The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has issued a correction to a story it published last month alleging a pattern of sexual assault cover-ups within the Georgia football program and has fired the reporter who wrote it.
The AJC on June 27 published a story with the headline “UGA football program rallies when players are accused of abusing women,” written by investigative reporter Alan Judd. The story claimed the Georgia football program went above and beyond to protect players who were accused of sexual assault, allowing players accused of crimes to remain on the team and/or relying on friendly relationships with law enforcement to make charges go away.
The UGA Athletic Association pushed back on July 11, issuing a nine-page letter to the AJC that cited “significant inaccuracies” in Judd’s reporting and demanded a retraction. A story published by Rivals.com last weekend noted that Judd had a history of problematic reporting, which led to his resignation from the Louisville Courier-Journal some years ago.
The AJC responded Wednesday, announcing corrections to the original story — which remains on the paper’s website, albeit with significant revisions — and noting that Judd had been fired. According to the response, the paper’s editors and attorneys investigated Georgia’s list of complaints and “found two elements of the story that did not meet the news organization’s journalistic standards,” but found no evidence that Judd had fabricated any of his reporting.
The two problematic elements were that (1) Judd had reported that 11 players accused of sexual crimes were allowed to remain on the team, a number that AJC editors could not verify; and (2) a quote from a police detective that was a combination of two statements made minutes apart.
“Our editorial integrity and the trust our community has in us is at the core of who we are,” AJC editor-in-chief Leroy Chapman said in a statement. “After receiving the university’s letter, we assigned our team of editors and lawyers to carefully review each claim in the nine-page document we received, along with some additional source material that supported the original story. We identified errors that fell short of our standards, and we corrected them.
“A critical part of our mission is to hold people and institutions accountable. It is a responsibility we take seriously. We must hold ourselves to this same standard and acknowledge when we fall short, which we have here. We apologize to the university and our readers for the errors.”