Alice Sebold, an American author, has apologised for her role in a man’s wrongful conviction for raping her in 1981, which was overturned this week. She described being raped in her novel Lucky, and afterward telling police she had spotted a black man in the street who she thought was her offender.
Anthony Broadwater was arrested and sentenced to 16 years in jail after being convicted.
Mr. Broadwater said he was “relieved that she has apologized,” according to a statement made by his attorneys.
Ms. Sebold’s career as a novelist began with the publication of Lucky, which sold over one million copies. She went on to write the novel The Lovely Bones, which Peter Jackson adapted into an Oscar-nominated film.
On Tuesday, the memoir’s publisher announced that it would cease distributing it while it worked with Ms. Sebold to “explore how the work might be altered.” Ms. Sebold was attacked when she was an 18-year-old student at Syracuse University in New York, according to the book.
She claimed spotting a black man in the street who she believed was her attacker months later and alerted authorities. Mr. Broadwater, who was apparently in the vicinity at the time, was then detained by an officer. Ms. Sebold failed to recognize him in a police lineup after his arrest, instead choosing another man. Nonetheless, Mr. Broadwater was tried, and Ms. Sebold named him as her assailant in court. On the basis of her testimony and microscopic hair analysis, he was found guilty.
Mr. Broadwater remained on the sex offenders register after he was released from prison in 1998. On November 22, he was exonerated after a re-examination of the case revealed that he was convicted based on insufficient and now-discredited evidence. After an executive producer working on a film adaptation of Lucky raised suspicions about the case and eventually engaged a private investigator, his unjust conviction was then revealed.
Mr. Broadwater, 61, told the Associated Press that he was shedding “tears of joy and relief” after learning that he had been absolved of the crime.
In her statement, Ms. Sebold claimed she had spent the previous eight days attempting to “comprehend how this could have happened.”
“I will also grapple with the fact that my rapist will, in all likelihood, never be known, may have gone on to rape other women, and certainly will never serve the time in prison that Mr. Broadwater did,” she added.
This narrative appears to be a fictionalized version of a real story in which a man lost 16 years of his life due to no fault of his own. An apology will not be enough to make those 16 years disappear. It’s extremely terrible when we make mistakes and someone else suffers the consequences.
