A Black Man Spent 16 Years in Prison After LOVELY BONES Author Alice Sebold Wrongly Accused Him of Rape

No apology from Ms. Sebold yet. Should we hold our breath?

Anthony Broadwater, seconds after a judge exonerated him of the decades-old crime he was never guilty of. Photo by CNN.

In 1981, twenty-year-old Anthony Broadwater had just returned to Syracuse, New York, after a stint in the Marines. His father was quite ill, and Anthony desperately wanted to see him. Out of the blue, Anthony was arrested, although he had no idea what he was being arrested for.

Shortly after his trial and conviction for a crime he kept insisting he hadn’t committed, Anthony Broadwater suffered another tragedy: the death of his father.

Previously, a brutal rape had taken place in a Syracuse park. The victim was eighteen-year-old Alice Sebold, then a freshman at Syracuse University. The rape was later described in horrifying detail in her memoir, Lucky, published twenty years later. What she went through was indeed ghastly, and clearly led to her PTSD and recreational heroin use (Sebold has since cleaned up.). After going to the police and still no suspects caught, Sebold began to despair.

Five months later, while walking down a street near Syracuse University, Sebold became convinced she’d just spotted her attacker. She notified the police, who lost no time picking up the man she claimed had raped her: Anthony Broadwater.

At the police lineup, Sebold identified a different man as her rapist. This is important, so let me repeat it: Sebold identified a different man as her rapist. The mind plays terrible tricks, especially on the traumatized. But there is another possible reason why, according to the Innocence Project, “358 people who were convicted and sentenced to death since 1989 have been exonerated through DNA evidence. Of these, 71% had been convicted through eyewitness misidentification and served an average of 14 years in prison before exoneration. Of those false identifications, 41% involved cross-racial misidentifications, and 28% of the cases involved a false confession”.

Ms. Sebold is White. Mr. Broadwater is Black.

Did this factor into her confusion?

In her memoir, Ms. Sebold reports that in the police lineup, Mr. Broadwater looked just like the man standing next to him. She also writes that “a detective and a prosecutor told her after the lineup that she picked out the wrong man and how the prosecutor deliberately coached her into rehabilitating her misidentification,"

Regrettably, this did not stop Ms. Sebold from testifying against Mr. Broadwater in court. He was promptly sentenced to 8 to 25 years in prison, based on her eyewitness testimony and a now-discredited type of microscopic hair analysis that, according to the FBI, contained errors in at least 90% of the cases the agency reviewed.

Even after his release 16 years later, Mr. Broadwater fought to get his conviction overturned, going through five different legal teams. He may have “served his debt to society”, but being on the Sex Offenders’ Registry made it impossible for him to get a decent job or reintegrate into the life he had previously enjoyed. “On my two hands, I can count the people that allowed me to grace their homes and dinners, and I don’t get past 10,” he said. “That’s very traumatic to me.”

His wife, whom he met and married in 1999, wanted children, but "I wouldn't bring children in the world because of this. And now, we're past days, we can't have children," Mr. Broadwater told reporters after the court hearing.

So, how was the case finally brought up for review? Knowing she’d been coached, did Ms. Sebold come to regret her fuzzy identification of the suspect and demand that Mr. Broadwater’s case be reopened?

Not hardly.

Credit for Mr. Broadwater’s exoneration lies entirely with the Timothy Mucciante, an executive producer working on an adaptation of Ms. Sebold’s memoir, Lucky, who noticed discrepancies between the memoir and the script.

In a recent interview, Mr. Mucciante said, “I started having some doubts, not about the story that Alice told about her assault, which was tragic, but the second part of her book about the trial, which didn’t hang together.”

Due to his mounting skepticism, Mr. Mucciante left the production in June. Yet, doubts continued to haunt him. He hired a private investigator, Dan Myers, to look into the case. It took little time for Mr. Myers to conclude that Mr. Broadwater was, indeed, innocent. With a raft of evidence, it was a relatively straightforward process getting Onandaga County to reopen the case.

After forty years of living under the shadow of his wrongful conviction, when Mr. Broadwater heard the judge grant him his exoneration, he hung his head and wept.

“I sympathize with her, what happened to her," he said about Ms. Sebold. "I just hope there's a sincere apology. I would accept it. I'm not bitter or have malice towards her."

That, my friends, is about as Gandhi as it gets.

CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others have reached out to Ms. Sebold and her publisher multiple times for comment. So far, none has been forthcoming.

It surprises me how this story keeps getting buried under other ledes. More people need to know about it, which is why I’m taking the time to detail what happened. And it’s very hard for me not to conflate Ms. Sebold’s silence with disapproval of the court’s decision. I don’t know what’s in her heart, but an articulate, intelligent woman like her must surely be aware that her misidentification of Mr. Broadwater as her assailant was sketchy and irresponsible at best, and may very well have been clouded by conscious or unconscious racism.

Was she afraid what might happen to her if she came forward? Or did she push all thoughts of Mr. Broadwater from her mind? What if she was that most odious and commonplace of creatures, a Karen, all too willing to throw a person of color under the bus and then shed White woman tears about it later?

Until she comes forward, we may never know.

It is gratifying to learn that as of November 27, the film adaptation of Lucky has lost its financing. Victoria Pedretti, who was slated to star as Sebold, has recused herself from the project.

But I can’t help but dwell on the fact that while Mr. Broadwater was behind bars, Ms. Sebold was enjoying the fruits of her literary success. Shouldn’t remuneration be involved—say, all the proceeds of Lucky and whatever else she received when the story was optioned? If not that, then perhaps the book itself should be removed from bookshelves.

I am trying to be fair here, but a man’s life was forfeit because of Ms. Sebold’s outrageously irresponsible testimony. And it’s not like these things don’t happen with ghastly regularity. Vigilante “justice” has resulted in an estimated 3,500 lynchings of Black people since the 1870s. In recent weeks, a man named Kevin Strickland was exonerated in three murders after 43 years in prison. Four Black men known as the Groveland Four, charged with raping a White woman 70 years ago in Florida, were exonerated in November of this year. And then, of course, the two men accused of assassinating Malcolm X fifty-five years ago were finally exonerated, too. But not after spending most of their lives in prison.

Aren’t we sick of perpetuating these kinds of human rights violations against people of color? Aren’t we sick of failing the Black community, over and over again? Is it really necessary for me to remind everybody that we are AMERICANS FIRST, regardless of the color of our skin, and that injustice perpetrated against one is an injustice perpetrated against all?

I hope I live long enough to see an American judicial system that is truly blind to race. Meanwhile, I’d be happy to hear even a word from Alice Sebold.

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