Ted Kaczynski’s decades-long acts of domestic terrorism that led to him being known as the Unabomber have been chronicled in books, documentaries, plays, and movies for years. Now Netflix is taking its swing.
In the streaming giant’s original movie “Unabomber,” the story splits between a young Kaczynski (played by Jacob Tremblay) as a test subject during his time at Harvard by a professor he idolizes (Russell Crowe), and the FBI investigation that inevitably ended with him being captured in a small cabin in Montana in 1996. Kaczynski pleaded guilty in 1998 to 13 federal counts of bomb attacks, for which he was given multiple life sentences. He died by suicide in 2023.
As the “Unabomber” movie shows, linguistics, the study of human language, was a major factor in revealing that Kaczynski was the Unabomber and bringing him to justice. Shailene Woodley plays Joanne Miller, a fiery FBI agent whose obsessive study of the Unabomber’s 35,000-word manifesto, which was published by The New York Times and The Washington Post in 1995, leads her to discover the Unabomber’s true identity.
Though the Miller character is fictitious, she seems to be based heavily on FBI profiler James R. Fitzgerald, who became the lead on linguistics for the Unabomber Task Force in 1995 after discovering a hidden message in one of Kaczynski’s letters.
In “Unabomber,” Miller’s actions, like suggesting the UTF investigate the Sylvan Learning Center, which is mentioned in the manifesto, and matching old Kaczynski writings to the manifesto, are all things Fitzgerald did during the real investigation. Fitzgerald says he was never contacted by the “Unabomber” production.
Fitzgerald has written a book about his experience hunting down the Unabomber, and in the 2017 Discovery Channel miniseries “Manhunt: Unabomber,” he was portrayed by Sam Worthington. (Fitzgerald was also a consulting producer on that show.)
Fitzgerald said he doesn’t take offense to creative license, but listed ways he didn’t like the “Unabomber” movie beyond the Miller character.
In response to a request for comment on Fitzgerald’s perspective, a Netflix spokesperson told Business Insider that the Miller character isn’t based on a specific person.
Here, Fitzgerald breaks down what is accurate and what isn’t in “Unabomber.”
The opening surveillance scene really happened — sort of
“Unabomber” opens with Miller as part of a surveillance team in San Francisco, hoping to catch the Unabomber while he buys a copy of The Washington Post, which has printed his entire manifesto.
A suspicious man in a hood buys a handful of newspapers, then runs away when Miller and another FBI agent follow. They ultimately catch him at his house and then let him go after searching it and finding nothing that would make him a suspect in the Unabomber case.
Fitzgerald said the surveillance was accurate, but that was the extent of the truth in this scene.
“They said in the movie, ‘We chose The Washington Post because nobody in San Francisco reads it,’ but we chose the Post in reality because only two stores sold The Washington Post in the San Francisco Bay area, so it made it easier to do surveillance,” said Fitzgerland.
“During that entire surveillance, there was no foot chase, no gun play, no guy running buying a bunch of copies, nothing like that,” he said, going against what is shown in the scene.
No FBI agent ever called the Unabomber hotline
Later in the movie, Miller is seen alone in the Unabomber Task Force’s offices answering the hotline. On the other end is an FBI agent with a tip.
Fitzgerald said that would never happen.
“Agents aren’t calling the line,” he said. “It would be a teletype or an inside phone they would call. And the tipline phone was manned 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The real UTP was a beehive of activity.”
Ted Kaczynski’s brother, David, was a major help to the FBI’s manhunt, as the movie depicts
Ted’s younger brother, David, is shown in the movie as a reluctant source for the UTF. He provided the team with materials written by Ted, which would inevitably lead the FBI to discover that Ted was the Unabomber.
“David turned over to the UTF a 23-page document that he was hoping we would rule his brother out as the author of the manifesto,” Fitzgerald said. “In ‘Unabomber,’ Miller is given a document by David, she looks at it and then says, ‘I got him.’ In real life, I looked at that 23-page document for a few hours, I was in Quantico, I called back San Francisco, I said ‘You’ve got your man.'”
No agent went rogue in the search for the Unabomber’s identity
In “Unabomber,” Miller gets fed up with her superiors on the team not believing her linguistic hunches, so she decides to go against her superior’s orders and travels to Lincoln, Montana, on her own to get intel that confirms her suspicion that Kaczynski is the Unabomber.
Fitzgerald said surveillance was eventually done on Kaczynski, but that was all approved, and no one ever went rogue.
“For an agent to not even tell the local FBI agents what she’s doing, that would be, I don’t know if it’s a fireable offense, but you’d get highly disciplined,” he said. “You just do not do that.”
Yes, the FBI did have to stop CBS from running a Unabomber story, but not exactly as the movie depicted
In the movie, as the UTF gets closer to raiding Kaczynski’s cabin, they discover that CBS has caught wind that the Unabomber lives in Lincoln. Miller gets on the call with the network and convinces them to hold the story; in return, the FBI will give them an exclusive, including the revelation that his brother, David, gave him up.
Fitzgerald said it’s accurate that CBS had the scoop, but that no one on the UTF conversed with the network.
“Dan Rather himself called FBI director Louis Freeh. He told Freeh they had information that the Unabomber lived in Lincoln, Montana. But they didn’t have his name,” Fitzgerald recalled. “Louis Freeh worked out getting us three extra days. All he promised CBS was an exclusive, nothing about the brother. But no one on the ground at the UTF in San Francisco or certainly in Lincoln was negotiating directly with CBS. That’s way above our pay grade.”
The movie left out an important part of how the Unabomber was caught
Fitzgerald said he was disappointed that “Unabomber” left out one of the most famous clues that led to the capture of Kaczynski.
In Kaczynski’s manifesto, he wrote in one sentence, “You can’t eat your cake and have it too,” misquoting the famous proverb, “You can’t have your cake and eat it too.” Fitzgerald came across the same misquote in a letter Kaczynski wrote, which David gave to the UTF team.
“It was the linguistics smoking gun, which got us the search warrant to get into his cabin,” Fitzgerald said. “We originally were going to go to the cabin in a month, but because of CBS, we had to speed things up. Within a week, we got him.”
Fitzgerald was upset by the Kaczynski audio used at the end of the movie
Fitzgerald took issue with the audio of the real Kaczynski played before the end credits.
While still photos of the real Kaczynski behind bars are shown on screen, audio of him is played. In one excerpt, he says, “If I could be used as a symbol for promoting revolutionary activity, that’s fine with me because the main thing, in my opinion… is to get rid of the industrial system by whatever means may be necessary.”
Fitzgerald felt that including language like this opens the door for copycat behavior.
“I thought that was a very poorly done ending,” he said. “Besides all the mistakes in the movie, now we have an ideological issue that, quite frankly, bothered me more than anything in the movie.”
“Unabomber” is currently available on Netflix.
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