'Bad City' alleges bad behavior — by a medical school dean, USC and within the Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — It would be hard to find a worse couple of years than 2016 and 2017 for two major Los Angeles institutions: the University of Southern California and the Los Angeles Times.

That's when a young drug addict overdosed on crystal meth and GHB in a Pasadena hotel room while partying with Dr. Carmen Puliafito, dean of USC's Keck School of Medicine. It also was when two high-level editors then at The Times were accused of trying to stop the paper's own reporting team from covering the USC scandal.

The Times eventually published a lengthy piece on USC's major ethical lapses. But to do so, a clandestine team of reporters had to hide their early efforts to cover the university from the paper's top management, according to "Bad City: Peril and Power in the City of Angels," out this month.

"A Times Investigation: The Secret Life of a USC Dean" did not run in the paper until more than a year after Sarah Warren survived that overdose. The piece kicked off a series of hard-hitting stories on Puliafito and led to a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation into Dr. George Tyndall, the USC gynecologist accused of sexually abusing hundreds of students.

Although USC's flaws have been exposed, The Times' largely have not. Until now. In "Bad City," Times investigative reporter Paul Pringle — who led the paper's efforts to scrutinize Puliafito and USC — dissects how the university and several of The Times' top editors, now no longer at the paper, allegedly fell from grace