Author sorry for injustice in rape case
“Lovely Bones” author Alice Sebold has apologized to the man wrongfully convicted for her 1981 rape, lamenting he was “unjustly robbed” of “the life you could have led.”
Anthony Broadwater, 61, spent 16 years in prison after his conviction for raping Sebold (photo) when she was a first-year student at Syracuse University. On Nov. 22, a judge cleared his conviction at the request of prosecutors, who called it an injustice “that should never have happened.”
“First, I want to say that I am truly sorry to Anthony Broadwater and I deeply regret what you have been through,” Sebold, 58, wrote in a statement posted on Medium.
“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. Of the many things I wish for you, I hope most of all that you and your family will be granted the time and privacy to heal,” she added.
In 1999 Sebold, who’s white, published her memoir, “Lucky,” recounting her rape in May 1981 and later seeing a Black man on the street who she believed was her attacker. He was later arrested.
In her Tuesday post, “The Almost Moon” writer said “as a traumatized 18-year-old rape victim,” she chose to put her faith in the American legal system.
Her goal in 1982 had been 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,” she wrote.
Though grateful that Broadwater has been vindicated, Sebold said she’d “forever be sorry for what was done to him.”
Speaking out on Broadwater’s exoneration for the first time, Sebold wrote it has taken “these past eight days to comprehend how this could have happened.”
She added she will “continue to struggle with the role that I unwittingly played within a system that sent an innocent man to jail,” and that the person who raped her “may have gone on to rape other women, and certainly will never serve the time in prison that Mr. Broadwater did.”