Tuft outside the Post-Dispatch in 2006 -- a year before being mugged.
In a letter to the newspaper's staff last month, Tuft's editors wrote that the reporter was retiring for "health reasons." Daily RFT attempted to reach Tuft at the time to ask her a bit more about her retirement. We never heard back from her.
Yesterday, we again tried to contact Tuft after reading a rather bizarre quote from her on the blog of her good friend Jerry Berger, himself a former P-D employee. Tuft responded that she couldn't comment on record with us.
Nonetheless, in a post on BergersBeat, Tuft claims her health concerns stem from an incident in 2007 when three men attempted to mug her on Post-Dispatch property. Moreover, Tuft seems to allege that the muggers were agents of the Joyce Meyer Ministries.
In 2003 Tuft wrote a series about the financial excesses of the Fenton-based televangelist. Two years later, Tuft penned a couple follow-up articles about Joyce Meyer that the editors at the Post-Dispatch retracted for not meeting the paper's "standards for fairness and accuracy."
Since then Tuft has been on somewhat shaky ground at the paper -- spending her last few years writing short articles for the newspaper's website.
Here then is how Tuft explains her departure from the paper to Jerry Berger:
Tuft said that she remains ill as a result of a mugging and beating she endured in 2007 by three men on a P-D parking lot. "One of them drew a gun and pointed it at my face," she recalled. "I chased one of them down the street. No one from the paper came to help me. The company told the cops that there was no gunman. As a result, I have since suffered from stomach and brain problems. I later testified against one of the guys and he has since been sentenced to 10 years in prison. The getaway car was similar to those used in the Joyce Meyers Ministries' fleet."
