Reporter Ousted For Deception

Foreign correspondent Jack Kelley was forced to resign from USA Today last week after he repeatedly misled editors during an internal investigation into some of his stories, the paper's top editors said.

Kelley told The Washington Post he concluded he should resign because he "panicked and used poor judgment" by encouraging a translator who was not present during a 1999 interview that had come under scrutiny to impersonate a translator who was there and confirm his story to USA Today investigators. He told the Post he realized his error and apologized to the paper's top executives two weeks later.

"The reason for ending Kelley's employment was that he engaged in an elaborate deception during an investigation into his work," USA Today editor Karen Jurgensen said in a lengthy statement posted Tuesday on the paper's Internet site. "He admitted that he engaged in conduct designed to deceive the investigation."

Her statement said the paper "had chosen to treat the issue as a confidential personnel matter, but because Kelley made it public and because some published accounts have contained inaccurate information, we are providing a summary of the central events that led editors to end Kelley's employment."

The statement said Kelley did admit attempting to deceive USA Today investigators, but only after being presented with evidence of his deception. Jurgensen said Kelley then resigned after being told he had two days to quit or be fired.

In a follow-up to the story it published Sunday, the Post reported in Tuesday's editions that Kelley's attorney, Lynne Bernabei, said USA Today told her last November that private investigators hired by the paper had discovered the Kelley deception. "They confronted us," Bernabei told the Post. "It was after that that Jack disclosed he had done that."

Despite the furor and exhaustive investigation, USA Today said it was not now making any changes to the underlying 1999 Kelley story under investigation because it has been unable to determinate it was not true.

Kelley continues to stand by the original story, which involved a notebook he said he was shown documenting Serbian war crimes. He maintained to the Post that he felt the USA Today investigation of his work — prompted by an anonymous letter — amounted to a witch hunt.

The Post quoted Barbara Davis, a former United Nations mission chief in Yugoslavia, as saying Monday in an interview from Belgrade that "the fact that it (the notebook) existed in the form that Jack described is very probable."

Kelley's departure comes more than eight months after The New York Times was rocked by the scandal over the reporting of Jayson Blair, who fabricated several stories. Shortly thereafter, The Times also fired Rick Burns for failing to disclose that he had had help reporting some of his stories. Times executive editor Howell Raines and his deputy, Gerald Boyd, both resigned amid the resulting furor.

Kelley was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting in 2002, cited for his "wide-ranging and prescient reporting on centers of foreign terrorism, often conducted at personal risk."