Lorna Hajdini fact-check: Did Peter Girnus promote JP Morgan female executive? Truth behind viral post

Lorna Hajdini, the Executive Director for Leveraged Finance at JPMorgan, has been accused of sexual harassment in a lawsuit, as per a Daily Mail report. Now, a person on X going by Peter Girnus has claimed that he was the one who promoted Hajdini to her post, amid the row surrounding the female executive.

“Not deal ownership. People ownership. The kind of leadership where you don’t just manage a pipeline. You manage the person building it. Their trajectory. Their compensation. Their future at the firm. Their references when they try to leave. I taught her that. Not at NYU Stern. Not at Harvard. Here. In Leveraged Finance. In my corner office on the forty-second floor with the framed Tombstones from every deal that made this division what it is,” the post continued.

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“Lorna’s handshake could restructure a cap table. That’s not a compliment. That’s a performance review. When the complaint came across my desk, I read it twice. Not because it was disturbing. Because it was familiar. Every behavior described. The direct communication. The after-hours mentorship. The expectation that juniors earn their advancement through demonstrated commitment to the team. That’s the playbook. My playbook. The one I handed Lorna when she made Executive Director and inherited a book of direct reports who needed to understand the hierarchy,” the post continued.

Girnus shared the entire thing in a Substack post as well. His post on X has reached a million views at the time of writing.

Several people reacted on the post. “That’s not “mentorship,” it’s control dressed up as culture. When “ownership” starts sounding like “I own you,” you’ve already crossed the line. If your system needs fear and leverage to work, it’s broken investigation or not,” one person wrote. Another added “Just because you taught and mentored her, doesn’t mean anybody is innocent. You are not being objective for clear reasons. Not saying the complainant is innocent and she’s guilty, but one has to always be willing to hear all sides. Also, the culture you described is fantasy land.”

Yet another said “Bro writes a TL;DR to dismiss a person with a life outside work, using boring Finances jargon to defend an aggressor. I’ve been harassed at work by a woman once and left because of that. She’s still there and I am not. My boss was impartial like this, in the end. I’ve seen it.”

His profile further notes that his places of work include Sprint, Best Buy, where he was a sales consultant. Then, Girnus worked at HEB as Overnight Stocker / Grocery Partner. For a while he was self-employed as a Freelance Developer & IT Consultant. Girnus was then a Technical Support Engineer at Forepoint and is now at Trend Micro, as per his profile.

Hajdini, meanwhile, interned before she got a job at JPMorgan and then moved her way up in the company. Her LinkedIn profile which has now been deleted, noted that she’s based out of New York. Thus, it is not possible for Girnus and Hajdini to have crossed paths professionally for the former to have given her the JPMorgan promotion.

Several people also pointed to that fact that Girnus’ post was satirical. “Peter Girnus is not at JP Morgan but a cybersecurity researcher at Trend Micro. It’s satirical fiction,” one wrote. Another added “NOTE: Peter Girnus is a Cyber Techie guy He is NOT a Leveraged Finance guy Therefore, he couldn’t possibly be Leveraged Finance mentor of alleged abuser Lorna Hajdini at JP Morgan”.

Yet another said “Peter Girnus does not work at JPMorgan Chase. His actual career is in cybersecurity, and his presence on social media—where he often writes from the perspective of an “executive” at various firms—is largely satirical.”

Notably, a JPMorgan spokesperson told the Mail that the complaint against the company and Hajdini had no merit, internal investigations had shown.