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From LitHub: The rape conviction at the center of The Lovely Bones author Alice Sebold’s memoir, Lucky, was overturned after an executive producer on its film adaptation started asking questions about the guilt of Anthony Broadwater, who served 16 years in prison after his conviction and spent 24 more on the sex offender registry.
Following the exoneration, the film adaptation was canceled and Scribner pulled Lucky from shelves.
In Lucky, Alice Sebold wrote about being raped as a first-year university student in 1981 and then recognizing a man in the street months later as her attacker. “He was smiling as he approached,” wrote Sebold in Lucky. “He recognized me. It was a stroll in the park to him; he had met an acquaintance on the street. ‘Hey, girl,’ he said. ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ . . . I looked directly at him. Knew his face had been the face over me in the tunnel.”
After Broadwater—who is Black—was arrested, Sebold identified a different man in a police lineup. But Sebold identified Broadwater as her rapist on the witness stand, after a prosecutor purportedly told her Broadwater and the man she identified in the lineup were friends conspiring to trick her. Overturning Broadwater’s conviction, the defense argued that the case had relied solely on Sebold identifying Broadwater in the courtroom and microscopic hair analysis, which is now considered junk science. “I’m not going to sully this proceeding by saying, ‘I’m sorry.’ That doesn’t cut it,” Onondaga county district attorney William Fitzpatrick said at the court hearing where Broadwater was exonerated. “This never should have happened.”
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