After the writer Alice Sebold misidentified Anthony Broadwater as her rapist, he spent 16 years in prison. In 2021, he was exonerated. Rachel Aviv explores the complexities of the case and its psychological aftermath.
She hurried to class and told Wolff that she had to miss the workshop. “She was utterly distraught,” Wolff said, “and she told me that she had been raped and that she had just seen her rapist down on Marshall Street and that he had spoken to her.” Wolff told her, “You’ve got to call the police right now.” The author of memoirs about the Vietnam War and a tumultuous childhood, he had a kind of mantra: “Hold on to the memories, keep everything straight.” He shared that advice with Sebold.
Sebold sketched the man’s face, and the Syracuse Police Department issued an alert to its officers. Clapper, the cop who had been chatting with him, recognized the description. Nine days later, Anthony Broadwater, who was twenty years old, was arrested. One of six brothers, Broadwater had left the Marine Corps to take care of his father, a former janitor at Syracuse, who was dying of cancer.
Broadwater’s attorney, Steven Paquette, assumed that the case would be dismissed. He was shocked when Uebelhoer presented it to a grand jury that day. He wondered if she was trying to compensate for the indifference with which the police had originally met Sebold’s account of her rape. “I think she may have been driven by a feeling of ‘Darn it, this isn’t going to happen to this young lady again,’ ” Paquette said.
When Clapper testified, a juror asked him, “When someone is picked out of a lineup, doesn’t it have to be absolutely sure that the person that they picked out of the lineup is the one they’ve seen before?”Uebelhoer cut him off. “He really can’t give you an opinion on that,” she said. The trial lasted only two days, and Sebold came for the second day. Her father, a professor of Romance languages at the University of Pennsylvania, accompanied her but mostly stayed in the lobby, reading a book in Latin. Her mother didn’t come. Sebold had no friends there, either. At the time, she said, “I felt more identified with people I had met in the criminal-justice system than I did with my peers.
Broadwater appealed the verdict, arguing that Sebold had a “reduced ability to perceive objects accurately due to the fear she felt during and after the attack.” At the time, there was only limited recognition of the fallibility of eyewitness testimony. Since then, studies have shown that roughly a third of eyewitness identifications are incorrect, and that, when the defendant and the witness are not the same race, the witness is fifty per cent more likely to be mistaken.
After college, she enrolled in the writing program at the University of Houston, to study poetry, but she felt adrift. She began doing drugs, and dropped out. She moved to Manhattan and lived in a low-income housing development in the East Village, where she often used heroin. In “Lucky,” she describes her realization that she did not share her life with the students at Syracuse or with the friends she’d made in New York. “I share my life with my rapist,” she wrote.
“Right. Well he came up and walked up to me, and the policeman was there, so I told the policeman, and then we pursued from that point.”Three years later, Sebold learned that heressay had been quoted in “Trauma and Recovery,” a groundbreaking book by the psychiatrist Judith Herman.
“Well, sir, the crime was done,” Broadwater answered. “I was punished for it. I must live with that.”
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