How the Investigation Into Richard Jewell Unfolded

… Then Became a Suspect

Jewell’s life turned upside down after The Journal named him as the focus of the F.B.I.’s investigation. While the newspaper did not cite its sources for this information, Eastwood’s movie depicts a female reporter offering sex to an F.B.I. agent in exchange for it.

Government officials and news organizations descended on the apartment Jewell shared with his mother. Dozens of F.B.I. agents scoured the home and towed away Jewell’s truck. In an apartment complex overlooking his building, four stations — ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC — paid a tenant $1,000 a day to set up a command post in her unit.

Yet he was never charged. Inside, Jewell watched TV. He read. He played video games. He couldn’t go outside — not without setting off a high-speed car chase of government vehicles and media vans, anyway.

But beyond his walls, in the news, his case seemed to worsen. Details that appeared to support his guilt began to emerge: The Journal article quoted acquaintances of Jewell’s, who recalled him owning a backpack similar to the one that held the bomb. Officials at Piedmont College, a small Georgia school where Jewell had been a security guard, had called the F.B.I. the day of the explosion with concerns that Jewell was “overly zealous.”

If The Times’s reporting showed restraint, focusing more on the local frenzy than the man himself, it was thanks to hard-won lessons in sourcing, Max Frankel wrote in the paper’s magazine. “The Times had learned from its own sad transgressions over the years that whispered accusations against named individuals must not be trusted.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/movies/richard-jewell-bombing-atlanta.html?emc=rss&partner=rss