This ugly, difficult situation over Alice Sebold’s bestselling 1999 memoir about her rape, and the exoneration last week of the black man wrongly convicted of that rape, is an intersectional nightmare in my view. Sexual violence against a woman, racist assumptions and wrongful imprisonment against a black man, plus police and prosecutor corruption created a tragedy, and the fact that neither Sebold nor her publisher Scribner seem willing to even apologize is infuriating.
[Update: After eight days, Sebold issued a 400 word apology earlier today. I’ll address the apology below.] [Update 2: Scribner has pulled the book. In their statement, they say “Following the recent exoneration of Anthony Broadwater, and in consultation with the author, Scribner and Simon & Schuster will cease distribution … while Sebold and Scribner together consider how the work might be revised,” Sebold’s UK publisher Pan Macmillan has also pulled the title.]
Sebold’s memoir, Lucky, recounts her 1981 rape as a 19-year-old student at Syracuse University. The title stems from a police officer telling her she was “lucky” to be alive because someone had raped and then murdered his victim in the same place. Sebold suffered from PTSD and addiction troubles for years.
She told police it had been a black man, but the composite sketch drawn from her description was inconclusive. A rape kit was done. Months passed with no arrests. Then, nearly six full months later, Sebold spotted a Black man on Marshall Street near Syracuse University. As Sebold describes it in her memoir,
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. ‘Hey, girl,’ he said. ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ I knew him, but I could not make myself speak. I needed all my energy to focus on believing I was not under his control again….
“I did not respond,” Sebold wrote. She wrote that she was too afraid to call out: “That’s the man who raped me!” Instead, she kept walking as she said she heard him laughing.
He had no fear. It had been nearly six months since we’d seen each other last. Six months since I lay under him in a tunnel on top of a bed of broken glass. He was laughing because he had gotten away with it, because he had raped before me, and because he would rape again. My devastation was a pleasure for him. He was walking the streets, scot-free
Sebold went to the police, who searched the area without success. Then a police officer suggested the name of Anthony Broadwater, a Black man they had seen in the area. The police picked him up and placed him in a police line-up for Sebold to identify. Looking at the line-up through one-way glass, Sebold identified the wrong man in the line-up. Regarding this, Sebold wrote: “the expression in his eyes told me that if we were alone, if there were no wall between us, he would call me by name and then kill me”.
Nevertheless, the police worked to convince the teenaged Sebold that Broadwater was the right man. As The New York Times reports:
[T]he prosecutor had falsely told Ms. Sebold that Mr. Broadwater and the man next to him were friends who had purposely appeared in the lineup together to trick her — and that it had improperly influenced Ms. Sebold’s later testimony.
In 1982, Broadwater was convicted on the flimsy basis of Sebold’s cross-racial flawed identification, and a microscopic hair analysis procedure that in later years the Justice Department abandoned as a junk science technique. He was sentenced to sixteen years in prison, and served the entire term. As CNN reports:
He was denied parole at least five times because he wouldn't admit to a crime he didn't commit, according to his attorneys. And he passed two lie detector tests.
Upon release in 1999, he remained in a sex offender registry.
As The Guardian reports:
Broadwater, who has worked as a trash hauler and a handyman in the years since his release from prison, told the Associated Press that the rape conviction blighted his job prospects and his relationships with friends and family members.
Even after he married a woman who believed in his innocence, Broadwater never wanted to have children.
“We had a big argument sometimes about kids, and I told her I could never, ever allow kids to come into this world with a stigma on my back,” he said.
He met his future wife shortly after he was released. He gave her all the transcripts from his trial, asking her to believe him when he said he was innocent. She believed him.
From Syracuse.com:
He’s been turned away from countless jobs and educational opportunities over the years for one simple fact: he’s a convicted rapist on the sex offender registry. One time, Broadwater said, he spent several days taking BOCES classes in heating and air conditioning before his past caught up to him and he was ordered to stay away from campus.
“I always hope for the best, but prepare for the worst,” Broadwater said.
Before being arrested, Broadwater, only 20 years old, had just returned home to Syracuse after serving in the Marine Corps. He had come home because his father was ill. His father's health worsened during the trial, and he died shortly after Broadwater was sent to prison.
How was he finally exonerated? Netflix was in the process of making a film version of Lucky. Timothy Mucciante, an executive producer on the project, was disturbed by ways in which details in the script diverged from details in the book, particularly in the second half about the trial. At one point, the Black actor set to play the role of the rapist backed out of the project because he didn’t want to contribute to the background of racial profiling, and the director wanted to switch the rapist to a white man.
Mucciante left (or was fired) from the project, and hired a private investigator to look into the case. It became clear that Broadwater had been wrongly convicted. In court last week, the conviction was overturned, Broadwater’s record was cleared and he was removed from the sex offender registry.
Syracuse.com describes the courtroom scene:
The extraordinary reversal came after Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatrick sided with two defense lawyers, who had asked for the dismissal based on serious flaws in the 1981 rape prosecution in Syracuse.
In court Monday, state Supreme Court Justice Gordon Cuffy agreed to overturn the conviction after both the defense and Fitzpatrick requested him to do so.
“I’m not going to sully this proceeding by saying, ‘I’m sorry.’ That doesn’t cut it,” Fitzpatrick said Monday in court. “This should never have happened.”
Before the brief but emotional court appearance, the DA met privately with Broadwater in a small room to apologize in person.
“When he spoke to me about the wrong that was done to me, I couldn’t help but cry,” Broadwater said. “The relief that a district attorney of that magnitude would side with me in this case, it’s so profound, I don’t know what to say.”
Netflix has just announced they are abandoning the film project, but it appears that the movie lost its funding months ago, perhaps as the exoneration case gathered steam.
As I mentioned and linked to in the update in the first paragraph, Sebold has finally issued an apology. She had her representatives send Broadwater a copy so he could read it before it was publicly released. As Syracuse.com reports:
“It comes sincerely from her heart,” Broadwater told Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard. “She knowingly admits what happened. I accept her apology.”
Broadwater then burst into tears.
Sebold’s 400-word apology seems pretty minimal to me, the least she could say. Broadwater’s generosity under the circumstances is amazing.
I hope as time passes she will think her way to a deeper contemplation and action. It’s easy to be angry at Sebold—and I am—but I can also see the tragedy in her situation. I know that she was raped. She suffered for years from the trauma of it. As a traumatized teen, she was bullied and railroaded into convicting Broadwater by corrupt police and prosecutors who just wanted to close the case and had not a single care if a Black man was wrongly imprisoned. Rape in general is under-reported by victims, too infrequently prosecuted, too often traumatic for the victims even if a case goes to trial. This is just a tragic horror story combining some of the worst failings of justice in our society.
But yes, I’m also mad at her. Sebold has profited immensely from the incident, both with the success of Lucky and with her follow-up novel about rape, the bestselling, made-into-a-movie The Lovely Bones. It took her many years and a lot of work, but she persevered and turned the trauma into bestselling books, a lucrative career, a prominent place in society, and the admiration of millions. Broadwater, meanwhile, had his life torn away. As the decades went by and Broadwater sought repeatedly and publicly to prove his innocence, it is hard for me to believe Sebold could not have had some inkling of injustice. Yes, as a traumatized teen she was railroaded by a corrupt legal system, but as an adult, perhaps she could have looked back and spoken up. In her apology, she writes:
Today, American society is starting to acknowledge and address the systemic issues in our judicial system that too often means that justice for some comes at the expense of others. Unfortunately, this was not a debate, or a conversation, or even a whisper when I reported my rape in 1981.
Well, maybe in her slice of American society, the wrongful accusations against Black men for crimes, and in particular sexual crimes against white women, was “not a debate, or a conversation, or even a whisper,” but it damn sure is a tragic and prominent part of history in other slices of society. And American society is not “just starting” to acknowledge this. It is hard to accept that all the news over the past many years, now resulting in the Black Lives Matter movement, would not in some way have penetrated her conscience. I’m sorry, but in the end, Sebold is exemplifying white privilege.
It’s a non-apology in too many ways, a displacement of personal responsibility onto the social failings of the era, and too much about herself feeling bad, and agonizing that her rapist went free. And saying she hopes “most of all that you and your family will be granted the time and privacy to heal” sound a little too much like ‘I hope you’ll shut up about this.’
A friend of the movie producer Timothy Mucciante, the man who got the ball rolling on this exoneration, has set up a GoFundMe for Anthony Broadwater. Mucciante himself has helped spread the word about it.
Next week I’ll review the book I’d originally planned for tonight, before this Anthony Broadwater news stirred me up: Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping, by Matthew Salesses, and the idea that #WritingWorkshopsSoWhite
A SELECTION OF THIS WEEK’S NEW HARDCOVERS
- Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing, by Peter Robison. A suspenseful behind-the-scenes look at the dysfunction that contributed to one of the worst tragedies in modern aviation: the 2018 and 2019 crashes of the Boeing 737 MAX.
- White Hot Hate: A True Story of Domestic Terrorism in America’s Heartland, by Dick Lehr. How the FBI thwarted a planned white supremacist terrorist attack on the growing Somali immigrant community in a small Kansas town in 2016.
- Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness, by Elizabeth D. Samet. This look at the literature, art, and culture that emerged after World War II exposes the confusion about American identity that was expressed during and immediately after the war, and the deep national ambivalence toward war, violence, and veterans—all of which were suppressed in subsequent decades by a dangerously sentimental attitude toward the United States’ “exceptional” history and destiny.
- All About Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business, by Mel Brooks. At 95, the legendary Mel Brooks continues to set the standard for comedy across television, film, and the stage. Here are the never-before-told, behind-the-scenes anecdotes and remembrances (and dozens of photos) from a master storyteller, filmmaker, and creator of all things funny.
- Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles, by Lydia Davis. A collection of essays on translation, foreign languages, Proust, and one French city, from the master short-fiction writer and acclaimed translator Lydia Davis
- The Making of the Bible: From the First Fragments to Sacred Scripture, by Konrad Schmid and Jens Schröter. The Bible is full of ancient texts long predating the assembly of Judaism's and Christianity's sacred books. Why these texts, and how were they transformed on the journey from folk tale to holy writ?
- WBCN and the American Revolution: How a Radio Station Defined Politics, Counterculture, and Rock and Roll, by Bill Lichtenstein. The story of how legendary radio station WBCN (and by extension the city of Boston) emerged as a central crossroads of the 1960s counterculture and political activism
- For middle school readers and up, there’s Art of Protest: Creating, Discovering, and Activating Art for Your Revolution, by De Nichols. From Keith Haring to Extinction Rebellion, the civil rights movement to Black Lives Matter, what does a revolution look like? Discover the power of words and images in this thought-provoking look at protest art by highly acclaimed artivist De Nichols.
I also post a comment on the Tuesday afternoon Black Kos diary of book curated for that community. There is some overlap with this list, but more as well, so check it out!
All book links in this diary are to my online bookstore The Literate Lizard. If you already have a favorite indie bookstore, please keep supporting them. If you’re able to throw a little business my way, that would be appreciated. Use the coupon code DAILYKOS for 15% off your order, in gratitude for your support (an ever-changing smattering of new releases are already discounted 15% each week). We also partner with Hummingbird Media for ebooks and Libro.fm for audiobooks. The ebook app is admittedly not as robust as some, but it gets the job done. Libro.fm is similar to Amazon’s Audible, with a la carte audiobooks, or a $14.99 monthly membership which includes the audiobook of your choice and 20% off subsequent purchases during the month.
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE