Reporter Admits Lying About Fatal Illnesses

OWENSBORO, Ky. — First, newspaper reporter Kim Stacy told her editors she’d fabricated five columns about her life-and-death struggle with cancer to hide the fact that she really has AIDS.

Now she says she has never been diagnosed with AIDS, either.

In an interview published Friday in the Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer, Stacy, 33, said she began making up stories about her health several years ago so she could make friends.

Stacy was fired Monday after admitting the first lie, about having cancer.

Then on Thursday, Stacy told the newspaper that, to the best of her knowledge, she had never had any symptoms of AIDS-related illnesses. She said she had never tested positive for HIV or been treated for the disease.

She agreed to have two reporters accompany her to take an HIV test. The results were not immediately available.

Over the last few weeks, Stacy wrote movingly about how she had brain cancer, had only a few months to live and was undergoing chemotherapy.

“I refuse to believe I’m going to die,” she wrote. “My life may be over in six months, but I’m not going out of this world without a fight.”

This week, she met with an editor at a newspaper where she used to work and admitted that she didn’t have cancer. The meeting came after suspicions were raised by former co-workers of Stacy.

Stacy said the deceit began in late 1995 when she told co-workers at the Appalachian News-Express in Pikeville that she had cancer.

“I don’t know where the idea came from,” she told the Messenger-Inquirer. “At the time I was having trouble with my blood sugar and going to the doctor a lot, and everybody was real nice to me, real concerned. It seemed like to me they really made an effort to be friends with me.”

Stacy joined the Messenger-Inquirer in 1998.

This week, Stacy was asked in an interview with Associated Press how readers would know that she was telling the truth about having AIDS.

“I don’t have an answer for you all,” she said.

Stacy said she has had stomach problems but attributes them to stress.

Stacy was a reporter for the newspaper, and her only columns were about her illness.