But she was wrong.

Woof!  What a tragedy.  From Man Is Exonerated in Rape Case Described in Alice Sebold’s Memoir by Karen Zraick and Alexandra Alter.  

The rape took place in a Syracuse, N.Y., park in 1981 and was described in raw detail in a memoir published nearly 20 years after it occurred, as the man convicted of the crime struggled to rebuild his life after his release from prison.

The book, titled “Lucky,” launched the career of the author Alice Sebold, who later rose to international fame with “The Lovely Bones,” a novel that also centers on sexual assault and sold millions of copies.

The man who was convicted of the attack, Anthony J. Broadwater, had always maintained he was innocent. On Monday, he was exonerated, as a state judge, his defense lawyers and the Onondaga County district attorney agreed that the case against him had been woefully flawed.

[snip]

In their motion to vacate the conviction, the defense lawyers J. David Hammond and Melissa K. Swartz wrote that the case had relied solely on Ms. Sebold’s identification of Mr. Broadwater in the courtroom and a now-discredited method of microscopic hair analysis.

They also argued that prosecutorial misconduct was a factor during the police lineup — that the prosecutor had 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 — and that it had improperly influenced Ms. Sebold’s later testimony.

The motion to vacate the conviction was joined by Onondaga County District Attorney William J. Fitzpatrick, who noted that witness identifications of strangers, particularly those that cross racial lines, are often unreliable. Ms. Sebold is white, and Mr. Broadwater is Black.

[snip] 

 

Ms. Sebold had no comment on the decision, a spokesman for Scribner, which published “Lucky,” said. The spokesman said that the publisher had no plans to update the text.

A planned film adaptation of “Lucky” played a role in raising doubts about the case against Mr. Broadwater.

Timothy Mucciante was working as executive producer of the adaptation of “Lucky,” but began to question the story that the movie was based on earlier this year, after he noticed discrepancies between the memoir and the script.

Mr. Mucciante said that he ended up leaving the production in June because of his skepticism about the case and how it was being portrayed.

He hired a private investigator, Dan Myers, who spent 20 years working for the Onondaga County Sheriff’s Office and retired as a detective in 2020, to look into the evidence against Mr. Broadwater, and became convinced of Mr. Broadwater’s innocence.

Mr. Myers suggested they bring the evidence they gathered to a lawyer and recommended Mr. Hammond, who reviewed the investigation and agreed there was a strong case. Around the same time, Mr. Broadwater decided to hire Mr. Hammond based on the recommendation of another local lawyer. 

[snip]

Mr. Broadwater recalled that he had just returned home to Syracuse from a stint serving in the Marine Corps in California when he was arrested. He was 20 years old at the time.

He had gone home because his father was ill, he said. His father’s health worsened during the trial, and he died shortly after Mr. Broadwater was sent to prison.

“I just hope and pray that maybe Ms. Sebold will come forward and say, ‘Hey, I made a grave mistake,’ and give me an apology,” Mr. Broadwater said.

“I sympathize with her,” he said. “But she was wrong.”

Ms. Sebold is in the tragic position of both being a rape victim and also having been the primary contributor to the false conviction of an innocent man.  It is further exacerbated by her fame and fortune resting on her recounting of that crime.

There is so much about this that seems wrong.  Deepest respect for Broadwater, as an innocent man wrongly convicted, persisting in his efforts to force the system to acknowledge a wrong.  Kudos also to Mucciante for speaking up when that would almost certainly have damaged his career.  The current DA also did the right thing by agreeing to the exoneration.