Richard Allensworth Jewell (born Richard White; December 17, 1962 – August 29, 2007) was an American security guard and law enforcement officer who alerted police during the Centennial Olympic Park bombing at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia. He discovered a backpack containing three pipe bombs on the park grounds and helped evacuate the area before the bomb exploded, saving many people from injury or death. For months afterward he was suspected of planting the bomb, resulting in adverse publicity that "came to symbolize the excesses of law enforcement and the news media".

Initially hailed by the media as a hero, Jewell was soon considered a suspect by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) based on psychological profiling. Though never charged, Jewell experienced what was described as a "trial by media", which took a toll on his personal and professional life. He was cleared as a suspect after 88 days of intense public scrutiny. In 2005, Eric Rudolph confessed and pled guilty to that bombing and other attacks.

Jewell's life has been the subject of popular culture, including the 2019 Academy Award–nominated film Richard Jewell directed by Clint Eastwood and the ten-episode 2020 season of the anthology series Manhunt, Deadly Games.

Jewell was born Richard White in Danville, Virginia, the son of Robert Earl White, who worked for Chevrolet, and his mother Bobi, an insurance claims coordinator. Richard's birth parents divorced when he was four. When his mother later married John Jewell, an insurance executive, his stepfather adopted him.

Centennial Olympic Park was designed as the "town square" of the Olympics, and thousands of spectators had gathered for a late concert. Sometime after midnight on July 27, 1996, Eric Robert Rudolph, a domestic terrorist who would later bomb a lesbian nightclub and two abortion clinics, placed a green backpack containing a shrapnel-laden pipe bomb under a bench. Jewell was working as a security guard for the event. He discovered the bag and alerted Georgia Bureau of Investigation officers. This discovery was nine minutes before Rudolph telephoned 9-1-1 to deliver a warning. During a Jack Mack and the Heart Attack performance, Jewell and other security guards began clearing the immediate area so that a bomb squad could investigate the suspicious package. The bomb exploded 13 minutes later, killing one person – later identified as Alice Hawthorne – and injuring more than 100 others. A cameraman, Melih Uzunyol, also died of a heart attack while running to photograph the incident.

Early news reports lauded Jewell as a hero for helping to evacuate the area after he spotted the suspicious package. Three days later, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution revealed that the FBI was treating him as a possible suspect, based largely on a "lone bomber" criminal profile. For the next several weeks, the news media focused aggressively on him as the presumed culprit, describing him as a "person of interest". The media, to varying degrees, described Jewell as a failed law enforcement officer who might have planted the bomb so he could "find" it and be a hero.

The New York Times reported in October 1996, when he was cleared as a suspect, that "a number of law-enforcement officials have said privately for months that they thought Mr. Jewell had been involved in the bombing, even though there was no evidence against him and some evidence seemed to rule him out".

Jewell was never charged officially, but the FBI thoroughly and publicly searched his home twice, questioned his associates, investigated his background, and maintained 24-hour surveillance of him. The scrutiny began to ease only after Jewell's attorneys hired an ex-FBI agent to administer a polygraph, which Jewell passed.