ALICE SEBOLD CASE HOW AN INNOCENT MAN WAS JAILED
A MOVIE PRODUCER HELPED REVEAL THE TRUTH SOME FOUR DECADES ON
Movie producer Timothy Mucciante became an overnight sensation after he cracked a 40-year-old case, thanks to the screen adaptation of Alice Sebold’s bestseller, Lucky, he was working on.
Timothy had been producing the film about renowned author Alice’s rape, which took place when she was 18. The flick was to feature You star, Victoria Pedretti, when he noticed major discrepancies between Alice’s memoir and the script.
He soon became convinced Anthony Broadwater, who was convicted of raping Alice and served 16 years in prison, was innocent. He left the film in June and hired a private investigator to review the case.
Anthony, 61, cried tears of joy when his conviction was sensationally overturned last month and Alice – who also wrote the wildly successful novel, The Lovely Bones
– apologised for the role she played “within a system that sent an innocent man to jail”.
“My goal in
1982 was justice, not to perpetuate injustice,” Alice,
58, said. “And certainly not to forever, and irreparably, alter a young man’s life by the very crime that had altered mine.”
Alice was a freshman student at Syracuse University, New York, when she was attacked from behind by a man in a park in the early hours of May 8, 1981.
In Lucky, which made her an estimated $3 million, Alice describes in graphic detail how he raped her then let her go, saying she was a “good girl” and apologising for what he had done.
When she reported the crime to police, she was told she was “lucky”, as a young woman had once been murdered and dismembered in the same location, which inspired the name for her book.
Months after the attack, Alice identified a different man as a rapist in her police line-up, but she was steered towards Anthony, a former US marine, by the police department and prosecutors.
He was originally convicted based largely on Alice identifying him as her rapist on the witness stand, and a testimony that microscopic hairs had tied him to the crime – which has since been deemed as junk science.
Timothy said he was fired from the production of Lucky this year when he began raising questions about the events in the story.
“I started having some doubts, not about the story that Alice told about her assault, which was tragic, but the second part of her book about the trial, which didn’t hang together,” he explained. “I was struck by how little evidence was presented at Broadwater’s trial. It seemed like Anthony was wronged.”
After hiring a private investigator, Timothy found Anthony living in a derelict apartment in Syracuse, the town where the rape occurred.
Netflix has since dropped the production of Lucky and Anthony will star alongside Timothy in a documentary about his life called Unlucky.
As is custom in documentaries, Anthony won’t be compensated for taking part in the film, but a Gofundme has so far raised more than $53,000 for him.
After his release in 1999, the same year Lucky was published, Anthony became a registered violent sex offender – a purgatory that diminished his income, quality of life and chance of having children.
Anthony burst into tears when Alice sent him a personal apology, just like he did in court days earlier when he was exonerated.
“It is still painful to me because I was wrongly convicted, but this will help me in my process to come to peace with what happened,” he said. “It comes sincerely from her heart.”