Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who was first lionized, then vilified by her own newspaper for her role in the CIA leak case, has retired from the New York Times, the paper announced on Thursday.

Miller, 57, joined the New York Times in 1977 and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for reporting on global terrorism. She said in a letter to readers that she left because she had "become the news." She had been negotiating a severance deal with the paper for several weeks.

Miller spent 85 days in jail over the summer for refusing to testify about her conversations with a confidential source. But after her release, she was criticized harshly and publicly by the New York Times for her actions in the CIA leak case and for her reporting during the run-up to the Iraq War, later discredited, indicating that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

"We are grateful to Judy for her significant personal sacrifice to defend an important journalistic principle," the New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said in a statement. "I respect her decision to retire from the (New York) Times and wish her well."

The New York Times declined to disclose details of the severance package, but said the paper had agreed to print a letter from Miller in which she defended herself and explained her reasons for leaving.

She said she could no longer function as a reporter at the paper, given her unwanted status as a news figure.

"I have chosen to resign because over the last few months, I have become the news, something a New York Times reporter never wants to be," Miller wrote, according to excerpts from her letter published on Thursday evening on the newspaper's website.

Even before her involvement in the CIA case, she added, she had "become a lightning rod for public fury over the intelligence failures that helped lead our country to war."

The full text of the letter was available on Miller's website.

One of Miller's attorneys, Matthew J. Mallow, said on Thursday that she did not plan to take any other jobs until at least January, but hoped to continue to lobby for passage of a federal shield law that would protect journalists from having to reveal their sources.

"She and we are pleased that the terms of her departure from the New York Times were on a very amicable basis," Mallow said.

Source: China Daily