Victoria Pedretti, best known for her roles in You and The Haunting Of Hill House, has dropped out of Alice's Sebold's new biopic after the man the author accused of rape in a tunnel back in May 1981 was exonerated.
Anthony Broadwater, who was behind bars for 16 years after being convicted of a crime he did not commit, had his conviction overturned by a judge on Monday, November 22.
Sebold, who penned the bestseller The Lovely Bones, had identified him as her rapist at a trial over the assault.
It was only when major flaws in the trial were challenged decades later that the innocent man was exonerated.
Pedretti, 26, was previously selected to star in a film adaptation of Sebold's memoir Lucky, in which the author shares a graphic account of the night she was raped as a 19-year-old college student.
However, the You star has now dropped out of the project, Variety reports.
The outlet also reported that a source close to the production said that the film was dropped after losing all its financing some months ago.
In the book, Lucky, Sebold recounts the assault, explaining that she was raped by a Black man in a tunnel.
Some months after the traumatic incident, she came across a man in the street that she was sure was the one who had assaulted 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 engage with the man, explaining how she "looked directly at him. Knew his face had been the face over me in the tunnel."
Sebold went to the police but because she didn't know the man's name, they were not able to locate him.
One officer suggested the man she had seen in the street may have been Broadwater, who had apparently been seen in the area.
But when Broadwater was arrested, Sebold did not identify him in a police lineup, instead choosing 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 later found guilty of the crime at a trial in 1982 for two main reasons.
The first was that Sebold later identified him as her rapist in court. And "evidence" in the form of microscopic hair analysis had linked Broadwater to the crime. This type of evidence has in recent years been referred to as "junk science" by the U.S. Department of Justice.
