It’s been a hell of a week for reporter Chuck Philips and the LA Times.

First the LA Times published his story linking Diddy to Tupac’s 1994 shooting.

Then Sean “Diddy” Combs said the story is a lie, lashing out against the paper for running it.

Next the Smoking Gun discovered that the FBI reports that reporter Philips cited throughout the story were possibly fake.

After that, the LA Times claimed they would launch their own investigation.

And now… the LA Times has apologized and Chuck Philips says he now believes those documents are indeed fake.

Reporter Chuck Philips and his supervisor, Deputy Managing Editor Marc Duvoisin, issued statements of apology Wednesday afternoon. The statements came after The Times took withering criticism for the Shakur article, which appeared on latimes.com last week and two days later in the paper’s Calendar section.

The criticism came first from The Smoking Gun website, which said the newspaper had been the victim of a hoax, and then from subjects of the story, who said they had been defamed.

“In relying on documents that I now believe were fake, I failed to do my job,” Philips said in a statement Wednesday. “I’m sorry.”

In his statement, Duvoisin added: “We should not have let ourselves be fooled. That we were is as much my fault as Chuck’s. I deeply regret that we let our readers down.”

That’s a big whoops.