The most electric character in Clint Eastwood’s new film, [Richard Jewell] (https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/12/richard-jewell-warner-bros-legal-letter)—and now the most controversial—is Kathy Scruggs, the hard-charging, real-life Atlanta Journal-Constitution journalist played by Olivia Wilde. In 1996, after security guard Richard Jewell discovered a bomb at Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park, helped clear the crowd and saved hundreds of lives, Jewell was declared a hero by the press. Days later, Scruggs was told by a trusted law-enforcement source that Jewell was also the FBI’s foremost suspect. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s decision to publish the story—immediately recasting Jewell as a villain in the minds of millions—was so journalistically problematic and personally devastating to Jewell (and his mother, Bobi) that the case continues to be taught as a cautionary tale in journalism schools.
Marie Brenner, who wrote the Vanity Fair feature on which the film is based, hopes that Richard Jewell might impact audiences the way the story affected her in 1996. “Reporting what happened to Richard Jewell and his mother profoundly changed me as a reporter and caused me to rethink many of the assumptions and quick judgments we can all unwittingly make under deadline pressure without attempting to find out a larger truth that lurks behind breaking news,” Brenner told Vanity Fair.
But ever since the film premiered at the AFI Fest in November, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s editor-in-chief, Kevin Riley, has insisted that the film—written by Oscar-winning screenwriter Billy Ray (Captain Phillips)—gets integral facts wrong. Specifically, Riley has pointed to a scene in Richard Jewell that implies Scruggs, who died in 2001, traded sex for stories—a scene that has incited an internet firestorm and prompted the AJC to demand a disclaimer on the movie. Rolling Stone’s film critic Peter Travers wrote in his review, “The attempt to slut-shame a reporter who’s not around to defend herself stands as a black mark in a film that otherwise hews close to the proven facts of the case." Nicholas Confessore of the New York Times wrote, “An accurate movie script about a female reporter would involve her being constantly propositioned or harassed by people she covers, while being invited to evening ‘meetings’ that somehow turn into involuntary dates with sources, and bombarded with rape threats on Twitter.” Added Melissa Gomez of the Los Angeles Times, “Hollywood has, for a long time, portrayed female journalists as sleeping with sources to do their job. It's so deeply wrong, yet they continue to do it. Disappointing that they would apply this tired and sexist trope about Kathy Scruggs, a real reporter.”
On Thursday, Ray defended the film—explaining that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution seems to be pulling focus to “one single minute in a movie that’s 129 minutes long.” Wilde also tweeted to respond to the controversy, saying,“I do not believe Kathy traded sex for tips” and “it was never my intention to suggest she had.” Ray and Brenner, among others, claim that the outsize focus on the Scruggs scene is a deliberate effort to deflect from the real story: the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s flawed, and destructive, reporting on Jewell.
The implication about Scruggs in Richard Jewell is seemingly rooted in the film’s extra source material, the book by Georgia U.S. Attorney Kent Alexander and Wall Street Journal reporter Kevin Salwen—The Suspect: An Olympic Bombing, the FBI, the Media, and Richard Jewell, the Man Caught in the Middle. The book describes Scruggs as the kind of woman who packed perfume and a pistol in her purse, wore leather miniskirts and fishnet tights to the office, and kept her blouse unbuttoned beyond what some might feel was workplace-appropriate. The reporter’s attire, according to Alexander and Salwen, “did little to dispel a growing ‘sleeps with her sources’ reputation.” But in a statement to Vanity Fair’s Joe Pompeo this week, the authors clarified that their five years of research—which encompassed “dozens of interviews about Scruggs and an examination of thousands of pages of her deposition testimony and news articles”—never turned up evidence that Scruggs ever traded sex for a story.
Mike King, a former Atlanta Journal-Constitution editor who worked with Scruggs for about eight years, said that, save for that glaring implication, Richard Jewell largely seems to get Scruggs right.
“If you wanted to draw a Hollywood stereotype of a hard-charging female cops reporter, Kathy would fit that bill pretty well,” King said during a phone call with Vanity Fair on Wednesday. “She was a great reporter who used her strength of personality and her looks to work sources.... When you’re a cop reporter, you have to be able to throw it and show it—get in there with them and not take any shit off them. She was great at that, and I think that’s one of the reasons why she was so successful working with cop sources—whether it was beat cops or detectives in the homicide squad. She was pretty fearless.... But it’s just jumping over that last wall to make it look like she traded sexual favors for information. That’s just bullshit.”
Author Robert Coram had a front-row seat to Scruggs’s dealings with law enforcement in the mid '90s. While researching his first novel, Atlanta Heat, Coram spent several days a week for a few years at Manuel’s Tavern—the homicide cop hangout where Scruggs would sidle up to cops over liquid lunches and happy hours in hopes of coaxing out new information.
“All the cops knew her and respected her and kidded her a lot,” said Coram, who based a character in Atlanta Heat on Scruggs. “I never heard any of them, even when they were drinking, say anything negative about her personally or professionally. The only thing that came close to it was one of them told me one day, ‘You can tell how badly Kathy needs a story by how short her skirt is that day.’”
To Brenner, though, “The Kathy Scruggs situation is much more layered and complicated.” Scruggs’s own brother Lewis has publicly remarked on his sister’s wild streak, telling the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “She was a little bit rebellious.... Her choice of boyfriends was not great.” While King was clear that Scruggs had never slept with sources, he told Vanity Fair that the reporter had “in-house romances [at the paper] that caused us to have to say, ‘You stay over here, you stay over there. Y'all stay away from each other, if at all possible.’ Ya know?”
Brenner never reported on rumors about Scruggs’s romantic life. “Why is that anyone’s business?” Brenner told Vanity Fair. “How this story and source was gotten was never my interest.”
When Brenner read the rumor about Scruggs trading sex for stories in Alexander and Salwen’s book, she felt it was deeply problematic: “Inevitably men get it wrong when they try to write about a woman’s sexuality.”
Both Brenner and Billy Ray, though, say the focus on Scruggs is a diversionary tactic. “This movie is about a hero whose life was completely destroyed by myths created by the FBI and the media, specifically the AJC,” Ray told Deadline. “The AJC hung Richard Jewell, in public.... They editorialized wildly and printed assumptions as facts. They compared him to noted mass murderer Wayne Williams. And this was after he had saved hundreds of lives. Now a movie comes along 23 years later, a perfect chance for the AJC to atone for what they did to Richard and to admit to their misdeeds. And what do they decide to do? They launch a distraction campaign. They deflect and distort...opting to challenge one assertion in the movie rather than accepting their own role in destroying the life of a good man. The movie isn’t about Kathy Scruggs; it’s about the heroism and hounding of Richard Jewell, and what rushed reporting can do to an innocent man. And by the way, I will stand by every word and assertion in the script.”
Said Brenner, “I was appalled by the reflexive snobberies and obliviousness of consequences that the AJC never addressed. The most important rule of reporting is never to reveal a suspect’s name without corroborating evidence. They had none—and neither did the FBI. I am sorry, but it is not enough to say, “law enforcement thinks.” And they didn’t even say that.” Citing the paper that reported there was no evidence against Jewell, Brenner said, “The New York Timesand its editor Joe Lelyveld knew better.”
King acknowledged that the Richard Jewell case “was a turning point in a lot of newspaper discussions about where to draw the line when on identifying suspects.... And I think those are good lessons to share with a movie-going audience, that there are people who are the subject of newspaper stories and of government investigations who look as guilty as Richard appeared to look in those initial stories but who ultimately are totally innocent and whose reputations are dragged through the mud for all the wrong reasons.”
Scruggs died in 2001 from a prescription drug overdose, due, in part, to a chronic back problem, still troubled by the repercussions of her Jewell reporting. In a feature last month, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported that Scruggs was disturbed by a lawsuit naming the AJC. The suit was dismissed in 2011 when the Georgia Court of Appeals concluded “the articles in their entirety were substantially true at the time they were published.” But Scruggs was not alive to see her name cleared, and friends told the AJC that stress related to the case exacerbated her failing health. “She was never at peace or at rest with this story,” said Scruggs’s former co-worker Tony Kiss. “It crushed her like a june bug on the sidewalk.”
A few days before Richard Jewell’s release, King was unsure whether he would see the film.
“I have mixed feelings about it. I keep thinking, ‘I’m not going to go watch it,’ but then the cast is so damn good and this story is a good story,” said King. “I probably will wind up watching it. I just wish they hadn’t smeared Kathy as part of the Hollywood telling of it.”
And even though the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is engaged in a full-blown battle with Warner Bros., King said that a group of his colleagues from the newspaper have plans to see the movie, covertly, on Saturday: “They don't want to give Clint the benefit of movie ticket sales, so they’ve cut a deal with movie theaters to buy tickets for another movie.”
