Moncrieff’s reasoning was that she wanted to dispel the racial stereotype of a black man raping a white woman, but as the actual perpetrator had been African-American, this did not make sense to me. However, as time went on, other aspects of the production raised red flags for me, such as the insistence of director Karen Moncrieff on changing the race of the actor playing Broadwater from a black actor to a white actor. I was assured that the publisher had fact-checked and vetted the book, so I should have confidence in the source material. This miscarriage of justice seemed obvious, and I pointed it out to my production team colleagues. Even with the lack of identification, the district attorney still took Broadwater to trial and he was convicted. Sebold’s failure to identify her attacker should have been the end of the case, with Broadwater released. I had marked the wrong one.” Sebold further wrote, “Number four and five looked like identical twins.” Sebold writes in Lucky, “I placed my X in the number-five box. Broadwater was suspect number four in the police lineup, and Sebold selected suspect number five as her attacker. On my first reading of the book, the portion regarding Sebold’s attempted identification of her assailant at a police lineup disturbed me.

When I first reviewed the book as a part of my preparations for the film, less than a year ago, I realised there were serious questions regarding the guilt of the man Sebold named in the book as Gregory Madison, the pseudonym she gave Anthony Broadwater.

His exoneration would probably not have come about but for a strange and unusual series of events linked to my role as executive producer on the film adaptation of Sebold’s bestselling book, Lucky, her memoir about the attack. He spent more than 16 years in prison and a further 23 years as a registered sex offender. Five months later, Sebold said she saw her attacker in Syracuse town centre.īroadwater was arrested, placed in a police lineup, tried and convicted. Sebold was savagely attacked while walking home from a friend’s house late one night. Anthony Broadwater, a 61-year-old resident of Syracuse, New York state, and former marine, was exonerated last week of the brutal rape, assault and robbery of best-selling author Alice Sebold.

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