Presumed Guilty
“Some journalists were too quick to embrace stereotypes and a narrative in their search to find someone who could be culpable of this,” Clay Calvert, professor of law and Brechner Eminent Scholar Emeritus at University of Florida, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “So they embraced the narrative of a wannabe hero, a man who lived with his mom at home, kind of a country bumpkin stereotype. He fit this preconceived narrative of somebody who would engage in this. They derided him as the Unabubba, like the Unabomber.”
Calvert notes that some journalists were quick to twist those stereotypes into a compelling narrative, when the reality was that Jewell took his job very seriously and respected law enforcement. He simply proved to be an easy target.
Jewell was hounded by the media every time he left his apartment. He wasn’t media trained, so he told reporters what he witnessed. “He might say, ‘I saw the knapsack. I went over, I cleared people out, told them to get away.’ It was doing interviews with the media that transformed him into a public figure,” Calvert, co-author of the law journal article Journalism, Libel Law and a Reputation Tarnished: A Dialogue with Richard Jewell and His Attorney L. Lin Wood, says. “He went from hero to villain in many people's minds, when in fact he was the hero. He spotted the knapsack and he saved lives in doing that.”
While the internet was still in its infancy in 1996, live broadcasts and mass media circulated the Olympic bombing story and information on the prime suspect almost instantly.
“It really was a viral moment before the internet, because in a way, he was doxed,” says Alexander, the former Federal prosecutor who wrote the October 26, 1996, official clearance letter for Jewell. “You had literally 100-plus media folks outside his apartment. His address was out there, his identity, his mother's identity, and they couldn't move. [Today] people get doxed before there's even a charge filed or an arrest warrant issue. And in Richard Jewell's case, there was never an arrest warrant. He was never placed under arrest, yet the vast majority of people assumed he was guilty.”
The letter announced that, after 88 days, Jewell was no longer a suspect in the bombing. In February 1998, Eric Robert Rudolph was named as a suspect in the case. He was indicted in late 2000 and eventually taken into custody on May 31, 2003.
The Fallout
“When he sued for defamation, the fact that he had volunteered to speak to the media transformed him into a public figure in the court's mind, which makes it harder to win a defamation lawsuit,” Calvert says. “If he'd have been a private figure, if he'd never come forward and spoken, he would have had a much easier time, because private figures typically only have to prove negligence to win a lawsuit for defamation. But public figures have to prove actual malice that the defendant—the media, in this case—knew the statements were false or acted with reckless disregard for whether they were true or false. And actual malice is a much harder standard to prove.”
Following his exoneration, Jewell continued working in law enforcement, married and tried to live a quiet life. In 2006, when Calvert was a professor at Penn State, he invited Jewell to speak on to topic of media ethics and reputational harm, and Jewell accepted.
“He was just a nice, humble man who never sought out fame and whose life was turned upside down by the news media, all because he understood something was very dangerous and cleared people out,” Calvert says. “It’s a very sad irony that he was basically punished for saving lives. It’s so tragic that someone doing something good, saving people, gets dragged like that through the media.”
Fewer than 90 days of media scrutiny forever changed Jewell’s life. Today, more people associate Jewell’s name with the Olympic Park bombing than that of the actual bomber, Rudolph.
In 2005, Rudolph pled guilty to four bombings—three in Atlanta and one in Birmingham, Ala.—and received four life sentences with no chance of parole.
Jewell died of heart disease in 2007 at age 44. His Olympics experience inspired the 2019 film Richard Jewell directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Paul Walter Hauser as Jewell.
To journalists eager to scoop their competition, Calvert advises taking time to get the facts right: “Nobody remembers ultimately who got it first, but they'll remember who got it wrong.”
