An Australian journalist has been forced to backtrack on a column he wrote earlier this week about a Sydney woman who claimed to have been brutally beaten and gang raped by six Arabic men.

Today, Paul Sheehan penned an apology and correction in The Sydney Morning Herald, where he admitted alarming details given to him by a NSW nurse called Louise had been "carefully constructed on a foundation of embellishments, false memories and fabrications".

Sheehan apologised to NSW police, saying his offending column, published on Monday, had "created the clear impression of police indifference towards this alleged crime". The correction also acknowledged the Fairfax journalist has cast untested aspersions against an ethnic group.

His original column claimed Louise had been sleeping in her parked car by St Mary's cathedral in 2002, before being dragged from the vehicle by six men of Middle Eastern descent.

"I was pulled out of the car and thrown to the ground. There were six of them and they all started kicking me," Louise told Sheehan, who wrote her account up as fact.

"A couple of homeless guys found me ... At the hospital they were asking my name and I couldn't speak. They called me Jane Doe.

"I couldn't speak for two months. My jaw was broken. My top lip was torn. I had 79 fractures all up. A broken ankle, a broken T10 [back vertebrae], broken face, nose, eye orbit, mandible, hands, both knees fractured. That was the end of my nursing career."

The Sydney Morning Herald column that ended with Paul Sheehan making a substantial correction and apology.

Sheehan today admitted he had failed to test her claims adequately.

"Prior to writing the column I had Googled her name, and checked our files, and found no red flags," wrote Sheehan.

"During four hours of interviews conducted over four conversations, when I pressed her about why there was no complaint in the system, an obvious red flag, she had claimed she had gone to report the crime six months after the alleged event, but been told by a police officer that she had waited too long, had no evidence and there was no credible claim to make."

Sheehan admitted after the column had been published that he discovered a woman had made very similar claims of rape to Louise's story during two Reclaim Australia rallies.