Alice Sebold's Lucky pulled from shelves, convection of man identified as rapist vacated

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Alice Sebold, the best-selling author of the memoir “Lucky” and the novel “The Lovely Bones,” apologized publicly on Tuesday to a man who was wrongly convicted of raping her in 1982 after she had identified him in court as her attacker.

The apology came eight days after the conviction of the man, Anthony J. Broadwater, was vacated by a state court judge in Syracuse, N.Y., who concluded, in consultation with the local district attorney and Mr. Broadwater’s lawyers, that the case against him was deeply flawed.

As a result of the conviction, Mr. Broadwater, 61, spent 16 years in prison before being released in 1998 and was forced to register as a sex offender.

In a statement posted on the website Medium, Ms. Sebold, who described the rape and the ensuing trial in “Lucky,” said she regretted having “unwittingly” played a part in “a system that sent an innocent man to jail.”

“I am sorry most of all for the fact that the life you could have led was unjustly robbed from you,” she wrote. “And I know that no apology can change what happened to you and never will. It has taken me these past eight days to comprehend how this could have happened.”

Ms. Sebold’s statement was reported earlier by The Associated Press. Her publisher, Scribner, said she was not available for additional comment.

Scribner said last week that it had no plans to update the memoir’s text based on Mr. Broadwater’s exoneration. But on Tuesday, the company said it would cease distribution of “Lucky” while it and Ms. Sebold “consider how the work might be revised.”

Mr. Broadwater, in an interview with The New York Times on Tuesday, said he was “relieved and grateful” for Ms. Sebold’s apology.

“It took a lot of courage, and I guess she’s brave and weathering through the storm like I am,” he said. “To make that statement, it’s a strong thing for her to do, understanding that she was a victim and I was a victim too.”

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The assailant was a stranger, but Ms. Sebold had studied his appearance — his small but muscular build, the way he gestured, his eyes and lips.

And so, five months later, when she spotted a man named Anthony Broadwater near a restaurant on Marshall Street, Ms. Sebold knew she had solved her case. She reported him to the authorities, saying that Mr. Broadwater had said to her, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

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On Oct. 5, 1981, he and a friend drove over to Marshall Street, a stretch of restaurants and shops that had long served as a gathering place for college students. While his friend was inside a store, Mr. Broadwater recognized a police officer from his younger days. Later, in court, the officer and Mr. Broadwater would each remember calling out to the other, “Don’t I know you?”

The two made small talk, unaware that Ms. Sebold had passed Mr. Broadwater on the street and was watching their exchange.

Days later, Mr. Broadwater was taken into custody. Ms. Sebold had identified him as her rapist.

But when it came time for the police lineup, Ms. Sebold, who is white, looked at the Black men before her and indicated that her attacker was the last person in the row, Number Five. Mr. Broadwater was Number Four. She would insist an hour later that the two men had looked identical to her.

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The memoir follows Ms. Sebold’s entire journey through the criminal justice system.

In one scene, she recounts how a prosecutor she trusted, named Gail Uebelhoer, told her that the man she identified in the lineup was a friend of Mr. Broadwater and had tricked her by staring menacingly.

According to the book, Ms. Uebelhoer then coached her into explaining away the misidentification in front of the grand jury. When reached by The Times, Ms. Uebelhoer declined to comment.

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Earlier this year, Mr. Mucciante was forging ahead in a new career, having started his own film production company. He had joined other producers who were adapting Ms. Sebold’s memoir and planning to film it in Toronto. He offered to cover the film’s entire budget of 6.5 million Canadian dollars.

As Mr. Mucciante read the script and the book, he was struck by how little evidence was presented at trial. He said he began to doubt the memoir’s veracity and withheld funding until he was dismissed from the project, which never got off the ground.

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After talking at length with Mr. Broadwater and reading Ms. Sebold’s memoir, the lawyers discovered the arguments they could make for exoneration were astonishingly obvious: The flawed hair comparison testimony. The heavy reliance on Ms. Sebold spotting her rapist five months afterward. The misidentification during the police lineup. The fact that Mr. Broadwater had passed two polygraph tests.

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Ms. Sebold said she had learned a few weeks before Mr. Broadwater’s exoneration that the district attorney was re-evaluating the case.

“It’s hard to unravel a truth I now know to be false and that has been part of my life for forty years and my work for twenty, without my whole understanding of truth and justice falling apart,” she said through a spokesman in an email to The Times, adding that she hadn’t been able to think about much else.

“Every word I’ve read that Anthony Broadwater has said has made me see him as a man who, though brutalized, somehow came through it with a generous heart,” she said. “To go from thinking he was the man who raped me to believing he was an innocent victim is an earth-shattering change.”

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