been reached in Switzerland between Samia Henni, an architecture professor at McGill University; and Stephan Trüby, a Stuttgart University architecture professor; and Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), a Swiss newspaper. The courts have requested Henni’s legal team to withdraw the civil lawsuit she filed against NZZ and the criminal lawsuit she filed against Trüby in 2024.
The courts have directed NZZ to withdraw its “unfounded accusations” against Henni, her dissertation, and her book, Architecture of Counterrevolution: the French Army in Northern Algeria. Henni’s scholarship “will be on record forever,” she said on June 8 to donors over email who helped support her legal fees. Henni called the outcome an “academic victory.”
Each party has been requested to cover their own legal costs. NZZ published a clarification in print and online on June 6, 2025. NZZ’s clarification, translated from German by Google, stated:
“In our article from March 19, 2024, entitled ‘Israel Hatred at ETH’ (print edition) and ‘Hatred of Israel in the architectural scene – ETH employees celebrate October 7 and sign open letters from Hamas supporters’ (online) by Stephan Trüby, Samia Henni was mentioned, among others. Should the impression arise that Samia Henni espouses antisemitic positions or questions Israel’s right to exist, especially in her academic publication ‘Architecture of Counterrevolution: the French Army in Northern Algeria,’ we would like to clarify that this was not our intention.” [Parenthesis in original.]
After the decision was announced, Henni told AN, “Some colleagues advised me to not take any legal actions to defend academic integrity. But this was absolutely not okay.” She continued, “I think we have to defend our rights. If something is on record and gives a wrong impression of a person, an academic, and of their scientific work, it’s not okay.”
“Just because someone is associated with a certain identity, or they signed a petition against a genocide and urbicide, doesn’t make them antisemitic,” Henni continued. “This is so dangerous. Within a few sentences [Trüby] drew a conclusion about a multi-award-winning book with more than 300 pages and numerous references. This is clearly not a scientific critique of my work as there were no scientific references, sources, and arguments.”
Trüby told AN via email he welcomed the outcome. “The legal dispute with Samia Henni ended with a result I am very pleased about: The text remains as it is because my critique of her dissertation is correct and legally unassailable—it is only supplemented with a short asterisk postscript which essentially says that if the impression has arisen that I had called Samia Henni an anti-Semite in this article, there has been a misunderstanding,” Trüby said.
“Anyone who reads my text carefully will not be surprised about this,” Trüby continued. “Above all, the entire proceedings show the tough fight that is required when one acts in solidarity with Israel and criticizes militant anti-Zionist positions in the sciences in general and in the architectural world in particular, which sometimes hardly can be distinguished from plain anti-Semitism.”
“The fact that it is still online says nothing about its content, especially not about the eligibility of this unscientific claim and above all it does not confirm anything from a legal point of view,” Henni said. She continued, “Trüby was not part of the legal case against the newspaper, he was not in the courtroom during the negotiation and agreement. The clarification does not state anything about Trüby’s personal intentions—after all he is a third party in this other legal case.”
How Did We Get Here?
Henni was a visiting professor at ETH Zurich when, on March 19, 2024, Trüby published an article in NZZ that mentioned her and other faculty members, including Anne Holtrop, who were advocates for Palestine. The article said ETH Zurich had become a “hotspot for scientifically disguised anti-Semitism” after October 7.
In the NZZ article, Trüby challenged the academic integrity of Henni’s PhD dissertation. (Philip Ursprung, Tom Avermaete, and the late Jean-Louis Cohen were her dissertation advisors at ETH Zurich; the dissertation won multiple awards.)
On March 28, 2024, ETH Zurich dean Matthias Kohler denounced Trüby’s accusations that the school had become a “hotbed” of antisemitism. Henni subsequently solicited a lawyer to file a formal request for the Right of Reply to NZZ editors, in order to have the article’s alleged defamatory content addressed. NZZ subsequently refused Henni’s request.
In May 2024, Henni received a death threat at her office. Someone placed a “black-and-white copy of a painting” that depicted a woman with a gun to her head on Henni’s office door. The culprit was never identified. (The act followed the vandalization of her office at Cornell University in 2022; similarly, the perpetrator wasn’t found. She has also been a victim of online hate speech.) A petition in support of Henni circulated in June 2024 alleging that the death threat and Trüby’s article in NZZ were connected.
On June 6, 2024, ETH Zurich faculty members issued a statement titled “D-ARCH stands behind the scholarly work of Samia Henni.” That same month, Henni, with ETH Zurich’s support, contacted Stuttgart University, where Trüby works, requesting an investigation into Trüby’s alleged academic misconduct.
Stuttgart University rejected Henni’s request for an investigation into Trüby in July 2024. (Stuttgart University declined AN’s invitation to comment on the court case.) Afterward, Henni filed two lawsuits: A criminal lawsuit against Trüby, and a civil lawsuit in defense of academic integrity and freedom against NZZ. In October 2024, Henni started a crowdfunding campaign to help finance her legal fees.
Trüby was accused of defamation, which is a crime in Switzerland. He was invited to an interrogation in Zurich, but he rejected the invitation, Henni told AN. Then in early June 2025, Trüby was interrogated in Stuttgart, Germany, through the German police on behalf of the public prosecutor’s office.
On the crowdfunding campaign’s website, Henni shared news of this lawsuit’s resolution with her supporters this past June 6. She wrote, “I am deeply grateful and thankful to my lawyers and to you all for standing up for academic integrity, academic freedom, civic rights, and justice.”
An ETH Zurich spokesperson told AN it cannot comment on the proceedings, however, “prior to the publication of the article, the media relations office [at ETH Zurich] informed the editors of NZZ that the individuals concerned must be contacted directly and given at least the opportunity to respond to the allegations, as required by the guidelines of the Swiss Press Council. We also insisted that all individuals mentioned in the article be anonymised. Unfortunately, these requests were not granted.”
Disclaimer: The author donated 40 CHF to Samia Henni’s crowdfunding campaign.
→ Continue reading at The Architect's Newspaper
