The producer who pulled out of a film adaptation of The Lovely Bones author's memoir due to inconsistencies over a passage written about an innocent man's rape conviction has said he has "questions" for her.
Anthony Broadwater, who was incarcerated for 16 years after Alice Sebold misidentified him in court as her rapist, had his conviction overturned by a judge on November 22.
The decision came after significant flaws in Broadwater's 1982 prosecution were scrutinized more closely.
Sebold, 58, had shared a harrowing account of the night she was raped when she was an 18-year-old student at Syracuse University in her 1999 memoir, Lucky.
But a producer working on a film adaptation of the 21-year-old book had noticed inconsistencies in the resulting trial and began doing his own research - even hiring a private investigator.
Now, in a piece for the Guardian, the producer, Timothy Mucciante, explained that while he doesn't think that Sebold, "as an 18-year-old rape victim, bears any blame," he does "have questions about the 39-year-old Sebold who wrote Lucky."
He continued: "Before she wrote the book, she had reviewed the entire district attorney's file, including the photo of the police lineup.
"Would she not have realized, in retrospect, that suspects four and five were not similar in appearance? Wouldn't she have had the opportunity to speak up at that time, to address her error, and vindicate her supposed attacker?"
While emphasizing that what Sebold went through on the night of May 8, 1981, was, of course, traumatic and tragic, he went on to suggest: "But isn't it equally tragic that she could have known, in the mid-1990s, that he was almost certainly not her attacker and could have tried to free him?"
In the book, Sebold goes into detail about the assault, explaining that she was raped by a Black man in a tunnel back in May 1981.
Months later, she came across a man in the street that she was sure was the person who raped her.
"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," Sebold wrote in her book. "'Hey, girl,' he said. 'Don’t I know you from somewhere?'"
She didn't speak to the man, recalling how she "looked directly at him. Knew his face had been the face over me in the tunnel."
Sebold went to the police but she didn't know the man's name and authorities had failed to locate him.
One officer suggested the man in the street could have been Broadwater, who had purportedly been seen nearby.
When Broadwater was arrested, Sebold did not identify him in a police lineup, and chose a different man as "the expression in his eyes told me that if we were alone, if there were no wall between us, he would call me by name and then kill me."
Despite this, Broadwater was ultimately convicted in 1982 for two main reasons.
The first was that Sebold would later identify him as her rapist in court. And "evidence" in the form of microscopic hair analysis had linked Broadwater to the assault. This type of evidence has in recent years been branded "junk science" by the U.S. Department of Justice.
