I'm curious about the mechanical details here. How can a tenured professor at UCLA not be aware that they contributed (not author?!) to a paper cited 3000 times?
She wasn't an author, so she had no reason to be involved w/ (for example) the referee process. She was made aware that this was their claim when someone contacted her.
She also works in a slightly different literature IMO. Even if she had read the article, it probably didn't say "the data gathering was done by Prof. Rossi at UCLA"