As Actress in Clint Eastwood’s New Film Nominated for Oscar, Who Really Bombed the 1996 Olympics?

Veteran actress Kathy Bates was nominated this week as Best Supporting Actress for her role as Richard Jewell’s mother, Bobi, in a film directed by Hollywood legend Clint Eastwood.

The film, simply titled Richard Jewell, tells the story of the title character who was a security guard at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia.

In the early hours of 27 July, 1996 an explosive device went off near a sound stage in Atlanta’s Centennial Park, killing two people and wounding dozens.

​It was the first terrorist attack on an Olympiad since Munich in 1970, when Palestinian terrorists targeted Israeli athletes, and it succeeded in its mission to terrify the city of Atlanta.

The FBI immediately launched a hunt to find the bomber and, with the Games organisers urging a quick resolution so that the Olympics could resume, it was perhaps no surprise the bureau fingered the wrong man.

Jewell had actually ushered people away from the nail bomb before it exploded but that only attracted the suspicions of the FBI who felt he had planted it so as to make himself the hero of the moment.

Alice Hawthorne, 44, was killed when a nail from the bomb penetrated her skull and the second fatality was a Turkish cameraman, Melih Uzunyol, 40, who died of a heart attack as he fled in terror.

​According to the movie’s version of events - which is based on an article in Vanity Fair - Kathy Scruggs, an ace reporter with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper (played by Olivia Wilde), slept with an FBI agent (played by Jon Hamm) in order to get a scoop.

That scoop was that the FBI were focusing on Jewell as the bomber and once the cat was out of the bag the US media led a witch-hunt against him, besieging the apartment which he shared with his mother.

Scruggs actually died of a drugs overdose in 2001, aged 42, so she is unable to defend herself.  

In an article with The Guardian, Kathy Bates said of Olivia Wilde as Scruggs: “I was a little uncomfortable with her character though I think Bobi sort of balances that out in the movie.”

Bates won the Oscar for Best Actress in 1991 for her portrayal of a stalker who is obsessed with author James Caan, in the film Misery.

She told the Guardian: “This time is different because Richard Jewell is based on a true story. All we wanted was for Bobi Jewell to feel the film vindicated her son. I wanted her to like my portrayal of her. She’s waited 23 years for justice. I’ve never felt quite like this before. Whatever happens now, I’m just grateful the film will get more eyeballs.”

So if Jewell was innocent, who did plant the bomb and why?

The truth did not begin to emerge until 11 years after the bombing when the FBI noticed similarities between the device and bombs which had been left outside an abortion clinic and a nightclub frequented by lesbians in 1997.

After another abortion clinic in Alabama was bombed, the FBI identified Eric Rudolph, a former soldier, as the bomber and put him on their Ten Most Wanted list, but in 1998 he went to ground.

​He spent the next five years hiding in the Nantahala National Forest in North Carolina, foraging for food and living in a camp in the woods.

In May 2003 he was arrested by chance by a police officer in Murphy, North Carolina as he rooted around in a dumpster.

When his identity became clear the FBI swooped and charged with all the bombings.

Rudolph, who claimed to represent an organisation called the Army of God, confessed almost immediately and later gave his reasons for the Centennial Park bombing.

​In a rambling statement written in April 2005, Rudolph railed against “global socialism”.

Rudolph's statement went on: “The purpose of the attack on July 27 was to confound, anger and embarrass the Washington government in the eyes of the world for its abominable sanctioning of abortion on demand. The plan was to force the cancellation of the games, or at least create a state of insecurity to empty the streets around the venues and thereby eat into the vast amounts of money invested.”

Rudolph’s plan failed abysmally. Not only did the Games resume almost immediately after the attack but the wider world was completely unaware the bombing was linked to the abortion debate until years later.

​Some critics of the film say the villains of the movie are the media and the FBI, rather than Rudolph, who almost gets a pass from the director, Clint Eastwood.

Bates, apparently not keen to be drawn into a debate over whether a veil had been drawn over Rudolph’s motives, told the Guardian: “Rudolph was just evil, obviously.” 

Rudolph, now 53, was given several life sentences without the possibility of parole and remains incarcerated in a federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.