COMMENTARY: “Why didn’t we notice the man convicted of Alice Sebold’s rape was innocent?, by Marlena Williams, published by ‘Electric Literature’, on March 17, 2022. (Marlena Williams is described as “a writer from Portland, Oregon. You can find her work in the Yale Review, Literary Hub, the Rumpus, Electric Literature, and Across the Margin. Her essay collection, Night Mother: A Personal and Cultural History of the Exorcist, will be published by Mad Creek Books in 2023. She currently works for a small foundation dedicated to ending mass incarceration in the United States.”...Electric Literature describes itself as"a nonprofit digital publisher with the mission to make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. We are committed to publishing work that is intelligent and unpretentious, elevating new voices, and examining how literature and storytelling can help illuminate social justice issues and current events. We are particularly interested in writing that operates at the intersection of different cultures, genres, and media."
GIST: "In 1982, Alice Sebold, an 18-year-old freshman at Syracuse University, was brutally attacked during an evening walk in Thornden Park.
Though Sebold reported the crime to the police, they were unable to identify a suspect until five months later, when Sebold spotted Anthony Broadwater while walking down Marshall Street—not far from the scene of the crime.
Sebold recognized him as her attacker and immediately notified the police.
Though she was later unable to identify Broadwater in a police lineup, he was taken into custody and charged with eight felony counts, including rape and sodomy. Sebold remained steadfast in her belief that Broadwater was her attacker. “I could not have identified him as the man who raped me unless he was the man who raped me,” she later testified.
After a trial that lasted just two days, Broadwater was sentenced to 8⅓ to 25 years in state prison.
Seventeen years later, Alice Sebold published Lucky, a searing account of the attack and its aftermath.
The memoir vividly details her experiences working with the police as a victim, testifying in the trial, and struggling with hyper-vigilance, drug and alcohol abuse, as well as PTSD in the years following her rape.
Published in 1999, Lucky went on to sell over a million copies and helped to launch Sebold’s successful career as a novelist.
The memoir served as an inspiration for many feminists and survivors who seldom saw the ongoing traumas of sexual assault written about in such a raw and unflinching way.
To an extent, Lucky also offered a unique sort of comfort to readers. Despite the violence and pain it depicted, it was a heartening example of the criminal legal system working: a victim endured a horrible crime, police arrested a supposedly dangerous suspect, and the guilty party was swiftly convicted and punished—except for one thing: Broadwater wasn’t guilty.
Despite the violence and pain it depicted, it was a heartening example of the criminal legal system working.
In January 2021, almost two decades after the memoir’s publication, a film adaptation of Lucky entered pre-production.
One of the film’s executive producers, a disbarred, formerly incarcerated Michigan lawyer named Timothy Muccainte, noticed shocking flaws in the case, flaws that should have been obvious from the beginning.
Broadwater’s conviction rested on an all-too-common confluence of discredited forensic science, rampant prosecutorial misconduct, and faulty eyewitness misidentification.
The hair comparison testimony used to connect Broadwater to the crime is now widely considered “junk science,” and cross-racial identification, especially five months after the crime, is notoriously unreliable.
Plagued by these suspicions, Muccainte left the project and hired a retired detective, Dan Myers, to investigate the case. Myers later connected Broadwater with a team of lawyers who were willing to represent him.
On November 22, 2021, a New York State Supreme Court Justice exonerated Anthony Broadwater, now in his sixties, on the grounds that the case against him had been deeply flawed, making Broadwater just one of 132 wrongfully convicted individuals exonerated in 2021 alone.
Broadwater, who maintained his innocence over the years, will no longer be categorized as a sex offender, a status that had severely limited where Broadwater could work, live, and travel in the years after his release from prison in 1998.
As a registrant, Broadwater was forced to abide by a strict curfew.
He struggled to find stable employment, instead taking temporary jobs doing yard work, bagging potatoes, and scavenging for scrap metal.
Because his computer was closely monitored after his release, he felt it easier not to learn how to use it.
When the Justice announced the decision, Broadwater released an audible gasp, bursting into tears.
The case was covered in major outlets and sparked justified outrage on social media.
Broadwater’s story offered a sobering reminder of the ways in which rape accusations have historically been weaponized as a tool of white supremacist violence.
Though Broadwater was not murdered like Emmitt Till or the Scottsboro Boys, his wrongful conviction is still a modern product of the same hateful, racist legacy—one that is still alive and well. According to data from the National Registry of Exonerations, a Black man serving time for sexual assault is 3.5 times more likely to be innocent than a white man.
Broadwater’s story offered a sobering reminder of the ways in which rape accusations have historically been weaponized as a tool of white supremacist violence.
Though many understandably criticized Sebold for the clear role of racial bias in her misidentification of Broadwater, the case also brought renewed attention to the ways in which police and prosecutors casually mishandle and manipulate traumatized victims in pursuit of a conviction.
As the Black Lives Matter movement and other activists across the country continue to bring much-needed attention to the many failures of policing and prisons in the United States, the saga of Alice Sebold and Anthony Broadwater served as an upsetting example of how the criminal legal system so recklessly and routinely destroys the lives of people of color, often in the name of “justice.”...
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It also highlighted publishing’s complicity in this broken system.
Despite the memoir’s obvious flaws, the white-dominated publishing world found nothing questionable or unsatisfactory about the narrative Sebold presented in Lucky when it was published, nor did the millions of people who read the memoir during the seventeen years it was in circulation.
Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. The vast majority of people who sell, acquire, edit, and market books are white, and despite a recent upsurge in demand for books like Just Mercy or How to Be an Antiracist, the industry has largely been uninterested in books that tackle racism or criticize our criminal justice system.
Lucky, a book by a white woman that consciously or unconsciously panders to white assumptions about Blackness and criminality, was in fact right at home in this environment.
It took a curious outsider with his own criminal record and no links to the literary or publishing worlds to spot the problems waiting in plain sight on the memoir’s surface.
The story of Alice Sebold and Anthony Broadwater is a case study in how the publishing industry champions white writers and their stories, often at the explicit expense of communities of color.
After the story broke, Sebold issued an apology to Broadwater via Medium.
Simon & Schuster announced they would cease distribution of Lucky pending a possible revision.
The film adaptation of the memoir was also dropped.
The literary world, it seems, is at a crossroads.
In the years since the #MeToo movement jump-started a national reckoning, memoirs of sexual assault and harassment have become commonplace.
From celebrity memoirs like Brave by Rose McGowan to literary accounts of campus rape like Know My Name by Chanel Miller and Notes on a Silencing by Lacy Crawford, stories of sexual assault, once niche, have found increased visibility and marketability.
The news about Lucky and the racist harm its publication perpetrated has further amplified calls for change in the literary and publishing worlds.
What do revelations like this mean for the steadily growing body of literature focused on sexual harassment and assault? How can one write about their experiences of sexual violence without contributing to the many harms caused by policing and mass incarceration? What happens when #MeToo and #Defund inevitably collide? And what role can publishing play in ensuring that what happened to Anthony Broadwater never happens again?
Publishing cannot do the work of the criminal legal system, but it can act as a critical check on its tremendous power. Through diversifying their staff and authors and changing the way stories about crime are acquired and published, the industry can begin to combat the historical exclusions, biases, and blind spots that allowed a flawed book like Lucky to be published in the first place, and that helped the suffering of a man like Anthony Broadwater to go completely unchecked for close to twenty years.
In the months since his exoneration, Broadwater has received an outpouring of support from people across the country, including over $160,000 from a GoFundMe Campaign aiming to raise money for his housing and legal fees.
Broadwater is currently seeking financial compensation from New York state for his wrongful conviction, and he hopes to one day have enough money to buy a farmhouse in the country with his wife, Elizabeth.
Toward Sebold, he remains forgiving and empathetic, telling the New York Times, “She went through an ordeal, and I went through one too.”
With time, Broadwater has set up his own email account and is slowly learning how to use a computer and navigate the internet.
Timothy Mucciante, the lawyer and producer who helped bring attention to the story, is interested in partnering with Broadwater to make a documentary film about his life. Soon, Broadwater may get the chance to share his own story with the world."
The entire commentary can be read at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
