| 6 weeks 1 day 13 hours ago Documents implicating Combs in 1994 assault likely fake
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LOS ANGELES (AP) - The Los Angeles Times apologized for using
documents that were apparently fabricated in a story implicating
associates of Sean "Diddy" Combs in a 1994 assault on rapper
Tupac Shakur.
"The bottom line is that the documents we relied on should not
have been used," Editor Russ Stanton said in a story posted
Wednesday night on the newspaper's Web site. "We apologize both to
our readers and to those referenced in the documents ... and in the
story."
Pulitzer-prize winning reporter Chuck Philips, who wrote the
story, and his supervisor, Deputy Managing Editor Marc Duvoisin,
also apologized.
The apologies followed an investigation launched by Stanton
after The Smoking Gun Web site reported earlier in the day that the
paper was conned by a prisoner who doctored the documents.
Combs denied that he had any prior knowledge of or involvement
in the robbery and shooting of Shakur at a New York recording
studio. He and other subjects of the story claimed they had been
defamed by the newspaper.
The Smoking Gun said the documents seemed phony because they
appeared to be written on a typewriter instead of a computer and
included blacked-out sections not typically found in such
documents, among other problems.
The Web site claimed the documents were fabricated by a prison
inmate with a history of exaggerating his place in the
rap music
world.
The Times said its March 17 story was based on FBI records,
interviews with people at the scene of the 1994 shooting, and
statements to the FBI by an informant.
None of the sources was named.
Philips said Wednesday that a former FBI agent examined the
documents in question for him and said they appeared to be
legitimate.
But Philips said he wished he had done more to investigate their
authenticity.
"I now believe the truth here is I got duped," he said.
The shooting triggered a feud between East and West Coast
rappers that led to the killings of Shakur and Notorious B.I.G.
The story said associates hoping to curry favor with Combs - who
was overseeing B.I.G.'s white-hot career at the time - lured Shakur
to the studio because of his disrespect toward them.
The story and related features on latimes.com attracted nearly 1
million hits - more viewers than any other story on latimes.com
this year, the newspaper said.
(Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
