Alice Sebold

Alice Sebold, 2007.

Alice Sebold (born September 6, 1963) is an American author. She is known for her novels The Lovely Bones and The Almost Moon, and a memoir, Lucky. The Lovely Bones was on The New York Times Best Seller list and was adapted into a film by the same name in 2010. Her memoir, Lucky, sold over a million copies and describes her experience in her first year at Syracuse University, when she was raped. Anthony Broadwater, who was incorrectly identified as the perpetrator by Sebold, spent 16 years in prison. He was exonerated in 2021, after a judge overturned the original conviction. Consequently, the publisher of Lucky announced that the book would no longer be distributed.

Identification of Anthony Broadwater

In the early hours of May 8, 1981, while Sebold was a freshman at Syracuse University, she was allegedly assaulted and raped while walking home along a pathway that passed a tunnel to an amphitheater near campus. She reported the crime to campus security and the police, who took her statement and investigated, but could not identify any suspects. Five months later, while walking down a street near the Syracuse campus, she encountered a man whom she believed to be the rapist. The man, Anthony Broadwater, ultimately served 16 years in prison, maintaining his innocence throughout. Because he would not admit to the attack, he was denied parole five times. Broadwater was released in 1999, and remained on New York's sex offender registry, before ultimately being exonerated in 2021.

Exoneration of Anthony Broadwater

Broadwater tried five times to have the conviction overturned, with at least as many groups of lawyers. When Timothy Mucciante began working as executive producer on a project to adapt Lucky to film, he noticed discrepancies in the portion of her book describing the trial. He later told The New York Times: "I started having some doubts—not about the story that Alice told about her assault, which was tragic, but the second part of her book about the trial, which didn’t hang together". He ultimately was fired from the project when he did not provide funding as he had originally agreed, and subsequently hired a private investigator to review the evidence against Broadwater.

In November 2021, Broadwater was exonerated by a New York Supreme Court justice, who determined there had been serious issues with the original conviction. The conviction had relied heavily on two pieces of evidence: Sebold's testimony and microscopic hair analysis, a forensic technique the United States Department of Justice later found to be unreliable.

At the police lineup, which included Broadwater, Sebold had identified a different person as her rapist. When police told her she had identified someone other than Broadwater, she said the two men looked "almost identical". Defense attorneys arguing for Broadwater's exoneration asserted that, after the lineup, the prosecutor lied to Sebold, telling her that the man she had identified and Broadwater were friends, and that they both came to the lineup to confuse her. They also stated that Sebold wrote in Lucky that the prosecutor coached her into changing her identification. In 2021, Broadwater's new attorneys argued that this influenced Sebold's testimony. Onondaga County District Attorney William J. Fitzpatrick, who joined the motion to overturn the conviction, argued that suspect identification is prone to error, particularly when the suspect is a different race from the victim; Sebold is white and Broadwater is black.

After his exoneration, Broadwater said: "I'm not bitter or have malice towards her." A week later, Sebold publicly apologized for her part in his conviction, saying she was struggling "with the role that I unwittingly played within a system that sent an innocent man to jail" and that Broadwater "became another young Black man brutalized by our flawed legal system. I will forever be sorry for what was done to him." The manner of Sebold's apology drew criticism from some observers, who noted that it was largely made in the passive voice and did not acknowledge any direct responsibility for Broadwater's conviction. Scribner, the publisher of Lucky, released a statement following Broadwater's exoneration that distribution of all formats of the book would cease.

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