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.
“Nothing in my research suggested she did so, and it was never my intention to suggest she had. That would be an appalling and misogynistic dismissal of the difficult work she did.”
The “Alpha Dog” star, who is the daughter of journalists Leslie Cockburn and Andrew Cockburn, said that she has “deep respect” for reporters.
“Particularly today when the media is routinely attacked and discredited, and regional papers like the AJC are disappearing on a daily basis,” Wilde tweeted.
Poynter reported that Scruggs died of an overdose of prescription pain pills in 2001.
Ref;pagesix.com