Newspaper fires writer, makes corrections to story about alleged sexual abuse by Georgia football players

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) released a statement on Wednesday to say that it has “issued corrections” in a story that investigated current and former members of the Georgia football team.

The author, Alan Judd, has been “terminated for violating the organization’s journalistic standards,” the outlet said.

The AJC declined Georgia’s demand to retract the article but detailed the corrections it made.

Judd’s article, originally titled “UGA football program rallies when players accused of abusing women,” claimed that 11 players remained on the team after reported violent encounters with women and/or the school. However, the AJC says the “‘precise count of 11 players’ could not be substantiated under the AJC’s standards.”

Because of this, several paragraphs were deleted and the headline of the story was changed, per the AJC.

The headline now reads, “UGA football program rallied in two incidents when players were accused of abusing women,” as the AJC says the two confirmed cases Judd wrote about were “accurate and newsworthy.”

In the school’s official demand for a retraction of the story, it said that Judd arranged quotes of a police interview with 16-year-old recruit Jamaal Jarrett to play into his “false narrative.” The AJC’s investigation into the quote seemed to side with the university.

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“In a second error, the article improperly joined two statements a detective made minutes apart into a single quotation,” the statement says. “Connecting the sentences did not change the meaning of the quote, but the way it was presented to readers failed to meet AJC standards.”

“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,” Chapman continued. “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.”

The university said the piece included “errors, unsubstantiated allegations, innuendo, and possibly even fabrications” and contained a “reckless disregard for the truth and its imposition of a damaging narrative unsupported by the facts.” But the AJC said they found “no instances of fabrication in the story.”

“I am proud of the work I have done for the AJC for the last 24 years and I am grateful for the opportunity I’ve had to serve the community,” Judd said in a statement.

Georgia won its second of back-to-back national championships this past January.