CBS foreign-affairs correspondent Lara Logan has granted an interview to Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz to acknowledge her messy personal life. Logan laments how she became "tabloid fodder," but she's telling Kurtz that the basic facts of the story are true:
[L]ast November, she broke off an intense relationship with another journalist in Baghdad. Soon afterward, Logan started dating Joseph Burkett, a federal contractor stationed in Iraq who was separated from his wife back in Texas.
Now, having just moved to Washington with an expanded portfolio for the network, Logan finds her romantic life reduced to tabloid fodder. And there is a new complication: She recently discovered that she is pregnant.
Logan, 37, says she and Burkett plan to get married eventually. Her divorce is slated to become final in two weeks, and Burkett's divorce trial is likely to end next month. But the case has turned decidedly messy, with Burkett's estranged wife Kimberly, the mother of their 3-year-old daughter, charging that Logan broke up her marriage.
A family friend told Kurtz that when Burkett came home to ask for a divorce and admit his affair with the CBS reporter, his wife was hospitalized after she overdosed on tranquilizers. Logan says the affair with Burkett came after her affair with CNN reporter Michael Ware:
Last year, about two years after Logan and her husband had separated, she began a relationship with Michael Ware, a CNN correspondent in Iraq. Shortly after that romance ended in November, she started dating Burkett, a friend she had met years earlier when both were working in Afghanistan.
Kurtz also quoted from the National Enquirer, proving the tabloid fodder is juicy enough to be reproduced in a prestigious daily:
Kimberly Burkett's lawyer, Susie Chmielowiec, told the supermarket tabloid that "Kimberly believes Lara stole her husband -- and now they're trying to steal her little girl." The divorce case includes a custody dispute between Burkett and his wife.
Chmielowiec and Burkett's lawyer, Jonathan Cluck, did not respond to requests for comment. The Enquirer quoted Kimberly Burkett last week as saying that "Lara Logan deserves to be canned" and that her CBS promotion is "a slap in the face to everyone who believes in marriage."
