A ruined life: how a writer pointed the finger at the wrong man
In 1981, the author Alice Sebold testified against the man she was convinced had raped her in a tunnel. He was jailed for over 16 years, but has just been exonerated thanks to an amateur sleuth. Rosie Kinchen reports on a wrenching miscarriage of justice
On 5 October 1981, a young black man and a young white woman crossed paths on a street in Syracuse, New York. They barely interacted, but the moment would set the course of both of their lives. The woman was the author Alice Sebold, then an 18-year-old undergraduate at Syracuse University reeling from a rape she had endured five months earlier. She was confused and angry about what had happened to her, but in that moment she felt certain of something for the first time in months: this was the man who had raped her.
She would describe this moment years later in her first book, a memoir called Lucky, about her rape and the subsequent trial. “I knew his face had been the face over me in the tunnel. Knew I had kissed those lips, stared into those eyes,” she wrote. The book would launch her onto the literary scene. She was lauded by critics as someone who could “speak the unspeakable” about sexual assault, a reputation she cemented with her second book, The Lovely Bones, published in 2002, the story of a 14-year-old girl who is raped and murdered. It sold more than a million copies and was made into a film starring Saoirse Ronan.
For the man, Anthony
Broadwater, who had just left the marines, the day would have very different consequences. He was convicted of rape and served more than 16 years in prison. Only now has it emerged that on that autumn afternoon Sebold made a terrible mistake. Last month, Broadwater, 61, was cleared of any involvement in the crime. He wept as a statement from the district attorney, William Fitzpatrick, was read to the court: “I will not tarnish this proceeding by saying I’m sorry. That does not matter. This should never have happened.” How it did happen is a tale of our times: one that shows the extent to which race, inequality and prejudice still play a pivotal role in the American justice system. Most surprising of all is that Sebold’s book was the key piece of evidence used to overturn Broadwater’s conviction.
None of this would have happened were it not for Timothy Mucciante, an unassuming lawyer, writer and former journalist from Michigan. In January, Mucciante was hired as executive producer of a film adaptation of Lucky, Sebold’s memoir. It was a big production and a big break for him, so he set about familiarising himself with the book.
Almost 30 years after it was written, Lucky is still a powerful read. Sebold recounts the feeling of being pushed to the ground; of having a tongue forced into her mouth and hands shoved inside her. “Those who say they would rather fight to the death than be raped are fools. I would rather be raped a thousand times. You do what you have to,” Sebold writes.
The first part of the book did not worry Mucciante. “None of my doubts involve the story she told about her assault, which was tragic,” he told me. “My doubts came about from the trial portion, which is essentially the second half of the book.”
After she had reported the rape, Sebold returned to Philadelphia for the summer. It was during the following term at Syracuse, five months after the assault, that she walked past Broadwater in the street and felt certain he had attacked her. He even seemed to acknowledge it with a taunt. As Sebold writes: “‘Hey girl,’ he said, ‘don’t I know you from somewhere?’ he smirked at me, remembering.” She called the police, and within hours Broadwater had been arrested and charged.
For Mucciante, parts of what she had written “did not ring true”. He was particularly concerned by the police line-up. About a month after she’d seen Broadwater in the street, Sebold was asked to pick out her attacker from a line-up of five black men. She chose No. 5; Broadwater was No. 4. In her memoir she explains this away: the two men “were like identical twins”, she observes. An officer told her she had chosen “the wrong one” and Sebold recalls feeling crestfallen until, she writes, the deputy district attorney, Gail Uebelhoer, told her she had fallen into a trap. Broadwater had insisted on bringing along a friend who looked like him, and the two men stood next to one another, one looking downcast and diminutive, the other staring straight at her to throw off her judgement. “They really worked a number on you. He uses the friend, or the friend uses him, in every line-up they do,” Uebelhoer told her in Sebold’s account. The case against Broadwater proceeded to trial. But Mucciante knew the exchange should never have taken place. “It’s completely inappropriate for an assistant district attorney to make these kinds of statements,” he says. He tried to brush off his doubts: lawyers would have looked over the text, he thought.
The racial undertones of the memoir were causing other problems. The film was being made in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Mucciante says a black actor who had been in pole position to play the part of Broadwater pulled out. “He said that he could not in all good
“Broadwater was cleared of any involvement in the crime. He wept as a district attorney said
the conviction should never have happened”
conscience play this role; he felt it would result in the deaths of other black men, because of the portrayal of a black man raping a white woman. He did not want to prolong that stereotype.”
A decision was made to change the story: the assailant became a white man. Mucciante disagreed with this departure from fact, fell out with the production team and was fired in June. It was reported last month that the project has now been abandoned.
After leaving the production, Mucciante was free to work out what it was about the book that bothered him so much. He found Dan Myers, a private detective who had good police contacts in Syracuse, and hired him to dig, without really knowing what he was hoping to find. Broadwater was released from prison in 1999. Myers and a colleague were able to track him down to a rundown flat in Syracuse and interviewed him for an hour. They got in the car afterwards, looked at one another. “‘This guy’s not guilty. Oh my God,’ we said. That’s how it started,” Mucciante recalls.
Once they started looking, they found red flags everywhere. The attacker was said to be right-handed. “The first time I met Anthony, he had to sign paperwork for the private investigator and I noticed he signed it with his left hand.” Broadwater’s words to Sebold on the street that day had a rational explanation: a policeman who had been standing behind Sebold, and testified that he knew Broadwater, claimed he had been calling out to him and had not said “girl”.
“The most painful part of the story is that, once the mistake had been made, there was so little interest in resolving it”
Two points in particular undermined the case. One was that the only crime-scene evidence against Broadwater was microscopic hair analysis – a hair had been retrieved from Sebold’s body and Broadwater had voluntarily submitted one, believing it would exonerate him. Instead an expert had testified that they were “consistent”. The scientific basis for this technique has been thoroughly discredited in the years since the 1982 trial.
The second was Sebold’s account of what had happened before and after the line-up. The man she identified, Henry Hudson, whom Sebold said could have been an “identical twin”, looked nothing like Broadwater. He had had nothing to do with the crime, and he and Broadwater had never met before they arrived at the police station that day. Contrary to what Sebold was told, Broadwater had never been in a police line-up until then. In his supporting statement last week the district attorney agreed that the conversation between Sebold and Uebelhoer, if true, should never have taken place.
The racist undercurrents of the trial trouble Mucciante most, especially at a time when the racial fault line running through the justice system has been laid bare. Transcripts show that in 1982 the prosecution repeatedly brought up Sebold’s behaviour, clothing and virginity to highlight her credibility and emphasise Broadwater’s alleged guilt in a way that his lawyers described as a “dog whistle”. At one point, in an attempt to make up for her error in the line-up, Sebold was asked by the prosecution to identify her rapist in court. Broadwater was the only black man in the room. “The idea that she could point out the only black guy in the courtroom and that is her only identification of him ever – I mean, how much more racist can we get?” Mucciante asks.
In their application last month, Broadwater’s lawyers said that “cross-race bias”, the high likelihood of mistakes being made by a person identifying someone of another race, should be factored in. A 2001 analysis of 39 research articles involving 5,000 witnesses showed that cross-race identification was 56% more likely to be wrong than same-race identification.
Sebold herself comes back to the issue of race over and over again in Lucky. She recalls the discomfort she felt when the black boyfriend of a friend tried to hug her, and the “fear I felt around certain black men since the rape”. She is acutely aware of how Broadwater’s trial looked – that she, the white, middle-class daughter of an academic, was accusing a black man of rape. At one point she writes: “This wouldn’t be the first time, or the last, that I wished my rapist had been white.” But she does not appear to dwell on it enough to consider if she may have made a mistake.
Mucciante says that there is no doubt in his mind that Sebold’s error was an honest one. But, having read her version of events and the transcript of the trial, he does have concerns about her representation of the facts. “When you read the transcript, it does not reflect a lot of what Alice describes in the trial.” One example is a report Sebold refers to in the book that apparently found Broadwater’s pubic hair matched the one on her body in 17 out of a possible 17 points. Mucciante and Myers found no evidence of such a report.
When you read the facts now, the most painful part of the story is that, once the mistake had been made, there was so little interest in resolving it. Broadwater maintained his innocence throughout his trial and incarceration. He was denied parole five times because he refused to acknowledge guilt. On five occasions he tried to overturn the judgment, once attempting to hire the lawyers who represented O.J. Simpson. He has also submitted to two liedetector tests, both of which he passed. It made no difference.
Broadwater told reporters last month that the conviction had ruined his life. He has been on the sex offender register ever since, has been turned down for numerous jobs and said he could count the homes he had been welcomed into on two hands. “That’s very traumatic for me,” he told the judge. Broadwater signed up to take a course on heating and air-conditioning installation, only to be ordered to stay off campus when it was discovered that he was a sex offender.
He married the year after he was released from prison, having made his wife sit down and read the court transcript before she made the decision to be part of his life. They never had children, even though she wanted to, because he didn’t want them to grow up with his criminal record hanging over their heads. Even so, Mucciante says Broadwater is not angry with Sebold. “All he really wants from Alice is for her to say, ‘I was 18. I was misguided by the defence. It was a mistake.’ He is not holding her personally responsible. She didn’t know any better.” Last week Alice Sebold apologised to Anthony Broadwater. “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 said in a statement. Broadwater said in turn via his lawyers that he was “relieved that she has apologised”. Scribner, the publisher of
Lucky, has said it will stop distributing the book. A longer version of this article appeared in The Sunday Times © The Sunday Times/News Licensing 2021