 On June 15, 2018, the "Globe" announced that Cullen would be suspended without pay for three months, with the newspaper's editor and publisher claiming that “our review leads us to a conclusion that Mr. Cullen damaged his credibility.”

Among the reported instances of wrongdoing, in a radio interview with the BBC after the bombing, Mr. Cullen fabricated a story in which he claimed that he had spoken to a firefighter who had rescued a 7-year-old girl hurt in the bombing and carried her to an ambulance before noticing that the girl's lower leg had been severed by the bomb, at which point, according to Cullen, the firefighter "went back to the scene and he told me he crawled on his legs and his hand and his knees trying to find her leg and he couldn’t find it.