A memoir by the author who penned the bestseller The Lovely Bones has been pulled from shelves after the man she wrongly identified as her rapist was exonerated.
On November 22, Anthony Broadwater had his conviction overturned nearly four decades after he was convicted for the 1981 rape of Alice Sebold, who was then a 19-year-old college student.
Broadwater was behind bars for 16 years following a trial in which Sebold misidentified him as the man who raped her a year prior.
On Tuesday, November 30, eight days after he was exonerated, Sebold issued a public apology to him on the online publishing platform, Medium.
Sebold had recounted in graphic detail the night she was raped in her 1999 memoir, Lucky. Now, the book has been pulled from shelves, the author's publisher Scribner announced in a statement.
A spokesperson for Simon & Schuster, the owner of Sebold's publisher, Scribner, wrote in a statement:
"Following the recent exoneration of Anthony Broadwater, and in consultation with the author, Scribner and Simon & Schuster will cease distribution of all formats of Alice Sebold’s 1999 memoir Lucky while Sebold and Scribner together consider how the work might be revised."
In her apology to Broadwater, Sebold 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."
Broadwater has since responded to Sebold's apology in a statement released through his attorneys to Entertainment Weekly.
It reads: "I’m relieved that she has apologized. It must have taken a lot of courage for her to do that.
"It’s still painful to me because I was wrongfully convicted, but this will help me in my process to come to peace with what happened."