the new yorker revisits the case of alice sebold and anthony broadwater
Anthony Broadwater spent 16 years in prison after the writer Alice Sebold misidentified him as her rapist. Rachel Aviv untangles how prosecutorial misconduct, racial bias, and trauma shaped the case.https://t.co/7yju6hMt34
- The New Yorker (@NewYorker) May 25, 2023
alice sebold, the previously celebrated author of the lovely bones and her memoir, lucky was profiled by the new yorker. if you are not familiar, previous posts are here that sum up that [cw: rape, racism]alice sebold was raped at eighteen years old on her college campus. months later, anthony broadwater, a black man, smiled at her on the street. alice sebold would go on to accuse him of being her rapist, and he was in prison for sixteen years. however, when the memoir was being made into a film, red flags sprung up and it lead to anthony broadwater being exonerated for this crime.
the new yorker profile is long, but here are some relevant points even though i urge you to read it (archive link)
[cw: rape, racism, ptsd]
- sebold currently has gone into a state where she is unable to write or trust herself as a writer. she has frequent vertigo and has stated "she will never write again."
- her experience of sexual assault was frequently used in her writing classes and her professors more or less pushed her to write more about it. her parents seemed to have blamed her for her assault.
- anthony broadwater never smiled at alice. he was smiling at a cop friend, who later was part of the effort to exonerate him.
- the book wound up being the downfall of the case as, due to her meticulousness, she wrote how she had not, in fact, identified anthony in a line up and she was told that; she also revealed how the system more or less aided and validated her at every turn despite other mess ups; the man she had identified in the line up looked nothing like anthony himself. this wound up being a frequent thing that people raised as flags whenever attempts at adapting this book came up. there were at the very least two productions that flagged this at some point.
- one production had her rapist changed to a white man, which sebold approved of.
- anthony broadwater does not nearly have enough in this profile. he had very little support due to the fact that his family thought he would not be convicted as they didn't believe the charges, leading to a shock when he was. he describes serving all of his sentence as he refused to say he committed a crime he did not, leading him to be berated by parole boards and routinely denied parole due to him "not taking responsibility for his crime.
- he was released and became obsessed with surveillance to prove he was never up to anything untoward. even now, he prefers jobs during certain hours, with cameras on him in case there needed to be proof of his innocence in the future. his wife read his court documents and married him, but the couple decided not to have children so as not to have the stigma attached to him
- unfortunately, anthony was conned: the producer who investigated his claims was also an previously convicted con man lawyer who anthony sold his rights to. however, he found that the man was conning him again, and cut off ties
- anthony and alice have not met faced to face ever since these revelations. additionally, he was awarded $5.5 million by NY after his wrongful conviction.
obviously, the whole profile is at the source.