LOS ANGELES (REUTERS) – Finest-selling writer Alice Sebold on Tuesday (Nov 30) issued a public apology to a person who was wrongfully convicted of raping her 40 years in the past in an assault that impressed her 1999 memoir Fortunate.
Anthony Broadwater, who spent 16 years in jail, was exonerated by a court docket in New York final week after the case was re-opened.
He was convicted in 1982 after Sebold, then a college pupil, mistakenly recognized him as the person who attacked her 5 months beforehand.
Sebold stated in an announcement on the Medium web site that she was “really sorry to Anthony Broadwater and I deeply remorse what you have got been by way of.” Sebold, who went on to jot down best-seller The Pretty Bones,stated that as a “traumatised 18 year-old” she had put her religion in the USA authorized system.
“I’m grateful that Mr. Broadwater has lastly been vindicated, however the reality stays that 40 years in the past, he turned one other younger Black man brutalised by our flawed authorized system. I’ll eternally be sorry for what was carried out to him,” Sebold wrote.
“I’ll proceed to battle with the function that I unwittingly performed inside a system that despatched an harmless man to jail,” she added.
The rape and the next trauma fashioned the premise of Sebold’s first e book Fortunate, which launched her profession.
Selection reported final week that work on an impartial movie adaptation of Fortunate had been deserted after financing dried up.