Olivia Wilde defended her role as journalist Kathy Scruggs in Clint Eastwood’s polarizing film “Richard Jewell” with a series of tweets Thursday.
The movie dramatizes the story of Scruggs and her news coverage of Richard Jewell — a security guard during the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta who found a bomb that killed one person and wounded more than 100 others.
The historical flick drew criticism from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper, where Scruggs worked, for fictionalizing a scene where Scruggs has sex with an FBI agent played by Jon Hamm to break a damaging story that the FBI was investigating Jewell for the bombing.
The paper has demanded that the movie studio behind the film issue a statement that it used dramatic license in the portrayal of its reporter — expressing outrage at the “Hollywood trope” of journalists sleeping with their sources — which is unethical in the field.
“The perspective of the fictional dramatization of the story, as I understood it, was that Kathy, and the FBI agent who leaked false information to her, were in a pre-existing romantic relationship, not a transactional exchange of sex for information,” Wilde tweeted.
“Contrary to a swath of recent headlines, I do not believe that Kathy ‘traded sex for tips,’” Wilde said.
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