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By Blake Morrison,USA TODAY
Seven weeks into an examination of former USA
TODAY reporter Jack Kelley’s work, a team of journalists has found
strong evidence that Kelley fabricated substantial portions of at
least eight major stories, lifted nearly two dozen quotes or other
material from competing publications, lied in speeches he gave for
the newspaper and conspired to mislead those investigating his
work.
Perhaps Kelley’s most egregious misdeed occurred in 2000, when he used a snapshot he took of a Cuban hotel worker to authenticate a story he made up about a woman who died fleeing Cuba by boat. The woman in the photo neither fled by boat nor died, and a USA TODAY reporter located her this month. If Cuban authorities had learned she was the woman in the picture, she says, she could have lost her job and her chance to emigrate.
Kelley, 43, resigned from the newspaper in January after he admitted conspiring with a translator to mislead editors overseeing an inquiry into his work. At the time, newspaper editors said they could not determine whether Kelley had embellished or fabricated stories. After Kelley quit, a new investigation began, spurred by fears that Kelley might have plagiarized. A team of five reporters and an editor, monitored by a three-member panel of former editors from outside the newspaper, reviewed more than 720 stories Kelley wrote from 1993 through 2003. Each was examined by at least two members of the team. A story was considered fabricated if expense reports, phone records, official documents or witnesses clearly contradicted all or parts of what was published, and if Kelley’s explanations failed to reconcile those contradictions. The three former editors spent about 20 hours interviewing Kelley. Throughout those interviews, Kelley insisted he had done nothing wrong and urged a quick resolution to the newspaper’s investigation. “I’ve never fabricated or plagiarized anything,” Kelley said. Confronted Thursday with the newspaper’s findings, Kelley spent 2 1/2 hours again denying wrongdoing. “I feel like I’m being set up,” he told them. But an extensive examination of about 100 of the 720 stories uncovered evidence that found Kelley’s journalistic sins were sweeping and substantial. The evidence strongly contradicted Kelley’s published accounts that he spent a night with Egyptian terrorists in 1997; met a vigilante Jewish settler named Avi Shapiro in 2001; watched a Pakistani student unfold a picture of the Sears Tower and say, “This one is mine,” in 2001; visited a suspected terrorist crossing point on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in 2002; interviewed the daughter of an Iraqi general in 2003; or went on a high-speed hunt for Osama bin Laden in 2003. In addition: • Significant parts of one of Kelley’s most gripping stories, an eyewitness account of a suicide bombing that helped make him a 2001 Pulitzer Prize finalist, are untrue. Kelley told readers he saw the bomber. But the man he described could not have been the bomber. • Kelley’s explanations of how he reported stories from Egypt, Russia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Yugoslavia, Israel, Cuba and Pakistan were contradicted by hotel, phone or other records or sources he said would confirm them. • Kelley wrote scripts to help at least three people mislead USA TODAY reporters trying to verify his work, documents retrieved from his company-owned laptop computer show. Two of the people are translators Kelley paid for services months or years before. Another is a Jerusalem businessman, portrayed by Kelley as an undercover Israeli agent. • In speeches to groups such as the Evangelical Press Association, Kelley talked of events that never occurred. Kelley’s conduct represents “a sad and shameful betrayal of public trust,” former newspaper editors Bill Hilliard, Bill Kovach and John Seigenthaler said in a statement. The three editors said their “analysis of how these abuses occurred” will conclude “in the near future.” Reporters Michael Hiestand, Kevin McCoy, Blake Morrison, Rita Rubin and Julie Schmit investigated Kelley’s work. Before he resigned in January, Kelley spent his entire 21-year career at USA TODAY. Editors nominated him for a Pulitzer Prize five times. Now, Editor Karen Jurgensen said the newspaper will withdraw all prize entries it made on Kelley’s behalf. The newspaper also will flag stories of concern in its online archive. “As an institution, we failed our readers by not recognizing Jack Kelley’s problems. For that I apologize,” USA TODAY publisher Craig Moon said. “In the future, we will make certain that an environment is created in which abuses will never again occur.” | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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