Photo: Claire Folger/Warner Bros
Richard Jewellis facing backlash for allegedly including a slanderous factual inaccuracy in its telling of a real-life story.
PEOPLE is out to the film’s studio Warner Bros. for comment.
Kevin Riley, editor at theAtlanta Journal-Constitutiontells PEOPLE there’s “no evidence” to support the implication.
“I didn’t know Kathy, but people who knew her talked about her as a really great reporter who was just tireless in terms of developing her sources and was really one of the newsroom’s big personalities,” Riley says.
“To persist in this idea that a female journalist only gets a big story this way is not only obviously completely untrue and insulting to all the women, frankly everybody in this profession but especially women, it’s just concerning” he adds. “I have trouble imagining why that storyline would need to be invented in order to get the powerful messages of what happened in this situation across.”
Scruggs broke the initial story that Jewell — a security guard at Centennial Olympic Park, heralded as a hero for discovering the explosive and alerting police before it detonated — was a suspect in the attack, which killed one and injured over a hundred people.
By October 1996, after a months-long investigation, the Justice Department cleared Jewell’s name, according toThe New York Times. He died in 2007.
Although Riley recognizes thatRichard Jewellis not a documentary, he questions the reasons behind Scruggs’ portayal in the movie.
“I don’t work in Hollywood, we cover the film industry here, and I know it’s a complicated, challenging, demanding industry to cover and there’s always a million things going on. But if you look at the #MeToo stuff and everything that’s going on, you’d have to hope that things at least with the stories wouldgo in a different direction,” Riley tells PEOPLE, noting that Scruggs, who died in 2001 at 42 years of age, “has no way to defend herself.”
Richard Jewellwill be released in theaters on Dec. 13.
source: people.com
