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Janet's World

© Megan Drummond

Jimmy is 8 years old and a third-generation heroin addict, a precocious little boy with sandy hair, velvety brown eyes and needle marks freckling the baby-smooth skin of his thin brown arms.

With those words, Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke gave the nation a glimpse into Jimmy’s World, in an article first published on September 28, 1980. Cooke described, in detail, Jimmy’s heroin-dependent existence. She claimed he had been introduced to the drug three years earlier by his mother’s live-in boyfriend.

The article prompted then-mayor Marion Barry and the city’s police force to begin an exhaustive search for the boy. After nearly a month of intensive searching, with nothing found, the city gave up the formal search. Teachers, parents, social workers and drug abuse counselors, among others, vainly continued trying to locate the boy.

When Jimmy could not be located and Ms. Cooke vehemently refused to divulge her sources, the mayor and the chief of police began to question the authenticity of the story. The time frame when all this happened can be pinpointed as the time that everything started to go wrong for Janet Cooke.

Life at the Post progressed normally for the next six months. The informal search for little Jimmy continued, Janet Cooke continued writing stories for the paper and garnering praise for her piece on the drug world’s youngest inhabitants.

On April 13, 1981, Janet Cooke was awarded journalism’s top honor, the Pulitzer Prize. On April 15, six months, two weeks and four days after the story first appeared, she returned the Prize and admitted that there was no Jimmy, that she had fabricated the entire story.

In the wake of her resignation from The Washington Post, facts on Janet’s resume that had been unchecked prior to this incident were checked. It was proven that she had fabricated more than her Pulitzer Prize-winning story.

Janet claimed to have graduated from Vassar College when she actually only attended Vassar for a year and completed her education at the University of Toledo. She claimed to speak four languages, including French. But when she was interrogated in French, she had no idea what she was being asked. Another of her false claims was that she studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. None of these credentials, which won her the job in D.C., was true.

In June of 1996, 15 years after her self-imposed exile, Janet publicly apologized for her lies in a story in GQ. According to all sources concerning the article, though, she fabricated her apology and the life story she told the reporter.

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