Watson Bryant, left, poses with Hollywood mogul Clint Eastwood and Bobi Jewell, mother of Richard Jewell, who was falsely accused of setting off a bomb in Centennial Park during the 1996 Olympics.Dec 1, 2020
$500,000In December 1996, NBC negotiated a settlement with Jewell for a reported $500,000. CNN and ABC settled, too, as did Piedmont College, which Jewell had sued for allegedly supplying false information.
AJC ace Kathy Scruggs broke the story that made Richard Jewell a household name. It also started her downward spiral. A crowd gathers on July 30, 1996, in Centennial Olympic Park during a memorial service for the victims of the bomb explosion.
At the time, Nancy Grace, the well-known legal commentator, was a 36-year-old assistant district attorney in Atlanta. She appeared on Good Morning America to give her two cents on the case. Blunt and accusatory, Grace speculated that Jewell's arrest was imminent.Feb 13, 2020
He sued the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the paper that first named him as a possible suspect and compared him to Wayne Williams, a killer believed to be responsible for the Atlanta Child Murders, the New York Times reported. Jewell also sued CNN and NBC and received unspecified settlements from both, CNN reported.Dec 22, 2020
Wood and Bryant, who still runs a law firm with Nadya, are all still based in Atlanta. Jewell was formally exonerated in 2005, two years before his death, when the real bomber Eric Rudolph was convicted.Dec 26, 2019
After his ordeal, Jewell sued or threatened to sue ABC, CNN, NBC, the New York Post and the AJC/Cox for defamation, as well as his former employer, Piedmont College, which he said gave false information about him to newspapers and the FBI. Everyone settled except for the AJC, which held its ground.Dec 10, 2019
August 29, 2007Richard Jewell / Date of death
Kathy Scruggs' death was caused by acute morphine toxicity. Kiss also stated that he believed that the stress of the Jewell story and the related litigation had contributed majorly to her death.Dec 16, 2020
Well, what differs from reality is the movieâs portrayal of Bryant as Jewellâs one and only lawyer. Jewell actually had several lawyers. In fact, he had an entire team. In addition to Bryant, he had a legal team including Lin Wood, Wayne Grant, Jack Martin, Richard Rackleff, and Watson's brother Bruce, according to Slate.
Jewell was formally exonerated in 2005, two years before his death, when the real bomber Eric Rudolph was convicted. Editor's note: This story has been modified to reflect that Wood and Grant joined Jewell's legal team the day before a press conference was held to announce that Jewell passed a polygraph test.
As the FBI pegs him as a possible lone bomber, Jewell reaches out to his previous employer Watson Bryant (played by Sam Rockwell), who by this point is only working as a real estate lawyer. Heâd never represented an alleged murderer, let alone someone accused of a domestic terror attack that killed two people and injured another 111.
James Rawls, an Atlanta-based lawyer who helped Mr. Wood with some of the Ramsey family matters, said working with him was easy âwhen we were all on the same team.â.
Doug Collier/Agence France-Presse â Getty Images. Mr. Woodâs biggest break came in 1996 when he represented Mr. Jewell, a security guard wrongly suspected of planting a pipe bomb in Atlanta during the Summer Olympics that killed one person and injured more than 100 others.
Ralph Reed, the chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition and a veteran of Georgia politics , said that control of the Senate was too important to squander. âI like Lin.
The defamation lawyer L. Lin Wood has transformed into a fierce advocate for President Trump whose error-riddled lawsuits have promoted falsehoods about election fraud. Lin Wood, a lawyer who gained prominence through high-profile defamation cases, is now best known for amplifying the presidentâs false claims about the election.
For the architect, see Richard Roach Jewell. Richard Allensworth Jewell (born Richard White; December 17, 1962 â August 29, 2007) was an American security guard and law enforcement officer who alerted police during the Centennial Olympic Park bombing at the 1996 Summer Olympics in ...
Jewell was born Richard White in Danville, Virginia, the son of Bobi, an insurance claims coordinator, and Robert Earl White, who worked for Chevrolet. Richard's birth-parents divorced when he was four. When his mother later married John Jewell, an insurance executive, his stepfather adopted him.
Richard Allensworth Jewell (born Richard White; December 17, 1962 â August 29, 2007) was an American security guard and law enforcement officer who alerted police during the Centennial Olympic Park bombing at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia. For months afterwards he was suspected of planting the bomb, ...
Sometime after midnight, July 27, 1996, Eric Robert Rudolph, a terrorist who would later bomb a lesbian nightclub and two abortion clinics, planted a green backpack containing a fragmentation-laden pipe bomb under a bench. Jewell was working as a security guard for the event.
On October 26, 1996, the US Attorney in Atlanta, Kent Alexander, sent Jewell a letter saying "based on the evidence developed to date ... Richard Jewell is not considered a target of the federal criminal investigation into the bombing on July 27, 1996, at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta". The letter did not include an apology, but in a separate statement issued by Alexander, the U.S. Justice Department regretted the leaking of the investigation.
Richard Jewell is portrayed by Cameron Britton.
It was written by Billy Ray, based on the 1997 article "American Nightmare: The Ballad of Richard Jewell," by Marie Brenner, and the book The Suspect: An Olympic Bombing, the FBI, the Media, and Richard Jewell, the Man Caught in the Middle (2019) by Kent Alexander and Kevin Salwen.
Lin Wood, a defamation lawyer who represented Jewell in lawsuits filed against The Journal-Constitution and other media outlets for defamation, spoke out against the movieâs portrayal of Scruggs. "I handled Richard Jewell's case against AJC for 16 years,â he tweeted.
Olive Wilde as Kathy Scruggs Photo: Warner Bros. One of the lawyers who represented the man at the center of Clint Eastwoodâs new movie âRichard Jewellâ has blasted the filmâs depiction of a female journalist. Before the filmâs Friday debut, it had already been criticized for its vampy portrayal of Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Kathy ...
Paul Walter Hauser attends the âRichard Jewellâ screening at Rialto Center of the Arts on December 10, 2019 in Atlanta, Georgia. The Vanity Fair article describes how FBI agents Don Johnson and Diader Rosario knocked on Jewellâs motherâs apartment door and told him, âWe need your help making a training film.â.
The movie makes journalist Kathy Scruggs into a pretty one-note villain. In real life, she was a lot more complex than that. Itâs true that she was a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper when the bombing occurred, and itâs true she broke the story that the FBI was looking at Jewell.
According to an Associated Press story from July 29, 1996, the bomb killed a woman and injured more than 100 people. She was Alice Hawthorne, 44, of Albany, Georgia. Her daughter was also injured. A Turkish cameraman also died from a heart attack while rushing to the scene.
Clint Eastwoodâs biographical drama Richard Jewell is based on the real-life story of the security guard (played by Paul Walter Hauser) who was wrongly investigated by the FBI as a suspect in the bombing at the 1996 Summer Olympics. The movie was adapted from a lengthy 1997 Vanity Fair article by Marie Brenner and The Suspect, ...
As in the movie, Richard Jewell really did help discover the pipe bomb by virtue of his famously thorough adherence to protocol. He saw a backpack under a bench by his station and insisted that it be treated as a potential threat. While both Jewell and the Georgia Bureau of Investigationâs Tom Davis initially suspected little of the package, The Suspect suggests Jewell really did treat it somewhat more seriously than Davis did. Then, as Jewell put it to Vanity Fair, âWhen Davis came back and said, âNobody said it was theirs,â that is when the little hairs on the back of my head began to stand up.â Jewell continued to do his part when the bomb was identified, clearing a 25-foot perimeter around the backpack and heading twice into the sound and light tower to warn the people inside to evacuate. Ultimately, the explosion directly killed one woman and injured more than 100 others. A cameraman from a Turkish television network also died of a heart attack he had while running to the site of the bombing.
Unlike Tom Shaw, Kathy Scruggs, who died in 2001, was a real reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution who really did break the news that Jewell was the focus of the FBI investigation. Wildeâs Scruggs is cartoonishly vampy in a way that seems unfair to Scruggsâ memory, but the most damaging aspect of the movieâs depiction is the suggestion that she offered to sleep with a source for a scoop, an insinuation that recently provoked the AJC into threatening a defamation lawsuit against Eastwood and the filmmakers. (In movies, female reporters sleeping with sources is an old sexist trope . In real life, itâs an egregious violation of journalistic ethics.)
Richard Jewell died in 2007 at age 44 from heart failure. Fox Nation's "Hero for a Moment " also detailed how the FBI settled on Jewell as their primary suspect and what happened when an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter broke the story.
Richard Jewell's mother Bobi and his attorney Watson Bryant react to the true story of the 1996 Olympic bombing being told on the big screen. Nearly 25 years after she lived through "88 days of hell," Bobi Jewell's emotions seem just as raw as they were when her son, Richard Jewell, was first identified as the main suspect behind ...
Centennial Olympic Park was designed as the "town square" of the Olympics, and thousands of spectators had gathered for a late concert and merrymaking. Sometime after midnight, July 27, 1996, Eric Robert Rudolph, a terrorist who would later bomb a lesbian nightclub and two abortion clinics, planted a green backpack containing a fragmentation-laden pipe bomb under a bench. Jewell was working as a security guard for the event. He discovered the bag and alerted Georgia âŚ
Jewell was born Richard White in Danville, Virginia, the son of Bobi, an insurance claims coordinator, and Robert Earl White, who worked for Chevrolet. Richard's birth parents divorced when he was four. When his mother later married John Jewell, an insurance executive, his stepfather adopted him.
Jewell worked in various law enforcement jobs, including as a police officer in Pendergrass, Georgia. He worked as a deputy sheriff in Meriwether County, Georgia, until his death. He also gave speeches at colleges. On July 30, 1997, Jewell testified before a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives in which he called for an independent investigation into methods used by FBI agents during their investigation of him. He appeared in Michael Moore's 1997 film The Big One. âŚ
After he was dropped as a suspect, Jewell filed libel suits against the FBI, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, CNN, the New York Post, and Piedmont College.
Jewell sued the Atlanta Journal-Constitution because, according to Jewell, the paper's headline ("FBI suspects 'hero' guard may have planted bomb") "pretty much started the whirlwind". In one article, the Journal-Constitution compared Jewell's case to that of serial killer Wayne Williams.
Jewell had been diagnosed with diabetes in February 2007 and suffered kidney failure and other medical problems related to his diagnosis in the following months. His wife, Dana, found him dead on the floor of their bedroom when she came home from work on August 29, 2007; he was 44. An autopsy found the cause of death to be severe heart disease with diabetes and related complications as a contributing factor.
⢠Centennial Olympic Park bombing