Janet Cooke

Janet Leslie Cooke (born 1954 or 1955) after admitting she had fabricated stories. The prize was awarded instead to Teresa Carpenter, a nominee who had lost to Cooke.

Early life Cooke grew up in an upper-middle-class, African-American family in Toledo, Ohio. She said her upbringing was stressful and strict, with constant pressure from both the predominantly white preparatory schools she attended and her father, whom she described as domineering; as a result, she claimed that habitual lying became a childhood "survival mechanism". She enrolled at Vassar College before transferring to the University of Toledo, where she earned a bachelor's degree. However, Cooke would claim later that she received her bachelor's degree from Vassar and a master's degree from Toledo. Cooke profiled the supposed life of an eight-year-old heroin addict named Jimmy, said to be a pseudonym. She wrote of the "needle marks freckling the baby-smooth skin of his thin, brown arms", and claimed to have witnessed episodes of heroin injection, describing them in graphic detail. Barry then admitted that the city still had no information on Jimmy's whereabouts, and suggested that the story was partially fictionalized, finding it unlikely that Jimmy's mother or dealer would "allow a reporter to see them shoot up", as Cooke claimed she saw.

Of "Jimmy's World", Woodward said: