In 1996, L. Lin Wood received a referral to represent Richard Jewell, the security guard who found the backpack bomb in Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park and was then named as a suspect by law enforcement and the press. A 2014 Attorney at Law Magazine interview quotes Wood calling the work “intensive on-the-job training in cases tried before the court of public opinion.” The same interview says the case turned a medical-malpractice lawyer into a national defamation lawyer.
The New York Times reported on December 10, 1996, that NBC paid Jewell an undisclosed sum to avert a libel suit over Tom Brokaw’s on-air remarks, and that Wood said Richard and his attorneys were satisfied with the settlement. CNN reported on January 28, 1997, that Jewell’s lawyers had also reached a settlement with CNN that included a “financial component,” and that they had sued Cox Enterprises (the Atlanta Journal-Constitution) and Piedmont College. Wood, quoted by CNN that day: “It’s about money, permanent and significant damages. It’s also about accountability on the part of the government and the media.”
The 2014 interview lists later libel settlements with CNN, NBC and Tom Brokaw, Piedmont College, and the New York Post, and says the Atlanta Journal-Constitution suit, after many years, was not successful. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution later reported that the Georgia Supreme Court in 2012 upheld trial-court rulings against Jewell in that newspaper case. Secondary recaps of Clint Eastwood’s film have published dollar figures for some settlements; those figures are reporting, not a court judgment, and are not copied here as Fact.
Wood told the magazine he delivered the eulogy at Jewell’s funeral. That is his own published recollection. Jewell died in 2007; Associated Press covered the death. The FBI never charged Jewell in the bombing. Eric Rudolph later pleaded guilty to that attack. Those are the documented ends of the criminal story. The defamation docket is what this chapter records.