Just before 1 a.m. on July 27, 1996, Atlanta's Centennial Park remained packed with visitors. Atlanta was hosting the Olympic Games and festivities were in full swing. Richard Jewell was a security guard working the night shift near the AT&T light and sound tower. The band Jack Mack and the Heart Attack had just started their set. Jewell approached a group of drunks on a bench to warn them about all the beer cans they had left in a heap on the ground. It was then he spotted an olive green backpack under the bench. When he realized it didn't appear to belong to anyone, Jewell alerted a Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent, who in turn called bomb technicians. In the meantime Jewell and the agent cleared a 25-foot-square area around the suspicious backpack and Jewell twice went into the tower to warn the technicians working there. “I want y'all out now,” he told them. “This is serious.”

About twenty minutes earlier, Atlanta police had received a 911 call from an anonymous male, who warned that there was a bomb in Centennial Park. “You have 30 minutes,” he said. But neither the police nor the bomb technicians who had been summoned could get to the bomb in time. Ten minutes after Jewell evacuated the tower, a forty-pound pipe bomb hidden in the backpack he had found exploded, sending a barrage of nails into the darkened sky. One woman was killed, 111 people were injured.

Jewell's quick thinking saved scores of lives. The 34-year-old security guard was heralded for his bravery. With AT&T pushing him into the spotlight, Jewell agreed to 10 interviews with reporters. AT&T urged him to wear his AT&T shirt with the company's logo and Jewell instantly became a darling of the press.

"You were in the right place at the right time and you did the right thing, Richard," said NBC Today Host Katie Couric in an interview the following morning.

But Jewell would soon go from darling to devil in the eyes of the media. Three days after the bombing, Atlanta Journal-Constitution cast Jewell in a harsh new light that he would spend the rest of his life fighting. “FBI Suspects ‘Hero’ Guard May Have Planted Bomb,” read the front page headline. Newspapers across the country picked up the story and splashed it across their pages.

“The speculation is that the FBI is close to making the case,” said Tom Brokaw of NBC News. “They probably have enough to arrest him right now, probably enough to prosecute him, but you always want to have enough to convict him as well. There are still some holes in this case.”

Over the next few months the case against Jewell fell apart. Meanwhile, Jewell suffered the consequences of being named a public prime suspect in a case that received intense national and international attention.

Kathy Scruggs was the Atlanta Journal police beat reporter who broke the story, along with Ron Martz, who was on the Olympic security beat. Scruggs, a “police groupie,” heard inklings the bombing case taking a new turn a day after the bombing. Her sources told her that investigators believed that “Jewell fit the profile of a person who might create an incident so he could emerge as a hero.”

More information emerged that helped the FBI formulate its profile. The president of Piedmont College, Ray Cleere, called investigators after seeing Jewell interviewed on TV. Cleere told authorities Jewell had been a campus police officer but was a troublesome employee, considered “erratic and somewhat excitable.” Jewell quit when his hours were reduced. Scruggs for her part learned more about Jewell's earlier employment history. He had been charged with impersonating a police officer while working for the Habersham county sheriff's office, and crashed a police car. All of this led investigators to believe that Jewell had motivation to commit the crime.

The newspaper was under considerable pressure to get the scoop. It was the hometown paper of the city hosting the Olympics. The attention of the world was on the city as was the attention of the international media.

“If we'd gotten beaten, we'd have been the laughing stock of the industry,” said reporter Martz. “We are the only newspaper in town.”

Scruggs wrote that Jewell “fits the profile of the lone bomber.” The article described Jewell as seeking celebrity by putting himself in front of news reporters, which Scruggs and Martz had learned from their FBI sources was a characteristic of a lone bomber.

The proof was flimsy. Later the American Journalism Review would harshly rebuke both reporters for “the scanty confirmation and lack of skepticism in its coverage of Jewell.” The reporters never sought to verify Cleere's assessment of Jewell, either. Had they, they would have learned, for instance, that Jewell had been named Citizen of the Year for his work with the local volunteer fire department, and once caught a burglar (during his tenure at Piedmont) hiding in a tree.

“The tragedy was that his sense of duty and diligence made him a suspect,” one of Jewell’s lawyers, John R. Martin, said. “He really prided himself on being a professional police officer, and the irony is that he became the poster child for the wrongly accused.”

Days after Jewell was named a suspect, CNN went on the defensive about its portrayal of Jewell. During a Crossfire episode, Bill Press said, “We’re accused of destroying the reputation of Mr. Jewell. I read today that Mr. Jewell has been arrested in the past for — he’s charged with impersonating a police officer. He was called an over-zealous enforcer of the law, made arrests way outside his jurisdiction. He wrecked a police car racing another police officer down a mountain. His former employer, the county sheriff, said: ‘Can’t say too much good about him.’ He did a pretty good job of destroying his own reputation, first, didn’t he?"

By the end of October, the FBI dropped its case against Jewell. But Jewell, who had been fired, could not find work for months. He filed multiple defamation lawsuits against the news outlets he claimed targeted him, as well as Piedmont College, with varying degrees of success.

Jewell accused Piedmont College of supplying the FBI and the Atlanta paper with false information about him. The College settled for an undisclosed amount.

He sued the New York Post for portraying him as an “aberrant person” not only in articles but in editorial cartoons. Jewell asked for $15 million. The two parties reached a settlement for an undisclosed amount.

NBC stood by its reporting, but paid Jewell $500,000. CNN also defended its reporting, but like NBC, paid Jewell an undisclosed amount.

His lawsuit against the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, however, bounced around the courts to the Supreme Court of Georgia, which eventually rejected his suit “because the articles in their entirety were substantially true at the time they were published—even though the investigators’ suspicions were ultimately deemed unfounded—they cannot form the basis of a defamation action,” the Court wrote in its 2011 decision.

“This case has everything—the F.B.I., the press, the violation of the Bill of Rights, from the First to the Sixth Amendment,” Watson Bryant, another of Jewell's lawyers, told Vanity Fair.

According to Vanity Fair, “It has become common to characterize the F.B.I.'s investigation of Richard Jewell as the epitome of false accusation. The phrase ‘the Jewell syndrome,’ a rush to judgment, has entered the language of newsrooms and First Amendment forums.”

“The weird thing was that when they were searching my apartment I was, like, ‘Take everything. Take the carpet. I am law enforcement. I am just like you,’” Jewell said. “’Guys, take whatever you are going to take, because it is going to prove that I didn't do anything.’ And a couple of them were looking at me like I was crazy.”

Eventually, Eric Rudolph, an anti-abortion, anti-gay domestic terrorist, admitted to the Olympic Park bombing in 2003, and is serving consecutive life sentences for his crimes. Meanwhile, Jewell died in 2007 at the age of 44 from complications related to diabetes.