Stop defending an irresponsible movie and start apologising

Benjamin Lee

The controversy swirling around an unverified claim of a journalist having sex with an FBI agent in Clint Eastwood’s new movie has led to a string of unconvincing justifications

Fri 13 Dec 2019 16.17 EST
Last modified on Fri 13 Dec 2019 17.28 EST

The ongoing furore over Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-hungry new drama Richard Jewell shows no signs of abating, partly because the contentious issue at its centre is so egregious and partly because no one involved with the film is willing to admit this.

The film purports to tell the “true” story of the heroic security guard who found the pipe bomb which killed one person and injured 111 others at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. He was heralded as a hero until he became the focus of the FBI investigation, a fact that was first made public in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution before getting picked up across the country. Jewell was ultimately cleared after a difficult 88 days of accusations and media focus.

Since its premiere last month, one particular scene has sparked controversy, an interaction alleging sex-for-tips between Kathy Scruggs, the AJC journalist who broke the story – and played in the film by Olivia Wilde as a vampish femme fatale – and an FBI agent, an amalgamation of characters played by Jon Hamm. It’s an unverified claim according to her colleagues, friends and family as well as Kent Alexander and Kevin Salwen, the authors of The Suspect, the book that served as a basis for the film and which involved over 180 interviews in research. In a firmly worded statement this week Alexander and Salwen stated that they found no evidence of sex-for-tips ever having taken place. Scruggs herself died in 2001.

Those who knew and worked with Scruggs have expressed their anger. The AJC has threatened legal action against Warner Bros, and female journalists have shared their frustration with both the sullying of a respected and hard-working professional and also the recycling of a tired stereotype of reporters sleeping with sources for intel. Warners and Eastwood stood their ground, turning the tables on the paper, blaming them again for reckless journalism but not explaining the origin of the scene itself. And at the Gotham Awards last week, Wilde claimed it was sexist for critics to call out the scene and was a misunderstanding of feminism.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/dec/13/richard-jewell-kathy-scruggs-olivia-wilde-irresponsible