Last week Ignacio Orovio echoed in this newspaper the terrible experience of Ahmed Tommouhi, a Moroccan citizen unjustly convicted of rape who spent fifteen years in prison after a flawed trial. The case connects with another that has taken place in the US and was recently documented by the journalist Rachel Aviv in one of those very extensive reports that are the pride of The New Yorker. A story that touches the literary and publishing world, and has the writer Alice Sebold at its center.
Sebold is the author of Desde mi cielo (The lovely bones), a novel that, published in 2002, sold three million copies and was made into a film by Peter Jackson, with Saoirse Ronan and Stanley Tucci.
In its pages, an adolescent recounts the consequences of her rape and murder, and she does so “from my heaven”, as an incorporeal presence in another reality from which she observes the environments she frequented in life. Sebold, it was said, transmuted a personal traumatic experience into a poetic and parapsychological fable.
Indeed, in an earlier non-fiction book entitled Lucky, the author (Madison, 1963) explained how in May 1981, when she was an 18-year-old student at Syracuse University, New York state, she was beaten and raped in the pedestrian tunnel of a public park.
Before the police, he identified the attacker as a young man between the ages of 16 and 18, black, “small and strong.”
After the trauma, the young woman decided to continue her studies because she had come into contact with the literary circle of Raymond Carver and his partner Tess Gallagher, who taught in Syracuse; her literature called to him and at the same time allowed her pain to be given an outlet. Some months later, when she was going to a session in Tobias Wolff’s writing workshop, Sebold ran into her rapist.
He called the police, who with the description of the face launched an investigation. Eight days later, Anthony Broadwater, a telephone installer who had left the Marines to take care of his sick father, was arrested. Broadwater denied his guilt but could not justify where he was on the night of the events. Microscopic analysis of a pubic hair found on Sebold’s body reportedly matched his own.
The young woman was summoned to an eye recognition test; Faced with five black men in jail clothes, the writer identified the fifth (Broadwater was the fourth). But once in court, and at the insistence of her lawyer, she said that she really wasn’t sure, that she had pointed to the fifth because she stared at him, and that she could also have been the fourth. .
In his statement, Broadwater argued that he had a scar on his face and a broken tooth, facts that Sebold had not referred to. But the future writer did not listen to him because, according to the New Yorker journalist, “her sister was graduating that day and her parents did not want her to miss the ceremony.”
Sebold made his own another day in a room where, according to the Broadwater lawyer, there was only one black man: the defendant. The judge found him guilty (there was no jury) and he was jailed. The lawyer appealed without success.
Beginning in 1990, Broadwater was repeatedly offered parole if he showed repentance, but he refused because he did not want to plead guilty to a crime he claimed he did not commit. He spent 16 years and seven months in jail until, when he was 38, he was paroled. He tried to rebuild his life with many difficulties, since he had been registered as a sexual offender; at the same time that Sebold was publishing his account of the events and his successful first novel.
In 2010, director Jane Campion wanted to adapt Lucky for the screen and commissioned her collaborator Lucy Parker to do the documentation. Parker found Sebold’s encounter with her rapist a few months after the attack dubious, and she found inconsistencies and lack of evidence in her account; the project collapsed.
A second project passed into the hands of director Karen Moncrieff. It was financed by Timothy Mucciante, a peculiar character who had been convicted of bank fraud and apparently wanted to reconcile with society. She hired investigator Dan Myers, who with his team worked on the conviction that Broadwater was innocent.
They found experts for whom the case had been decided without sufficient evidence, and the only proof that had supported it, the public hair, was not enough:?in 2015 the Department of Justice and the FBI recognized that they had been applying an erroneous technique for two decades compared to of hair. The current view that interracial identifications are often unreliable was also taken into account. With the case reopened, Judge Gordon Cuffy declared Broadwater’s exoneration in 2021.
Sebold, who over the years avoided any encounter with Broadwater, and has not wanted to have him after the proclamation of his innocence, sent his lawyers a letter of apology in which he wrote: “as a traumatized victim of rape at the age of 18 , I chose to put my faith in the American legal system. My goal in 1982 was justice, not perpetuating injustice. And certainly not forever and irreparably altering a young man’s life for the same crime that had altered mine.”
Lucky was discontinued by Scribner’s, where Broadwater appears under the pseudonym Gregory Madison.
After suing the state of New York, the legal representatives of the false culprit closed a compensation agreement worth five and a half million dollars last March. “I appreciate what the attorney general has done, and I hope and pray that others in my situation can achieve the same measure of justice. We all suffer lives destroyed, “said Broadwater, according to the Associated Press. The rape conviction, he added, had ruined his job prospects and his relationships with friends and family.
“Obviously, no amount of money can erase the injustices suffered by Mr. Broadwater, but the settlement now officially recognizes them,” Alice Sebold said in a statement.
The author has kept a very discreet profile ever since. At 60 years old, she lives in San Francisco. “I still don’t know how to handle this subject other than regret it, remain silent and be ashamed,” she wrote to Rachel Aviv. The identity of the real attacker has not been revealed.
