Decision reversed in 1982 rape case

A rape conviction at the center of a memoir by award-winning author Alice Sebold has been overturned because of what authorities determined were serious flaws with the 1982 prosecution and concerns the wrong man had been sent to jail.

Anthony Broadwater, who spent 16 years in prison, was cleared Monday by a judge of raping Sebold when she was a student at Syracuse University, an assault she wrote about in her 1999 memoir, “Lucky.”

Broadwater shook with emotion, sobbing as his head fell into his hands, as the judge in Syracuse vacated his conviction at the request of prosecutors.

“I’ve been crying tears of joy and relief the last couple of days,” Broadwater, 61, said Tuesday. “I’m so elated, the cold can’t even keep me cold.”

Sebold, 58, wrote in “Lucky” of being raped as a first-year student at Syracuse in May 1981 and then spotting a Black man in the street months later that she was sure was her attacker.

“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,” wrote Sebold, who is white. “‘Hey, girl,’ he said. ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’”

She said she didn’t respond: “I looked directly at him. Knew his face had been the face over me in the tunnel.”

Sebold went to police, but she didn’t know the man’s name. An officer suggested the man in the street must have been Broadwater, who Sebold gave the pseudonym Gregory Madison in her book.

After Broadwater was arrested, though, Sebold failed to identify him in a police lineup, picking a different man as her attacker.

Broadwater was nonetheless tried and convicted in 1982 based largely on two pieces of evidence. On the witness stand, Sebold identified him as her rapist. And an expert said microscopic hair analysis had tied Broadwater to the crime. That type of analysis has since been deemed junk science by the U.S. Department of Justice.