Alice Sebold, in a statement released on Tuesday, has apologised to Anthony Broadwater, the man wrongfully convicted of raping her. Broadwater’s conviction was recently overturned after a possible film adaptation of Sebold’s 1999 memoir Lucky, that detailed the rape and Broadwater’s conviction, raised concerns that the wrong man had been sent to jail.
“40 years ago, as a traumatized 18-year-old rape victim, I chose to put my faith in the American legal system. My goal in 1982 was justice — not to perpetuate injustice. And certainly not to forever, and irreparably, alter a young man’s life by the very crime that had altered mine,” her statement read.
Sebold was raped in 1981, when she was a first-year student at Syracuse University. Although she had reported the crime to the police and an investigation was carried out, no suspects were identified.
Months later, she came across a Black man on the street in the same area, Broadwater, who reminded her of the attacker. She described their meeting in her memoir Lucky.
Broadwater was arrested after Sebold notified the police. Though she had picked out a different man in a police lineup, Sebold testified against Broadwater, who was convicted in 1982 based on her identification in court and microscopic hair analysis had tied him to the crime. He finished his prison term in 1999 but remained on New York’s sex offender registry.
“I am grateful that Mr. Broadwater has finally been vindicated, but the fact remains that 40 years ago, he became another young Black man brutalized by our flawed legal system. I will forever be sorry for what was done to him,” Sebold said in the statement. She added that the acknowledgment of systemic issues within the judicial system “was not a debate, or a conversation, or even a whisper when I reported my rape in 1981.”
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She said that she will remain sorry for the rest of her life, and added “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.”
Broadwater’s innocence was brought to light only after Tim Mucciante of Red Badge Films who was supposed to serve as the executive producer for Lucky’s film adaptation became sceptical of Broadwater’s guilt, owing to differences between the memoir and the script.
After Mucciante’s exit, Jonathan Bronfman of JoBro Productions was supposed to executive produce the film but neither him nor actor Victoria Pedretti, who was supposed to play the lead, is attached to the project anymore.