'Wash Post' Editor Who Blew Whistle On Janet Cooke Fabrication Dies At 61

By: E&P Staff Vivian Alpin-Brownlee, a Washington Post weekly section editor who was the first inside the newsroom to doubt the infamous "Jimmy's World" Pulitzer Prize-winning fabrication, has died at age 61, the Post reported.

Alpin-Brownlee died at her Washington, D.C., home Oct. 20 of complications from leukemia, the Post reported in an obituary by Patricia Sullivan.

Alpin-Brownlee was editor of the Post's District Weekly section when she assigned Janet Cooke to write about a reported new kind of heroin on D.C. streets.

Cooke came back with a sensational story about an 8-year-old who was being injected with heroin, and had ambitions to be a drug dealer himself.

"Ms. Aplin-Brownlee doubted the reporting from the start," the Post reported. "When Cooke returned from her initial investigation with what seemed to be a huge story, Ms. Aplin-Brownlee sent Cooke to Milton Coleman, who was the District editor at the time. Out of town on vacation while the story developed, Ms. Aplin-Brownlee returned to find the story on the front page of the edition of Sunday, Sept. 28, 1980."

"Jimmy's World' won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, but others were having their doubts as well. The police reported they could find no trace of "Jimmy," and Cooke was unable to show editors the place where she witnessed the boy taking heroin.

"The day Cooke's Pulitzer Prize was announced, Ms. Aplin-Brownlee went to Coleman and said, 'I hope she has committed the perfect crime,' according to a 14,000-word investigation of the scandal, written by ombudsman Bill Green and published in the Post," the newspaper's obit said. The paper said she tried several times after that to tell "higher-level editors that the story didn't sound right and that Cooke was not capable of doing the reporting she said she had done."

Despite her protests, Cooke was promoted by Bob Woodward, the Metro section's assistant managing editor at the time.

Alpin-Brownlee was the Post's first African-American to become an assignment editor on the national desk. She was also the first black woman reporter at the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

She retired from the Post in 1985.