The man who was wrongly convicted of raping bestselling author Alice Sebold over 40 years ago has expressed dismay that she has not contacted him, despite his conviction having been overturned in November 2021.
Anthony Broadwater served 16 years in prison for assaulting the author in Syracuse, New York in May 1981. She single-picked him in a row, but told the jury, “I’m not entirely sure.” He was convicted because she recognized him and there was forensic evidence that is now unreliable and no longer used.
Sebold wrote his memoir “Lucky” about the attack. However, when it was made into a film, several people working on the project began to question Broadwater’s beliefs. A private investigator was hired, whose evidence quickly convinced the district attorney that the case needed reconsideration.
Broadwater was released from prison at the end of his sentence in 1998 at the age of 38.
In October 2021, his conviction was overturned.
Sebold issued a statement but was not in direct contact with Broadwater.
Author Alice Sebold wrote her memoir, Lucky, about her rape in May 1981 in Syracuse, New York
Anthony Broadwater spent 16 years in prison for raping Alice Sebold in May 1981. He was released in 1998 at the age of 38. In October 2021, his conviction was overturned
This is a photo of a group from which Alice Sebold accidentally chose the wrong man in November 1981, almost six months after her rape
The New Yorker spoke to both of them for an article published on Monday.
Broadwater said he was disappointed she hadn’t been in touch.
Sebold said she’s mentally preparing to write a letter as a first step.
“I guess it would be pretty nice to start with a letter,” Broadwater said.
Shortly after the conviction was overturned, Sebold wrote a one-page letter to Broadwater’s attorneys and published it on Medium.
“Most of all, I am sorry that you were wronged for the life you could have lived, and I know that no apology can and will never change what has happened to you,” she wrote.
“My goal in 1982 was justice.” Certainly not to change a young man’s life forever and irretrievably through the very crime that changed mine.’
Sebold told the New Yorker that she’s still wrestling with how to deal with the fallout from Broadwater’s conviction being overturned.
“I still don’t know where to go with this other than in grief, silence and shame,” she said.
“It’s about figuring out the details.” I can’t get into that without losing a sense of who I am. My perception of other people, my trust in myself. That I can mess up so much without knowing it.’
Sebold’s book was based on her own experiences and was made into a film. Then the producers realized that the conviction was on shaky ground
Sebold wrote in Lucky how she was attacked from behind by a man in Syracuse Park in 1981, while she was still a student. She describes in several pages in detail and vividly how he raped her, then released her and told her she was a “good girl” and apologized for what he had done. The book sold over a million copies and propelled her career
The author, whose 2002 novel The Lovely Bones sold 10 million copies, spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list and was made into a 2009 film starring Saoirse Ronan and Stanley Tucci, said she struggled with to be “shackled to the new reality”. .
Sebold, who lives alone in San Francisco with her dog, told the New Yorker, “There was no bottom, even though I thought there was bottom.”
She said she no longer writes.
She added, “You feel like you have to get up and sit down immediately because you’re about to fall over.”
“It’s not just that the past is collapsing.
“The present is collapsing, and every good feeling I’ve ever had is collapsing.” it’s taking me – and I don’t know where I’ll end up.”
Sebold acknowledged the devastating effects of May Night 1981 on both.
“The rapist came out of nowhere and shaped my entire life,” she said. “My rape came out of nowhere and shaped his entire life.”
Broadwater described how he and his wife – who shocked him while dating by believing in his innocence – decided not to have children because he didn’t want them to carry the stigma of a registered sex offender and a convicted rapist father.
Broadwater is pictured outside the Syracuse courthouse in November 2021 after his conviction was overturned
Broadwater, 61, was shaking with emotion and sobbing as his head fell into his hands as the Syracuse judge overturned his conviction at the request of prosecutors
Broadwater, who was seen in court, said he was still weeping tears of joy and relief at his exoneration the next day
He said he took jobs where he knew he could get in and out and be watched constantly because he lived in fear of being wrongly accused again.
“We both walked through fire,” he said. “You see movies about rape and the young lady keeps scrubbing herself in the shower.
“And I’m like, ‘Damn, I feel the same way.’
“Will it ever leave my memory, my mind, my thoughts?” No. And it won’t go away for them either.’
Broadwater turned down several opportunities for parole because he refused to admit guilt and apologize.
He said he made peace with Sebold himself.
“I thank the good Lord that I’ve gotten to the point where I’m mentally strong enough to say, ‘Hey, it was the court.’ It was the system. It’s not the victim’s fault.”
Broadwater said he hopes to “compare notes” with Sebold so he can understand how prosecutors “deceived and kept them blind.”
She was not told that he repeatedly refused to confess, even though doing so would have set him free. She also wasn’t in court to hear him talk about his distinctive facial features like scars, which she didn’t mention.
Sebold said that as she thought about the meeting, she suspected words would not suffice.
“Maybe all we do is stare at the floor or cry,” she said.
How Alice Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones” made her a literary star
Alice Sebold was writing her hugely successful novel The Lovely Bones about the rape and murder of a teenage girl in the late 1990s, when she had to abandon that project to complete her own memoir about being raped as a college student.
Years later, she said she wanted her novel’s late narrator, Susie Salmon, to “tell her own story” while her memoir, Lucky, would be the “real” subject about rape.
This memoir was published in 1999, three years before her novel, and received critical acclaim.
But it was The Lovely Bones (2002) that landed her literary fame after it became an instant classic.
The novel begins with the captivating line: ‘My name was Salmon, like the fish; First name: Susie. “I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.”
The book is narrated in the voice of Susie, a dead girl who speaks from heaven after being raped and murdered.
Susie tells the harrowing story of her gruesome kidnapping and murder in a cornfield near her home and observes the events that follow.
How her severed elbow is discovered in a bloodstain in the field, but her body is nowhere to be found.
This leaves her parents with vain hope that she will be found alive.
The portrayal of her family grieving over the loss of their child made the novel a critical hit.
Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times described it as “a deeply touching meditation on how terrible pain and loss can be redeemed.”
Others found Susie’s ability to flick between heaven and earth to be an unconvincing plot device.
The girl’s ghost is seen by family members as they turn the corner in her home.
And she even penetrates the body of a school friend who is making love to her former lover.
The novel was particularly popular with teenage girls and women.
English author Joan Smith criticized the novel’s “apple pie sentimentality,” saying it was sickeningly sweet.
Literary critic Philip Hensher described the book as “a sophisticated, overwhelmingly saccharine and callous exercise in emotions.”
The novel won the 2003 American Booksellers Association Adult Fiction Book of the Year Award and was adapted for a film by fantasy director Peter Jackson, starring Saoirse Ronan, Susan Sarandon and Stanley Tucci.
The Lovely Bones influenced an entire young adult fiction subgenre known derisively as the sick lit, which has remained popular to this day.
In general, it is fiction revolving around life after death, with the protagonists being killed at the beginning of the narration and finding themselves in a strange spirit world.
The hugely successful Twilight Saga, a series of fantasy romance novels by Stephenie Meyer, was influenced by Sebold’s work.