Alice Sebold, the author of The Lovely Bones, has apologized to the man who was incarcerated for 16 years after he was wrongfully convicted of raping her when she was a teenager.
Anthony Broadwater, who was found guilty of raping the then-18-year-old college student in 1982, had his conviction overturned by a judge on November 22. Sebold had misidentified the innocent man as her rapist at a trial a year after the assault.
However, a producer working on a film adaptation of Sebold's 1999 memoir, Lucky, which includes a graphic account of the night she was raped, noticed inconsistencies in the case and began doing his own research.
When the case was scrutinized more closely by officials, Broadwater was finally exonerated - nearly four decades after he was convicted.
On Tuesday, November 30, more than a week after he was exonerated, Sebold issued a public apology to him on the online publishing platform, Medium.
She wrote: "I am sorry most of all for the fact that the life you could have led was unjustly robbed from you, and I know that no apology can change what happened to you and never will."
Sebold explained that "as a traumatized 18-year-old rape victim, I chose to put my faith in the American legal system. My goal in 1982 was justice — not to perpetuate injustice. And certainly not to forever, and irreparably, alter a young man’s life by the very crime that had altered mine."
She added: "I am grateful that Mr. Broadwater has finally been vindicated, but the fact remains that 40 years ago, he became another young Black man brutalized by our flawed legal system. I will forever be sorry for what was done to him."
In her memoir, Lucky, Sebold recounted how she'd been raped by a Black man in a tunnel in May 1981. Some months later, she came across a man in the street who she was sure was the perpetrator.
After she informed the police, one officer suggested the man she had seen could have been Broadwater, who had supposedly been seen nearby.
When Broadwater was arrested, Sebold did not initially identify him in a police lineup, and instead 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 not being selected in the lineup, Broadwater was later convicted of the crime for two main reasons.
The first was that Sebold did eventually identify him as her rapist in court. And "evidence" in the form of microscopic hair analysis had linked Broadwater to the crime. This sort of evidence has in recent years been regarded as mere "junk science" by the U.S. Department of Justice.
The film adaption of Lucky has now been dropped.
