Lovely Bones author Alice Sebold apologises to man wrongfully jailed 16 years for her rape in 1981
- Anthony Broadwater was convicted in 1982 after Alice Sebold, then a university student, mistakenly identified him as the man who attacked her
- Broadwater, who spent 16 years in prison, was exonerated by a court in New York last week after the case was reopened
Author Alice Sebold publicly apologised Tuesday to the man who was exonerated last week in the 1981 rape that was the basis for her memoir Lucky and said she was struggling with the role she played “within a system that sent an innocent man to jail”.
Anthony Broadwater, 61, was convicted in 1982 of raping Sebold when she was a student at Syracuse University. He served 16 years in prison. His conviction was overturned November 22 after prosecutors re-examined the case and determined there were serious flaws in his arrest and trial.
In a statement, Sebold, the author of the novels The Lovely Bones and The Almost Moon, wrote to Broadwater that she was truly sorry for what he’d been through.
“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,” she wrote.
She wrote that “as a traumatised 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.”
In a statement issued by his lawyers, Broadwater said he was “relieved that she has apologised”.
He went on: “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”.