Atlanta newspaper threatens Clint Eastwood and Warner Bros. with defamation suit over Richard Jewell
Aux Features Film
Last week, we reported that Olivia Wilde had responded to some of the critics of Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jewell by saying that a lot of the backlash against her character was based around a sexist refusal to accept female characters who aren’t necessarily meant to be likable. The movie is about the real-life story of the eponymous Jewell, a security guard who helped save people from a bomb at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics but was later vilified by the media when it came out that the FBI was considering him as the lead suspect in the bombing. Wilde plays real-life journalist Kathy Scruggs, who has since died, with the movie inserting a—reportedly wholly manufactured—sequence where its inferred that she slept with a source in order to get a tip about the FBI’s investigation into Jewell.
Wilde’s take was that it’s unfair for a female character to be singled out for doing a morally questionable thing when male characters in the same movie aren’t given the same scrutiny, but the Atlanta-Journal Constitution (where the real-life Scruggs was employed) had objections that went beyond how audiences feel about the character. Last week, editor-in-chief Kevin Riley released a statement saying that the movie’s implication about Scruggs was an “offensive and troubling” accusation with “no evidence that [it] ever happened” in real life, and now the paper is threatening Eastwood and Warner Bros. with defamation lawsuit. According to Deadline, it has accused the filmmaker and the studio of being on a “path to severely tarnish the reputation of AJC.”
The letter that AJC sent to Eastwood and Warner Bros. (via hotshot Hollywood attorney Marty Singer) says that it is “the height of irony” that a movie about the media “engaging in constitutional malice” to defame an innocent man is also (allegedly) “engaging in constitutional malice” in what it is implicitly accusing AJC and Scruggs of doing. It also demands that the studio release a public statement admitting that some aspects of film “were imagined for dramatic purposes” as well as add a “prominent disclaimer to the film to that effect.” It doesn’t sound like Eastwood or Warner Bros. have responded at all.
96 Comments
Ironic it’s a news organization filing a defamation suit in relation to a movie about Richard Jewell.Edit: Oh, I should read the article to find the same observation.
I think the result of Olivia de Havilland’s lawsuit is that now you can put lies in your movie for ‘dramatic effect’ and the people you’re effectually slandering can’t do a damn thing about it.
Olivia de Havilland > Olivia Wilde
Olivia de Havilland > everyone (except, possibly, Joan Fontaine)
That goes without saying!
They hardly slandered her. Perhaps she never said the exact line, but the sentiment was there.
The slander is the implication that she slept with a source for information, which is incidentally a claim that female reporters have long been subjected to. Nor did they need that particular but of fiction to make her an interesting character , she had a drinking problem among other things.
I was referring to de Havilland and Feud. There was no slander in Feud.
The AJC refused to settle when Jewell sued and a court eventually ruled in their favor, and a judge found that they had accurately reported that the FBI was investigating him. No irony there. They were accurate then, and they’re asking Eastwood to be accurate now.
Ironic it’s a movie explicitly dedicated to clearing a dead person’s name that is slandering a dead person’s name.
*nods*
It’s not dedicated to clearing anyone’s name; it’s dedicated to making the FBI look evil and amateurish and the AJC (and others) as purveyors of “fake news”. This has almost nothing to do with Jewell’s reputation, and everything to do with swaying public opinion against FBI and journalism in general. This, my children, is called propaganda.
It absolutely is, but the tagline of the film is literally “The world will know his name. And the truth.”
If I were the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, I would want to draw as little attention to these events as possible. “Sure! We were the first to publish a story that resulted in an innocent man being smeared, but we didn’t do it that way!”I mean, you can argue about whether or not it was responsible to report that Jewell was officially a suspect in the eyes of the FBI, but there is no way to do that and also wash your hands of the shit storm that occurred afterwards. This is the risk of desperately wanting to get the scoop.
Being an imperfect actor doesn’t mean you can’t call attention to shitty things done to you.
The AJC won in court. They were accurate. They’re not responsible for what other media does.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=18195453683118649812
So that makes lying about a reporter using sex to get a scoop okay. Interesting take.
What is funnier a movie who message is about the damages of being reckless when talking about other people inventing a character to accuse a now dead person of a serious ethical lapse without any evidence – or – The paper whose reporting seriously damage some guys life complaining that Hollywood recap is getting the details wrong? I don’t have a ton of sympathy for either. What amazing to me is how the FBI bungling has disappear from this conversation. At least Atlanta Journal-Constitution the story was at least true. The FBI was investigating Richard Jewell as the guy. They were wrong, but AJC article does not say he did it, only that he is being investigated. And I don’t blame them for investigating him. Sure that could be due diligence, maybe there was a enough smoke there, but the leak was the real problem. But keep your trap shut until you are ready to arrest. It is not dissimilar for how Comey got himself in trouble with Clinton investigation. When you are investigating something you are going to look at a bunch of avenue that turn out to be dead ends. Sometime you will investigate something just to eliminate it a possibility. But that does mean you have to go ahead telling everyone each little idea that pop into your head.
The FBI is clearly in the wrong, and clearly the most wrong party for leaking it in the first place. But there is plenty of blame to go around.
I’ve found the reactions on this story so far to be pretty fascinating as an illustration of the difference between the context of living through something versus learning about it from history.Sorry to mention this on a day when you felt even creakier following the Ghostbusters grandkid movie, but for olds like ourselves what’s different is that we actually remember bits and pieces of the actual events, ranging from the bombing itself to the media coverage to the late night jokes to the eventual exoneration. The sheer intensity of the shitstorm here is genuinely difficult to explain to those younger, especially in an age where it’s now par for the course that someone will instantly be tarred, feathered, and pitchforked on social media until the mob gets bored and moves on to the next target.OJ Simpson in 1993 may have been the first 24/7 target of the news cycle, and Monica Lewinsky got equivalent treatment a couple years later, but Jewell was the first who really did absolutely nothing to warrant having his life ruined by both the government and the media – with neither of the two executioners ever accepting any responsibility for their actions save for what Jewell was able to get out of litigation. The disgust plenty of us felt afterwards wasn’t particularly skewed by political party, something that I’ve seen surprise many younger folks. I’m not thrilled with the choice of using a tired stereotype, but at the same time, there were some genuinely scumbag moves taken by the media during all this. There were probably better ways to show a reporter not giving a damn about ethics or the effect their work might have on someone, but I’d guess understanding that context means that what Eastwood is doing here makes it more acceptable to us than to those younger. They instead look at it through the prism of the Trump era media attacks and talking-to-an-empty-chair Clint, in which case their reaction to the AJC threatening litigation makes more sense.All that said, from a legal perspective he may very well have made a mistake not to create another composite character for the reporter as he did for the FBI agent, and it’s an extremely curious choice.
Exactly. People didn’t move on nearly as quickly. They didn’t get outraged about every little thing either. It was just a year after Oklahoma City and the Unabomber’s arrest. Americans were still coming to terms with the idea of domestic terrorism.
As my NATSEC feed points out from time to time, there’s a pretty good argument that Americans still haven’t come to terms with it.
When I’m asked if I’m a veteran, I always reply I was too busy fighting domestic terrorists, racists, and homophobes in the 90s to go to Kosovo.
FYI ya boy is at it again https://gizmodo.com/1840329789
Thanks. Reported.
I’m not prepared to exonerate Eastwood on the insinuation that the reporter sold her body for a scoop.
But you’re spot-on about the treatment of Jewell. I lived in Atlanta at the time and his face was on the news every night, plus late-night did everything but introduce the Dancing Jewells while mocking him mercilessly for his weight, wanna-be cop status, living with his mother, you name it. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be the guy, having just saved who knows how many lives and having yours ruined as thanks.
Oh, don’t get me wrong: I’m not exonerating Eastwood either.As I said, I’m not particularly comfortable with even the good faith interpretation, which is that sleeping with your source is his method of condensing just how many ethical shortcuts the media took or just outright ignored during that period. It just likely offends me a bit less than others given that understanding, even if it’s incredibly lazy and dumb filmmaking. (This contrasts with the bad faith version, which ranges anywhere from the AJC threat all the way to the general belief that he’s making a movie for the MSM-lies-and-is-evil crowd.) The really sad part is that if he’d done his job properly in skewering the media for what they actually did rather than making things up, this would have made for a far better film. As you point out, there was more than enough material for him to do so. Simply paying a few grad students at Annenberg or UCLA to sift through the plentiful archives and have that story arc of the movie focus on actual segments and quotes from the era would have been a powerful and effective way to make a point that would have been far more defensible: that the media had tremendous culpability for ruining Jewell’s life during all this, and promptly ran away from even self-reflection, let alone accepting any responsibility for it.For them to keep blaming all of his problems on the FBI as they have for the last 25 years – which even the AJC letter still does (“We were the ones who figured out the timeline didn’t work, we’re heroes!”) – is intolerable as well. The real shame is that given what Eastwood has done here, it’s now almost impossible that there will be a movie funded in the next generation or two that properly captures the horrific but fascinating story of what actually happened. Much like I felt towards Emmerich when I walked out of Midway last month with him having blown the last chance in my lifetime of a decent film on a vastly important bit of history, the similar loss of that opportunity here is why I’m really disappointed with Eastwood.
Well, worth noting that of all the media outlets Jewell sued in connection with this, the AJC was the only one to fight the case on the merits, and the only one that won. The ultimate question is, was the (accurate) fact that Jewell was being considered as a primary suspect newsworthy? It almost certainly was, right? I mean, before it was revealed he was a suspect, he has gained some notoriety as a guy responsible for saving lives. And if you consider it newsworthy to report that he was a suspect (and, again, that reporting was 100% accurate), it actually matters quite a bit whether AJC engaged in the shitstorm that followed. From what I can tell, the subsequent smearing of Jewell was mostly done by other news outlets, not AJC, and so it actually does make sense that they are pushing back here, especially in light of the fact that the movie implies that one of their reporters traded sex for a scoop.
We can agree or disagree on the scope the papers reporting played in Jewels death but making it seem that a female reporter slept her way to the story is across the line. Especially, when we k ow the true story is likely some FBI agent leaked the name.
”I mean, before it was revealed he was a suspect, he has gained some notoriety as a guy responsible for saving lives.”Why would anyone gain notoriety for being responsible for saving lives? If anything he’d gain fame and attention, not notoriety. You make it sound like he was famous for doing something bad.
Well here’s the thing, they’re the only defendants that didn’t settle with Jewell in the flurry of lawsuits he tossed out after he was fully cleared. There’s information about it and its impact on case law on the Jewell Wikipedia page.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jewell
You can be legally right (or at least not legally culpable) and still have done something not very good.I just think that if you light the match, you get some blame for the fire. Maybe everybody wanted s’mores, maybe somebody else would have lit the match if you hadn’t, and maybe you ran to get the fire extinguisher right after, but when somebody says “who used a blow torch 30 years ago?” you shut up, you don’t start screaming “HOW DARE YOU, IT WAS JUST A MATCH!”
I feel like ultimately that if Eastwood wasn’t casting an absurd narrative on its deceased reporter, this whole thing might have been avoided. But he decided that’s how women get things in the world because reasons, so here we are.
I feel like the person or entity that publishes something that is true that blows up is less at fault than the person or entity that puts lies about a real person in a real situation in a movie that blows up. In other words, you tell the truth and it causes problems you aren’t as culpable as if you tell lies and it causes problems.
But isn’t desperately wanting and then reporting scoops the definition of news? Why isn’t this ire directed at the FBI, who were wrong, instead of the paper which reported a true story (the FBI identified him as a suspect)?
The AJC had the misfortune of being the major daily paper covering the story full-time. They might have gotten over their skis some, but its default role in the situation put it directly in the crosshairs when the Jewell angle collapsed.
Yeah, bullshit. The film defames a real person by presenting her as getting an FBI leak by fucking an FBI agent. Eastwood has always been a misogynistic douchebag but he generally saved that for his fictional women, not actual ones.
I don’t think you can really argue about whether or not it was responsible to report it. He was, in fact, a suspect (technically, a person of interest, which is what the AJC identified him as) in the crime, after people who’d known him at his previous job raised concerns that he had been erratic and attention-seeking. Within a day or so of the initial report, the fact that he was being investigated would be evident to the world, because the FBI spent the day searching his house, the kind of thing that people notice. So Scrugg’s big sin (the one that justifies this movie calling her out as a whore) was reporting he was being investigated 24 hours before everyone would’ve known anyway. Should the papers have also ignored law enforcement getting a warrant and publicly ransacking the guy’s house? Because that’s the only thing that would’ve truly spared Jewell’s reputation.Some people want to treat the Jewell case like it’s Absence of Malice, where the FBI falsely leaks that a guy is under investigation, stringing him along under public suspicion for weeks in order to pressure him to become an informer (and sure enough, Sally Field as the unethical reporter in that movie has an affair with Paul Newman, as the guy who’s getting squeezed). But the reason the AJC won the defamation suit Jewell made against them is because everything they reported was true. The FBI was wrong about Jewell, but he really was investigated for the crime when they reported he was and, everyone forgets, Scruggs also reported about other sources who contradicted local law enforcement’s claims about Jewell being the focus of the investigation.
There’s a reason why those disclaimers exist. This movie’s trying to take advantage of the fact that the reporter is dead to further bury her reputation with whatever extra fantasy they want to add to an already tragic case.
I really respect Eastwood’s body of work, so it irritates me to see him throwing a blatant piece of propaganda out there in the service of ill intentioned players attempting to destroy the constitutional protection of the free press.
Lol he’s only been making blatant propaganda what are you talking about?
Which body of work? The one when he was a director or the one where he put his name on movies made by other people (like Jersey Boys) the same way Clive Cussler does with his novels?
Has Eastwood made a movie that wasn’t propaganda? Maybe Unforgiven or Changeling?
Re: the last line: uh, does anyone really think that Clint Eastwood, who spent over a million dollars in cahoots with Warner Bros. to effectively kill Sondra Locke’s directorial career, cares at all about a woman’s reputation or the quality of her work?
I know that films have to bend history at times. Stories have to be simplified, huge numbers of characters have to be whittled into a composite, fine. But why the fuck would they have to make this up for this story? Like the AJC’s screw-up on this wasn’t bad enough? Like the overall story wasn’t horrible enough?
Probably to explain the why the leak. Recall that David Petraeus leaked information the exact same way, so it’s not impossible or even improbable. What else would cause an FBI agent to just up and blab? While that doesn’t make it true, the movie makers had to have some plausible reason for an FBI agent to break his oath.
But that’s 100% speculation. It’s logical, it might even be true, but there was no evidence that it happened and they attributed the act to a real person, not a composite character or fictionalized version of the real person. If there was a hole in the story, they needed to come up with something that wasn’t such a specific attack on one person.
Like bribery? Blackmail? Holding the FBI agent at gunpoint? If there’s a decent explanation for an FBI agent potentially destroying an investigation for no reason it would be interesting to get that on the screen beyond “a miracle happens.”
Lol fuck Clint Eastwood. Only in the republican party is senility seen as an endearing quality.
Hey, if senility was good enough for Saint Ronald Reagan, it’s good enough for me!Fetch me mah votin’ pants!
1people who think Eastwood is big right wing idiot are reacting to the morons in the audience laughing every time Eastwood appears to be knocking Obama, like it’s the WHCD and he’s an unknown comedian making his bones by belittling the president. But they aren’t actually listening to what Eastwood is saying or the way he is saying it. Eastwood was saying he was hoping Obama would be the “change you are looking for” like he said he would be and was himself disappointed, like many, when Obama turned out to not be that change; and that he wished Obama did more to lower the unemployment rate. He was also sincere when he said he was emotional of election night 2008 and was clearly not taking a cheap shot at Oprah even thought the dummies in the audience laugh. His delivery may be off, some of his points may have been not thought through deeply (Obama did save the economy) but he is not making fun of Obama here. And there is zero chance Eastwood voted for trump. Zero.
The Republicans were explicitly sabotaging Obama at literally every chance. Obama was disappointing in a lot of ways, but the party fighting tooth and nail to stop him from doing anything has no fucking right to complain that he didn’t do enough. Jesus.
The GOP rebranded as the party of no.How the hell do you blame ANYONE else after that point?
He didn’t have to bail out the car companies. he didn’t have to continue the wars in the middle east and start new ones (the refugee crisis is on him), he could have double or tripled the amount of new debt created to spur the economy even more (as Krugman, the earth is flat guy, he could have raised taxes, he could have not given away billions of dollars to wall street bankers, he could have used an executive order to wipe away student loan debt, he could have NOT forced Common Core (e.g. the corporate takeover of our public school system) into public schools, he could have insisted the ACA not be a giant giveaway to lawyers and insurance companies, and he could have forced/bullied/badgered Harry Reid into nuking the filibusters from the get go to implement as many progressive policies into place as possible, and he could have had Howard Dean create a national platform for the democratic party to focus on winning all elections not just the presidential one.Yeah he had republicans thwarting him at every turn but there is more he could have done.BTW, my post was about Eastwood and the reaction people have about his “performance” at the 2012 republican convention,.
Yeah, because the first ever black President was supposed to wave his magic wand and make America into the European progressive utopia AND make the Republican/racist white people opposed to his presidency go away just like that!
Yeah, the Republican plan against Obama was to try to turn him into former New York mayor David Dinkins: a prominent failure to convince the electorate for an entire generation that voting for a black person wasn’t a good idea.
It was the plan of the Klan too in an Esquire interview.
So you’d rather all those autoworkers lose their jobs? And no he didn’t start any new wars, he ended the Iraq war. The ACA wasn’t a giant give away otherwise Republicans would have been for it. But hey, you go and tell everyone who got insurance because if it you want to take their insurance away because you can’t stand that it didn’t do it by your own specific way. I’m sure all the people who haven’t died as a result will want to listen to your tantrum on it.
And christ, Krugman isn’t The Earth Is Flat, that’s Friedman. Your rant reads like a spoiled affluent kid who’s pissed that Obama wasn’t your magic negro.
And there is zero chance Eastwood voted for trump. Zero.You’d be wrong, both on this and on your analysis of the senescent empty chair speech. Not sure how pretending his empty chair told him to go fuck himself isn’t insulting the person the chair represents.https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2016/live-updates/general-election/real-time-updates-on-the-2016-election-voting-and-race-results/clint-eastwood-trump-trump-trump/
This is some seriously galaxy-brained horseshit.
so is your screen name. C’est la vie
His delivery may be off, some of his points may have been not thought through deeply (Obama did save the economy) Yeah, what fool would mistake such a person for a right-wing idiot? Christ.
I like the way you think! Just bc the Nazi’s laugh the hardest at my jokes doesn’t make me a Nazi comedian. I can’t control the audience’s I speak to and I certainly can’t correct an audience who is misunderstanding me.
you are calling Eastwood a Nazi?We’ll disagree with our response to the Eastwood talks to chair video but yesterday was the first time I watched and I come off feeling like Eastwood had high hopes for the Obama presidency and felt let down. and that he is not telling jokes even though people are laughing. and i’ll continue to believe Eastwood was trolling the right with this appearance.
I’m saying if you tell jokes to Nazis and they love your jokes you just might be a Nazi yourself. It’s like when David Duke of the KKK says you’re the best president ever. We can learn a lot about a person from the people who support them. You can read into that what you want.
There’s nothing to read into. you are calling Eastwood a Nazi. he is not. Duke is and has been his whole life.
I think you are implying that the audience at the Republican National Convention were Nazis and well we agree on that.
I was going for dumb partisan America hating assholes but Nazis works
https://www.businessinsider.com/clint-eastwood-praises-donald-trump-and-slams-political-correctness-2016-8
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/clint-eastwood-praises-trump-for-being-on-to-something/
https://entertainment.ie/trending/clint-eastwood-explains-why-he-supports-donald-trump-354009/ lol what rock do you live under? I’m not even an avid gossip journalism consumer and I knew this.
I get my entertainment news from The AV Club and Rotten Tomatoes. So I guess a rock that neither of those can penetrate.
all three of those articles have the same quotes.I forgot about the “pussy generation” stuff, which is kinda funny. Eastwood says he does not support or endorse trump only that he likes that trump has no filter.He said he didn’t want to vote for Hillary because she was going to continue Obama’s policies. maybe he did vote for trump. but i refuse to accept that Eastwood is so far gone he would give his vote to someone as objectionable as trump. blinders staying on i guess.
Just another source of Clint being an asshole:I went to 7th-12th grade with his granddaughter. I’ve been to multiple concerts with her and her cousin, Morgan(a?).
I also know he’s super wealthy and extremely conservative, and if you “like trump for not having a filter” then you’re probably an asshole too, because the only people “not having a filter” is endearing to is assholes. The reason people have filters is so that they’re not considered assholes by everyone else in society. Just buttholes. Trump is a gaping asshole. Say whatever about Hillary, because I don’t think she was a great candidate either, but I know she would have been better overall than Trump.
so his granddaughter thinks he’s an asshole? cool. any stories or anecdotes?
Negatory. I only asked her about him a couple times lol mostly because I genuinely don’t give a shit about Clint Eastwood.
Seriously, the Democrats need to do something similar, at their 2020 convention, as a parody where a celebrity chastises an invisible Trump sitting on a gold-plated toilet. And dare republicans to criticize it.
Only in the republican party is senility seen as an endearing quality. I hope you’re right, but Biden is still doing alright in the polls . . .
Well the film is alleging that one of its journalists broke company policy. The reporting they did was a bit shitty but it was legal. This could have been avoided if they hadn’t written the character like that.
But women can only succeed by relying on their feminine wiles, don’tcha know?
Obviously all female reporters sleep around to get info. Next you’ll tell me Nellie Bly wasn’t that unique…
I hope they sue and I hope they win. Because Eastwood is a Trumptard Fascist. So what if he’s a ‘bigtime famous film maker’? So was Leni Reifenstahl.
Boy, the extreme left and right both have a close relationship with hyperbole.
ouch!
https://variety.com/2019/film/news/warner-bros-clint-eastwood-richard-jewell-1203430756/ WB’s response.
Does Jewell also get to be part of two different threesomes or does that only happen to characters played by Clint himself.
So … we’re talking about the news outlet that never so much as apologized to Richard Jewell, and waited him out in court until he died? That’s the one that’s in some sort of position to be making demands? I’ve got a better idea: screw them, screw their mothers, screw their grannies, and screw anyone or anything that looks like them.
Yes, the legal system should definitely work on the “two wrongs make a right” principal.
They didn’t win the court case because they “waited him out.” His estate continued the suit after he died. They won because there wasn’t legal merit to his claims. Most of the other outlets settled because it wasn’t worth the bad publicity of fighting with a guy who had been put through the ringer already. The AJC stood by their reporting because it was accurate.
They dragged it out to ensure that Jewell would never see the benefit of the court’s ruling, even had it been in his favor. That’s the AJC’s prerogative, but don’t ask anyone to sympathize with them over anything Eastwood’s film had to say.
I think people underestimate how long court cases take, particularly ones where there’s appellate practice involved. And the fact remains that there were no benefits for Jewell to be denied through delay, because AJC was on very strong legal ground and in fact won. It may sound nice to claim that they wronged him one last time, but it doesn’t seem accurate.
They reported that he was a suspect, which he was. So, how about screw you?
Beg pardon, but I lived in Atlanta in ‘96, and subscribed to the AJC. That is FAR from all they did, you muppet.
No muppet no muppet, you’re the muppet.
Clint Eastwood’s next biopic should be about Ken Bone. Since he likes narratives that at face value could be about a non-partisan integrity but then at the last minute end up being right-wing propaganda.
Eastwood reportedly responded by screaming at an empty chair.
It also demands that the studio release a public statement admitting that some aspects of film “were imagined for dramatic purposes” as well as add a “prominent disclaimer to the film to that effect.”Doesn’t every movie already more-or-less say this exact thing already?