Alice Sebold | |
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Born | Madison, Wisconsin, U.S. | September 6, 1963
Occupation | Writer |
Education | Syracuse University (BA) University of Houston University of California, Irvine (MFA) |
Genre | Literary fiction, memoir |
Notable works |
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Spouse |
Alice Sebold (born September 6, 1963) [1] is an American author. She is known for her novels The Lovely Bones and The Almost Moon , and a memoir, Lucky . The Lovely Bones was on The New York Times Best Seller list and was adapted into a film by the same name in 2009. She is also known for the false accusation of rape against Anthony Broadwater, who spent 16 years in prison, before being exonerated.
Her memoir, Lucky, sold over a million copies and describes her experience in her first year at Syracuse University, when she was raped. She wrongly accused Anthony Broadwater of being the perpetrator. Broadwater spent 16 years in prison. He was exonerated in 2021, after a judge overturned the original conviction. Consequently, the publisher of Lucky announced that the book would no longer be distributed.
Sebold was born in Madison, Wisconsin. [2] She grew up in the Paoli suburb of Philadelphia, where her father taught Spanish at the University of Pennsylvania. [3] While they were young, Sebold and her older sister, Mary, often had to take care of their mother, a journalist for a local paper, who suffered from panic attacks and drank heavily. [2]
Sebold graduated from Great Valley High School in Malvern, Pennsylvania, in 1980. Sebold attended Syracuse University, where she earned her bachelor's degree. Among her professors was Tess Gallagher, who became one of Sebold's confidantes. [4] Also among her professors were Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, and Hayden Carruth. [5]
After graduating in 1984, she briefly attended the University of Houston in Texas, for graduate school, then moved to Manhattan for the next 10 years. [6] She held several waitressing jobs while pursuing a writing career, but neither her poetry nor her attempts at writing a novel came to fruition. [7]
Sebold left New York for Southern California, where she became a caretaker of an artists' colony, earning $386 a month and living in a cabin in the woods without electricity. [3] She earned an MFA from the University of California, Irvine in 1998. [6]
In the early hours of May 8, 1981, while Sebold was a freshman at Syracuse University, she was assaulted and raped while walking home along a pathway that passed a tunnel to an amphitheater near campus. She reported the crime to campus security and the police, who took her statement and investigated, but could not identify any suspects. [3] [8] Five months later, while walking down a street near the Syracuse campus, she encountered a man whom she believed to be the rapist. [8] [9] The man, Anthony Broadwater, ultimately served 16 years in prison, during which he maintained he was innocent. [9] Because he would not admit to the attack, he was denied parole five times. [9] Broadwater was released in 1999, and remained on New York's sex offender registry, before ultimately being exonerated in 2021. [10]
After the rape, Sebold struggled to make sense of life for at least ten years. [3] In 1996 or 1997, she began writing a novel about the rape and murder of an adolescent girl. The interim title was Monsters. [2] She found herself struggling to finish it, and abandoned several other novels she had also started. [11] Eventually, she realized she needed to write about the rape and its impact on her first. [3]
Lucky was published in 1999, in which she described every aspect of the rape in graphic detail. She used the fictitious name "Gregory Madison" for the rapist. [3] [8] The title of her memoir stemmed from a conversation with a police officer who told her that another woman had been raped and murdered in the same location, and that Sebold was "lucky" because she hadn't been killed. [12] Sebold wrote that the attack made her feel isolated from her family, and that for years afterwards, she experienced hypervigilance. She resigned her night job, fearing danger in darkness. She was depressed, suffered from nightmares, drank heavily and snorted heroin for three years. Eventually, after reading Judith Lewis Herman's Trauma and Recovery, she realized she had developed post-traumatic stress disorder. [13]
According to one reviewer, Lucky was positively reviewed and then "sank into oblivion". [14] After Sebold became successful with her 2002 novel, The Lovely Bones, interest in the memoir picked up and it went on to sell over one million copies. [15]
Broadwater tried five times to have the conviction overturned, with at least as many groups of lawyers. [9] When Timothy Mucciante began working as executive producer on a project to adapt Lucky to film, he noticed discrepancies in the portion of her book describing the trial. He later told The New York Times : "I started having some doubts—not about the story that Alice told about her assault, which was tragic, but the second part of her book about the trial, which didn't hang together". [8] He ultimately was fired from the project when he did not provide funding as he had originally agreed, and subsequently hired a private investigator to review the evidence against Broadwater. [8] [16]
In November 2021, Broadwater was exonerated by a New York Supreme Court justice, who determined there had been serious issues with the original conviction. The conviction had relied heavily on two pieces of evidence: Sebold's testimony and microscopic hair analysis, a forensic technique the United States Department of Justice later found to be unreliable. [17] [18]
At the police lineup, which included Broadwater, Sebold had identified a different person as her rapist. When police told her she had identified someone other than Broadwater, she said the two men looked "almost identical". [17] Defense attorneys arguing for Broadwater's exoneration asserted that, after the lineup, the prosecutor lied to Sebold, telling her that the man she had identified and Broadwater were friends, and that they both came to the lineup to confuse her. [8] They also stated that Sebold wrote in Lucky that the prosecutor coached her into changing her identification. [9] In 2021, Broadwater's new attorneys argued that this influenced Sebold's testimony. [8] Onondaga County District Attorney William J. Fitzpatrick, who joined the motion to overturn the conviction, argued that suspect identification is prone to error, particularly when the suspect is a different race from the victim; Sebold is white and Broadwater is black. [8]
After his exoneration, Broadwater said: "I'm not bitter or have malice towards her." [19] A week later, Sebold publicly apologized for her part in his conviction, saying she was struggling "with the role that I unwittingly played within a system that sent an innocent man to jail" and that Broadwater "became another young black man brutalized by our flawed legal system. I will forever be sorry for what was done to him." [10] The manner of Sebold's apology drew criticism from some observers, who noted that it was largely made in the passive voice and did not acknowledge any direct responsibility for Broadwater's conviction. [20] [21] Scribner, the publisher of Lucky, released a statement following Broadwater's exoneration that distribution of all formats of the book would cease. [22]
Once Lucky was finished, Sebold was able to complete her novel, Monsters. She sent the manuscript to her mentor, Wilton Barnhardt, [2] who passed it to his agent. The work was eventually published as The Lovely Bones in 2002. It is the story of a teenage girl who is raped and murdered at age 14. In an interview with Publishers Weekly , Sebold said, "I was motivated to write about violence because I believe it's not unusual. I see it as just a part of life, and I think we get in trouble when we separate people who've experienced it from those who haven't. Though it's a horrible experience, it's not as if violence hasn't affected many of us." [23]
A reviewer for the Houston Chronicle described the novel as "a disturbing story, full of horror and confusion and deep, bone-weary sadness. And yet it reflects a moving, passionate interest in and love for ordinary life at its most wonderful, and most awful, even at its most mundane." [2] A reviewer for The New York Times wrote that Sebold had "the ability to capture both the ordinary and the extraordinary, the banal and the horrific, in lyrical, unsentimental prose". [2] The Lovely Bones remained on The New York Times Best Seller list for over one year [24] and by 2007, had sold over ten million copies worldwide. [25]
In 2010, it was adapted into a film of the same name by Peter Jackson, starring Saoirse Ronan, Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci, Mark Wahlberg, and Rachel Weisz. [26]
Sebold's second novel, The Almost Moon , describes an art class model who murders her mother. It begins with the sentence: "When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily" and continues a key theme of her two other books in describing acts of violence. Sebold uses the killing as the starting point from which to examine dysfunctional relationships between parents and their daughters. [27] The book received mixed reviews. [28] [27]
Sebold guest-edited The Best American Short Stories 2009 . [29]
The Lovely Bones won the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel and the Heartland Prize in 2002, [30] [31] and the American Booksellers Association's Book of the Year Award for Adult Fiction in 2003. [32] Sebold held MacDowell fellowships in 2000, 2005, and 2009. [33] In 2016, Emerson College awarded Sebold with an honorary degree. [34]
In 2001, Sebold married the novelist Glen David Gold; [2] the couple divorced in 2012. [35]
The Central Park jogger case was a criminal case concerning the assault and rape of Trisha Meili, a woman who was running in Central Park in Manhattan, New York, on April 19, 1989. Crime in New York City was peaking in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the crack epidemic surged. On the night Meili was attacked, dozens of teenagers had entered the park, and there were reports of muggings and physical assaults.
Innocence Project, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit legal organization that is committed to exonerating individuals who have been wrongly convicted, through the use of DNA testing and working to reform the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. The group cites various studies estimating that in the United States between 1% and 10% of all prisoners are innocent. The Innocence Project was founded in 1992 by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld who gained national attention in the mid-1990s as part of the "Dream Team" of lawyers who formed part of the defense in the O. J. Simpson murder case.
Hair analysis may refer to the chemical analysis of a hair sample, but can also refer to microscopic analysis or comparison. Chemical hair analysis may be considered for retrospective purposes when blood and urine are no longer expected to contain a particular contaminant, typically three months or less.
The Lovely Bones is a 2002 novel by American writer Alice Sebold. It is the story of a teenage girl who, after being raped and murdered, watches from her personal Heaven as her family and friends struggle to move on with their lives while she comes to terms with her own death. The novel received critical praise and became an instant bestseller. A film adaptation, directed by Peter Jackson, who personally purchased the rights, was released in 2009. The novel was also later adapted as a play of the same name, which premiered in England in 2018.
Lucky is a 1999 memoir by the American novelist Alice Sebold, best known as the author of the 2002 novel The Lovely Bones.Lucky describes her experience of being raped and beaten when she was eighteen in a tunnel near Syracuse University where she was a student, and how this traumatic experience shaped the rest of her life. Sebold has stated that her reason for writing the book was to bring more awareness to rape and rape survivors. The memoir sold over one million copies.
Gary E. Dotson is an American man who was the first person to be exonerated of a criminal conviction by DNA evidence. In May 1979, he was found guilty and sentenced to 25 to 50 years' imprisonment for rape, and another 25 to 50 years for aggravated kidnapping, the terms to be served concurrently. This conviction was upheld by the appellate court in 1981. In 1985, the accusing witness recanted her testimony, which had been the main evidence against Dotson. He was not exonerated or pardoned at that time, but due to popular belief that he was a victim of a false rape accusation, Dotson went through a series of paroles and re-incarcerations until DNA evidence proved his innocence in 1988. Dotson was subsequently cleared of his conviction.
The Lovely Bones is a 2009 supernatural drama film directed by Peter Jackson from a screenplay he co-wrote with Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens. It is based on Alice Sebold's 2002 novel of the same name and stars Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci, Michael Imperioli, and Saoirse Ronan. The plot follows a girl who is murdered and watches over her family from heaven and is torn between seeking vengeance on her killer and allowing her family to heal.
The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town is a 2006 true crime book by John Grisham, his only nonfiction title as of 2020. The book tells the story of Ronald 'Ron' Keith Williamson of Ada, Oklahoma, a former minor league baseball player who was wrongly convicted in 1988 of the rape and murder of Debra Sue Carter in Ada and was sentenced to death. After serving 11 years on death row, he was exonerated by DNA evidence and other material introduced by the Innocence Project and was released in 1999.
Clarence Harrison was wrongly convicted in 1987 for the kidnapping, rape and robbery of a 25-year-old-woman in Decatur, Georgia. He is the first person exonerated through the work of the Georgia Innocence Project.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in the United States.
The Almost Moon is the third book and the second novel by the American author Alice Sebold, author of the memoir, Lucky and the best-selling novel The Lovely Bones.The Almost Moon was released by Little, Brown and Company in the United States on October 16, 2007.
Timothy Brian Cole was an American military veteran and a Texas Tech University student wrongfully convicted of raping a fellow student in 1985.
Rape by deception is a situation in which the perpetrator deceives the victim into participating in a sexual act to which they would otherwise not have consented, had they not been deceived. Deception can occur in many forms, such as illusory perceptions, false statements, and false actions.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in Canada.
The innocent prisoner's dilemma, or parole deal, is a detrimental effect of a legal system in which admission of guilt can result in reduced sentences or early parole. When an innocent person is wrongly convicted of a crime, legal systems which need the individual to admit guilt — as, for example, a prerequisite step leading to parole — punish an innocent person for their integrity, and reward a person lacking in integrity. There have been cases where innocent prisoners were given the choice between freedom, in exchange for claiming guilt, and remaining imprisoned and telling the truth. Individuals have died in prison rather than admit to crimes that they did not commit.
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After a sexual assault or rape, victims are often subjected to scrutiny and, in some cases, mistreatment. Victims undergo medical examinations and are interviewed by police. If there is a criminal trial, victims suffer a loss of privacy, and their credibility may be challenged. Victims may also become the target of slut-shaming, abuse, social stigmatization, sexual slurs and cyberbullying. These factors, contributing to a rape culture, are among some of the reasons that may contribute up to 80% of all rapes going unreported in the U.S, according to a 2016 study done by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Anthony Broadwater is an American who was wrongfully convicted of raping author Alice Sebold in 1982. His conviction was overturned in 2021 after significant flaws in the evidence and procedures used during his trial were brought to light. Broadwater's case has become a prominent example of the issues within the criminal justice system, particularly regarding wrongful convictions based on unreliable eyewitness testimony and discredited forensic methods.