The real villain in Sebold’s tale still hasn’t been caught
As the ‘rapist’ of ‘The Lovely Bones’ author has his conviction overturned, Christina Patterson unpicks a twist wilder than fiction
O‘What are you meant to say when a man’s life has been ruined? As the judge said, sorry doesn’t cut it’
n May 8 1981, Alice Sebold was stopped on her way back to her university dormitory, dragged into a tunnel and raped. “You’re the worst b---- I ever done this to,” said the man who crushed her to the ground. She was a virgin. She was 18.
A 20-year-old man, Anthony Broadwater, was convicted of sodomy and rape, and was in prison for 16 years. On Monday, he wept in court as his conviction was overturned on the grounds of flawed evidence, including a discredited method of hair analysis and mis-identification in a police line-up.
When Broadwater was approached by a private detective earlier this year, he had no idea that the woman he was jailed for raping had written a book about her ordeal that had sold more than a million copies. Sebold’s memoir, Lucky, was published in 1999, the year after Broadwater (“Gregory Madison” in the book) was released.
She had started writing it, she explained when I interviewed her in 2003, because she wasn’t making progress with the novel she was trying to write. “I realised that I had to get myself out of there” – so she sat down, wrote Lucky and did. It got some good reviews and then, she told me, “sank into oblivion”. It was her novel that changed everything. That book, The Lovely Bones, published in 2002, became a New York Times No 1 bestseller. It was made into a blockbuster film by Peter Jackson and has now sold more than five million copies.
While Sebold was touring TV studios to talk about her books, Broadwater was struggling to adapt to post-prison life as a convicted sex offender and social pariah. He got by with odd jobs and hauling rubbish. He tried taking classes in heating and air-conditioning, but was banned from the campus. He did night shifts at factories, so police couldn’t implicate him in another late-night attack. He lives with his wife in a derelict apartment in Syracuse, New York State, with tarpaulin on the windows to protect them from the cold. His wife had always wanted children, but he refused. “I wouldn’t bring children into the world because of this,” he told a journalist this week.
It’s a story to break the heart, but it also has a twist that even a novelist as imaginative as Sebold might have trouble dreaming up. It was a producer working on the Netflix film of Lucky, due out next year, who smelt a rat. “I started having some doubts, not about the story that Alice told about her assault,” Timothy Mucciante, an executive producer on the film, told a newspaper this week, “but the second part of her book about the trial, which didn’t hang together.” He left the film in June, and hired private investigator Dan Myers to look into the case.
Myers, a former detective, became convinced of Broadwater’s innocence. He had never stopped fighting to clear his name and even turned down the chance of early release in return for an admission of guilt. But he couldn’t raise the money for lawyers. Mucciante launched a crowd-funding campaign for two lawyers to act on his behalf. And on Monday, state Supreme Court Justice Gordon Cuffy told the court, “I’m not going to sully this proceeding by saying, ‘I’m sorry.’ That doesn’t cut it.”
It certainly doesn’t. And what of Alice Sebold? It was, after all, her false identification of Broadwater as the rapist that played a key part in his conviction. Is she sorry? Yesterday, she was spotted walking her dog in a street near her home. (A “$6m mansion in San Francisco”, according to one newspaper, next to a helpful photo.) When a journalist asked her if she had anything to say to Broadwater, she marched on in silence. Her publishers, Scribner, have issued no comment. They have also said they have no plans to update the text of Lucky. Others have strongly implied it’s time some of Sebold’s own “luck” was shared.
Sebold, and Scribner, will presumably comment at some point. But what are you meant to say when a man’s life has been ruined? And when your own misfortune has made you rich, but his has cost him almost everything? As the judge said, sorry doesn’t cut it.
The title, Lucky, was always ironic, of course. After Sebold went to the police, cut, bleeding and wincing from the pressure points that would soon turn into “an elegant lattice-work of bruises”, she was told by a male officer that a girl had been murdered and dismembered in the tunnel where she was raped. Sebold, he said, was lucky. But she didn’t feel lucky, as she lay on a couch and a doctor took samples of semen and blood. Sebold also didn’t feel lucky when she realised that no shower would ever wash off the shame. “I share my life with my rapist,” she writes in Lucky. “After telling the hard facts to anyone from lover to friend, I have changed in their eyes.” What she sees in their eyes is repulsion. “I was changed, bloodied, damaged goods, ruined.” She “saw violence everywhere”.
After dropping out of graduate school, she moved to a “low-income housing project” where she tried to numb her pain with alcohol and heroin. She left to become a caretaker, for $386 (£290) a month, at a writer’s colony, living in a log cabin with no electricity, and started to rebuild her life. When I met her in 2003, she was rich, famous and in love. She had married the writer Glen David Gold and moved to San Francisco. Four years later, she published her second novel, The Almost Moon. It had mixed reviews. Sam Anderson of the New York Magazine commented on its similarity to The Lovely Bones. “I wonder,” he wrote, “if her imaginative territory is just so small that we’ve already had the full tour.” Not kind, perhaps, but she hasn’t published a book since. She is also divorced.
I was not a big fan of The Lovely Bones, but Lucky remains one of the most powerful memoirs I’ve read. It’s spare, stark, harrowing and utterly lacking in self-pity. It’s electric with the pain that bad luck brings: walking in the wrong park, on the wrong night, that hair-line fracture between everything being OK and changing for ever. Now we know that the day she “ran into” her rapist in the street was the start of another piece of life-changing bad luck. “I looked directly at him,” she writes. “Knew his face had been the face over me in the tunnel.” But she was wrong.
There are plenty casting stones: she must be racist, for example, because she thinks all black men look the same. In fact, she was at pains to point out during the case that she lived on a multi-racial campus. She was also misled and pressurised by people keen to win in court. The evidence was flimsy and, we now know, false. But the rape, the violence and the trauma were not. This is a tragedy for Broadwater and for Sebold, too. The real villain in this tale hasn’t yet been caught.
Broadwater has said that all he wants now is to look at people more confidently, be able to walk through a park without feeling uneasy and maybe take a holiday. His lawyers think he should get financial compensation. Nothing can compensate him for what he has been through, but I really hope he gets it.