Richard Jewell wasn’t exactly traduced like Joseph K., but who but Kafka could have written of his experience at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, where he was knocked sidelong by a rush to judgement? Just months after Ted Kaczynski was apprehended for the Unabomber explosions and had provided the template of an awkward and unshaven villain, the FBI brought another lone madman to justice, and it was Jewell–although it wasn’t really him at all.

Go here to watch Adam Hootnick’s new ESPN short doc, “Judging Jewell.”

From “The Ballad of Richard Jewell,” Marie Brenner’s 1997 Vanity Fair article:

“It took 10 minutes to pluck Jewell’s thick auburn hair. Then the F.B.I. agents led him into the kitchen and took his palm prints on the table. ‘That took 30 minutes, and they got ink all over the table,’ Bryant said. Then Bazar told Bryant they wanted Jewell to sit on the sofa and say into the telephone, ‘There is a bomb in Centennial Park. You have 30 minutes.’ That was the message given by the 911 caller on the night of the bombing. He was to repeat the message 12 times. Bryant saw the possibility of phony evidence and of his client’s going to jail. ‘I said, ‘I am not sure about this. Maybe you can do this, maybe you can’t, but you are not doing this today.”

All afternoon, Jewell was strangely quiet. He had a sophisticated knowledge of police work and believed, he later said, ‘they must have had some evidence if they wanted my hair.… I knew their game was intimidation. That is why they brought five agents instead of two.’ He felt “violated and humiliated,” he told me, but he was passive, even docile, through Bryant’s outburst. He thought of the bombing victims—Alice Hawthorne, the 44-year-old mother from Albany, Georgia, at the park with her stepdaughter; Melih Uzunyol, the Turkish cameraman who died of a heart attack; the more than 100 people taken to area hospitals, some of whom were his friends. ‘I kept thinking, These guys think I did this. These guys were accusing me of murder. This was the biggest case in the nation and the world. If they could pin it on me, they were going to put me in the electric chair.”