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jollybumpkin t1_jdz00y1 wrote

Reply to comment by DigitalSteven1 in N.Y. to pay $5.5 million to man exonerated in writer Alice Sebold rape case by OutsideObserver2

Now you're just being antagonistic.

When she testified, she had the mistaken belief that he was the perpetrator. Was this foolish? Perhaps. Was she mixed up? Yes, probably. Was it racism? Probably not. There was never much doubt that the perpetrator was black. It just wasn't Broadwater.

But there's no reason to believe she testified maliciously. If that were true, she wouldn't have publicly apologized, recently.

When she wrote her book about the assault, Broadwater was already tried, convicted and locked up. She used a pseudonym for Broadwater, but she repeatedly wrote about the guy who was caught and prosecuted. She wrote he was the one who did it. She seems to have believed it, until, much later, she better understood what had happened and how the police improperly influenced her testimony.

Lucky did not sell well. After she published Lovely Bones, the public got interested in her previous book, Lucky, and started to buy it. By then, Broadwater had been locked up for years.

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global_scamartist t1_jdz4o88 wrote

And lucky was about to be made into a Netflix movie which got cancelled when the original producer did his own research and hired a private investigator to look into the case. That’s how broadwater got exonerated.

The producer is now making a movie called unlucky about how that process went.

“The new film will be titled Unlucky, and is being produced by Timothy Mucciante — who, during his previous tenure as an executive producer on a film adaptation of Lucky, found inconsistencies in Sebold's account that eventually led to Broadwater's exoneration.

In the op-ed, Mucciante detailed that one of the things that made him start to question the case was Sebold's own account of comments made to her by an assistant district attorney after she initially identified a man other than Broadwater in the police lineup (later, in the trial, she did identify Broadwater as her rapist, which together with a now-discredited junk science known as "microscopic hair analysis" secured his conviction). He said that a script rewrite that changed the race of Sebold's assailant in the film to a white man (Broadwater is Black) also led to keeping his ‘unease with aspects of the book fresh in mind.’”

So basically she changed her account from identifying broadwater and was potentially ok with the script changing the assailant to a white man. If it was for a sale to Netflix then it’s at the least, still disingenuous and shady. At the worst it’s selling her trauma to wrongfully accuse a man for decades and trying to do it until Mucciante caught on. This is all publicly available information. I’m not the source - it’s available everywhere.

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QuintoBlanco t1_je4wqu3 wrote

>There was never much doubt that the perpetrator was black. It just wasn't Broadwater.

Well, there is the problem.

Broadwater only became a suspect because Alice Sebold falsely accused him.

The only reason the police was convinced Broadwater was the rapist, was that Sebold initially was sure he was the man who raped her.

She was raped by a black man, and accused another black man.

I just want to make it clear that she did not accuse Broadwater after the police had arrested him, or pointed him out to Sebold.

She accused a black man she had met on the street.

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humanregularbeing t1_je3x9pt wrote

Don't know anything about this case, am only passing through. But "was it racism probably not there was never much doubt that the perpetrator was black it just wasn't Broadwater" is a bit messed up. Just reread it.

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