The film adaptation of Alice Sebold’s memoir, Lucky, was dropped by the makers after it lost financial backing months ago, Variety reported.
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. Actor Victoria Pedretti, who appears in the Netflix show You, was set to headline the screen adaptation that was first announced in 2019.
While the attacker could not be apprehended due to identity issues, Sebold claimed in the memoir that months later she came across a Black man on the street in the same area, Anthony Broadwater, who reminded her of the attacker. She described their meeting in Lucky. “He was smiling as he approached. He recognized me. It was a stroll in the park to him; he had met an acquaintance on the street,” wrote Sebold. “‘Hey, girl,’ he said. ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’”
Broadwater was arrested after Sebold notified the police even though she picked out a different man in a police lineup. He was convicted for 16 years, in 1982, based on her identification in court and microscopic hair analysis that had tied him to the crime.
Broadwater was exonerated by a court, on Tuesday. It was only when the screen adaptation was in the process of being filmed that Timothy Mucciante of Red Badge Films, who was initially supposed to executive produce the film, became sceptical of Broadwater’s guilt, owing to differences between the memoir and the script.
“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,” Mucciante told the New York Times.
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The report also noted that while Sebold was conflicted with Broadwater’s identity, she pointed to him in the court after the “prosecutor falsely told Ms. Sebold that Mr. Broadwater and the man next to him were friends who had purposely appeared in the lineup together to trick her.”
Taking a personal interest in the case, Mucciante dropped out of the project earlier this year and contacted a defence lawyer, who then got the conviction overturned.
After Mucciante’s exit, Jonathan Bronfman of JoBro Productions was supposed to executive produce the film but neither him nor Pedretti are attached to the project anymore.