UNABOMBER Ted Kaczynski’s brother has revealed the FBI never had to convince him to give him up, as he breaks his silence on what he brands “totally fictional” scenes in Netflix’s new movie.
David Kaczynski, 79, spoke exclusively to The U.S. Sun following the release of the star-studded film Unabomber, which has shot to number one on the streaming service.
The film, starring Jacob Tremblay as a young Ted, Russell Crowe as Harvard psychologist Henry Murray and Shailene Woodley as FBI agent Joanne Miller, revisits the notorious killer’s troubled childhood, controversial Harvard years and eventual capture.
David is played by Matthew Kevin Anderson, while Tanya van Blokland portrays his wife Linda Patrik.
The real-life couple approached authorities after recognizing similarities between Ted’s writings and the , helping end a 17-year bombing campaign that killed three people and injured 23 others.
But David has now stressed that federal agents did not persuade him to give up the brother he had once idolized.
“No FBI agents ever convinced me,” he exclusively told The U.S. Sun.
“I turned in my brother, based on a long, very difficult, painful, ethical decision-making process that my wife and I went through.”
It differs from the version dramatized by Netflix, in which Woodley’s fictional Joanne becomes a driving force behind identifying Ted as the Unabomber.
Joanne is shown pursuing David and Linda’s tip despite skepticism within the FBI and later trying to convince David to cooperate.
In reality, David and Linda had already spent months wrestling with their suspicions before approaching Washington attorney Tony Bisceglie, who acted as an intermediary with authorities.
Experts then compared Ted’s writings with the Unabomber manifesto.
“It was a very, very difficult dilemma, but by the time we contacted the FBI, the decision was made,” David said.
“We were going to go forward, share everything we knew.”
Despite their suspicions, David desperately hoped investigators would discover they had made a terrible mistake.
“My hope was that they would investigate and find that my brother was innocent, that we were wrong,” he said. “But, of course, that did not happen to be the case.”
David and Linda later received the $1 million reward offered for information leading to the Unabomber’s capture, despite saying they had not known about the money when they first came forward.
They viewed it as “blood money” and, after taxes and legal expenses, distributed $680,000 to Ted’s victims and their families through the Unabom Survivors Fund.
Ted’s arrest left David wrestling with his decision for decades, and he in prison in an attempt to reconcile, despite his brother repeatedly rebuffing his efforts.
David has not watched the new Netflix movie himself but has been told about specific scenes.
“I haven’t seen the movie. I don’t have a Netflix subscription,” he said.
“[But] one of the friends who emailed me did tell me some things that were in the film that were totally fictional.”
David also revealed nobody behind the Netflix movie approached him before it was made, joking: “Maybe they didn’t want to pay me anything.”
Another scene he disputes involves the controversial Harvard experiments Ted underwent after entering the university at just 16.
The movie suggests Ted forged his parents’ signature to gain access to the study, but David insists that never happened.
“One was that my brother had forged my parents’ signature to gain entrance into this study, and that’s not true,” he said.
“My mother did sign, and she actually had this hopeful sense of, ‘Ted has difficulty with social relationships, [maybe] it could help him.’ Obviously that was not what they were about. They weren’t about helping people.”
David believes the Harvard experiments may have damaged his brother, but warned against portraying them as the single explanation for Ted’s later crimes.
“I’m glad that they brought out this study, because it was unethical, it was harmful,” he said.
“It may have contributed to Ted’s problems throughout life, but human beings are much more complicated than this.
“I guess what I wouldn’t like anyone to take away from the movie is the idea that this was, like, a singular cause for his fall from grace.”
David said their mother Wanda believed Ted’s difficulties trusting others may have begun much earlier, after he was hospitalized at around nine months old and largely separated from his family for around 10 days.
“My mother always felt that his hospital experience as a nine-month-old child [when] we were not allowed to visit except, I don’t know, three times over 10 days or something, was [what caused] Ted’s difficulty in trusting people, his sensitivity, and so forth,” he said.
David described Ted as having “great cognitive intelligence,” but also recalled “the sort of scared boy behind it.”
He also disputed the film’s depiction of their father, Theodore Kaczynski Sr., after hearing about scenes involving his hot-headed reaction to Ted’s intellectual “debates.”
“My dad was a somewhat passive person,” David said. “It just does not sound like him at all.”
David recalled one rare incident when Ted, then around 10 or 11, failed to come home at night, leaving his worried parents searching for him until he eventually called from a friend’s house.
“My father was very angry then, and that was the only time I remember in our entire childhood that there was physical punishment, like spanking,” David said.
He also revealed the real woman he and Linda interacted with most during the investigation was FBI profiler Kathleen Puckett, rather than the fictional Joanne Miller, saying she had a “major role to play.”
He said, “Now, why they would have changed the name of this person? I don’t know.” Ted was arrested at his Montana cabin on April 3, 1996, later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life without parole.
He died by suicide in federal custody in 2023 aged 81.
For the full breakdown of fact versus fiction in Netflix’s Unabomber movie, watch the video on The U.S. Sun’s YouTube channel .
