“Jimmy’s World,” Thirty Five Years Later

On this day in 1981, Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for a front-page article titled “Jimmy’s World,” in which she told the story of an eight year old heroin addict.  Just two days later, the Post announced that the story was contrived – Jimmy was at best a composite, and most likely did not exist at all – and the Pulitzer was returned.  On April 19, the Post published a front-page analysis by ombudsman Bill Green, explaining how the paper had missed warning signs and red flags.  “This is essentially a story of the failure of a system that, in another industry, might be called ‘quality control,’” he wrote.  “On newspapers, it is called editing.”  

Cooke’s original assignment, from editor Vivian Aplin-Brownlee, was for the Post’s Thursday section on local news.  A new type of heroin, which caused skin ulcerations, was rumored to be circulating in the area, and Cooke was asked to investigate and report on it. She did not find the new heroin, but she did come back with the story of a shockingly young addict.  She pitched the story to Aplin-Brownlee, who immediately referred it to the more prestigious Metro section.

The Post’s Metro section had an extensive vetting process, with multiple editors — ultimately including both Bob Woodward and Ben Bradlee — reviewing every story.  Nonetheless, the process failed to identify Cooke’s fraud.  The first error occurred when editor Milton Coleman told Cooke that she could offer anonymity to Jimmy’s mother and her boyfriend.  From that point forward, nobody at the Post pressed Cooke for identifying information about her informants.  As ombudsman Green put it,

Coleman did not ask the mother’s name or the family’s street address.  He had promised Cooke confidentiality for her sources.  The jugular of journalism lay exposed – the faith an editor has to place in a reporter.

Other editors continued to take a hands-off approach to Cooke and her sources.  On the rare occasion that she was asked for more information, Cooke responded that “Ron,” the invented lover of Jimmy’s mother, had threatened her life and therefore could not be approached.  Bob Woodward later said, “In a way, both [Cooke] and the story were almost too good to be true.” “This story was so well-written and tied together so well,” he explained, that my alarm bells simply didn’t go off.  My skepticism left me.”  Several other reporters and editors were somewhat less credulous, but they suppressed their misgivings in light of the story’s great appeal.

“Jimmy’s World” ran on the front page of the Washington Post on Sunday, September 28, 1980.  It was over 2200 words long – which was very long for a newspaper – and it was distributed to almost 900,000 readers.  Telephones at the Post began ringing almost immediately, as concerned citizens insisted that the paper do something to find and help Jimmy.

There were doubters from the beginning.  Dr. Alyce Gullattee, of Howard University’s Institute for Substance Abuse and Addiction, said that she did not believe that Jimmy’s mother “fired up” in front of Cooke.  “Junkies just don’t trust reporters like that,” she said.  Even Washington’s Mayor Marion Barry – who turned out to know a thing or two about drug use himself – expressed doubts.  “I’ve been told the story is part myth, part reality,” he said.  Speaking of the police, he continued, “We all have agreed that we don’t believe that the mother or the pusher would allow a reporter to see them shoot up.”

Confronted by implausibilities in the article, the Post editors did not insist on confirmation, documentation, or even prior consistent statements.  Instead, the Post editors stood by their story and their reporter, even when she was not able to show them the house where Jimmy allegedly lived.  When pressed for details, in light of the public doubts, Cooke told her editors that the family had moved to Baltimore, which evidently satisfied them.  According to Green, the Post “stuck by its story and what it described as its First Amendment rights to protect its sources.”

Ironically, Cooke’s story unraveled only because the Post nominated her for a Pulitzer Prize, which was publicly awarded on April 13, 1981.  Based upon Cooke’s official biography, which accompanied the Associated Press announcement of the award, it was discovered by her hometown newspaper, the Toledo Blade, that she had lied on her resume.  She claimed to have graduated magna cum laude from Vassar, and even to have been the valedictorian, when in fact she had studied there for only one year, before attending and graduating from Toledo University.  She had also falsely claimed to have studied at the Sorbonne.  The Blade provided this information to the AP, which in turn contacted the Post.

Cooke’s editors finally confronted her, having confirmed that she had not graduated from Vassar.  The resume discrepancies “cast serious doubts on her honesty [and] her honesty, or the lack of it, was the only thing that held the ‘Jimmy’ story together.”

For a while, Cooke’ insisted that that story was true.  Fortunately for the Post, Cooke’s notes and tape recordings had been preserved.  There was nothing in them about a child addict. 

Cooke had no choice but to confess the fraud.  “Jimmy is a composite,” she said, although everyone realized that was just a rationalization for what Green later called a “journalistic felony.”  The story was retracted and the Pulitzer Prize was returned.

Green’s report was published on the Post’s front page on April 19, 1981, only six days after Cooke’s fraud had been exposed, under the headline “Janet’s World: The Story of a Child Who Never Existed – How and Why it Came to Be Published.”  Green concluded, “This business of trusting reporters absolutely goes too far.  There is a point when total reliance on this kind of trust allows the editor to duck his own responsibility. Editors have to insist on knowing and verifying.”

Is there a lesson in this sad tale for lawyers, beyond the obvious caution against falsifying evidence?  We would all probably like to think that our commitment to adversarial testing — cross examination; extensive depositions; document discovery — provides adequate protection against fraud.  On the other hand, devotion to our clients, and to the merits of our cases, risks putting us in the same stance as the Post's editors took toward Cooke — placing trust ahead of verification.  Our strongest tool, therefore, may well be an ingrained professional skepticism, or the deep-seated instinct to leave no fact unexamined.

Finally, it is worth noting that the ultimate key to the fraud was the preservation of Cooke's original notes, in which the editors found no mention of "Jimmy" or anyone like him.  Lawyers spend tremendous amounts of time on discovery, searching for the proverbial "smoking gun," but sometimes it is the absence of evidence that makes all the difference.

[Source:  Bill Green, "Janet's World," Washington Post, April 19, 1981.]