'I'll forever be sorry': Lovely Bones author Alice Sebold apologises to man cleared of her 1981 rape

Alice Sebold has said she will "forever be sorry" for the role she played in Anthony Broadwater's false conviction, Chloe Keedy reports

American author Alice Sebold has apologised for her role in the wrongful conviction of a man who has been cleared of raping her in 1981, after he spent 16 years in jail.

Anthony Broadwater, 61, was convicted in 1982 of raping Sebold when she was an 18-year-old student at Syracuse University in New York.

He served 16 years in prison.

Mr Broadwater's conviction was overturned on November 22 after prosecutors re-examined the case and determined there were serious flaws in his arrest and trial.

Mr Broadwater, who was released from prison in 1998, told the Associated Press last week he was crying “tears of joy and relief” after his conviction was overturned by a judge in Syracuse.

In a statement released to the Associated Press, Sebold, the author of the novels The Lovely Bones and The Almost Moon, wrote to him saying she was truly sorry for what he’d been through.

“I am sorry most of all for the fact that the life you could have led was unjustly robbed from you, and I know that no apology can change what happened to you and never will,” she wrote. She wrote that “as a traumatized 18-year-old rape victim, I chose to put my faith in the American legal system. My goal in 1982 was justice - not to perpetuate injustice.

"And certainly not to forever, and irreparably, alter a young man’s life by the very crime that had altered mine.” In a statement issued by his lawyers, Mr Broadwater said he was “relieved that she has apologized". “It must have taken a lot of courage for her to do that. It’s still painful to me because I was wrongfully convicted, but this will help me in my process to come to peace with what happened.”

In her 1999 memoir Lucky, she described being raped and later telling police she had seen a black man in the street whom she believed was her attacker.

Sebold, who is white, went to the police.

An officer said the man in the street must have been Mr Broadwater, who had supposedly been seen in the area.

After Mr Broadwater was arrested, Sebold failed to identify him in a police lineup, picking a different man as her attacker because she was frightened of “the expression in his eyes”. But prosecutors put him on trial anyway.

He was convicted based largely on Sebold identifying him as her rapist on the witness stand and testimony that microscopic hair analysis had tied him to the crime.

That type of analysis has since been discredited by the US Department of Justice.

In a statement, Sebold, now 58, said: “I am grateful that Mr Broadwater has finally been vindicated, but the fact remains that 40 years ago, he became another young black man brutalized by our flawed legal system. I will forever be sorry for what was done to him.

"I will continue to struggle with the role that I unwittingly played within a system that sent an innocent man to jail."

Mr Broadwater remained on New York’s sex offender registry after he was released from prison in 1998 and has worked as a bin hauler and a handyman.On Tuesday, publisher Simon & Schuster and its imprint Scribner said they had ceased distribution of “Lucky” in all formats and were working with the author to consider how it might be revised.

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