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He Was Falsely Accused Of Rape By ‘The Lovely Bones’ Author. New York Will Pay Him $5.5 Million.

   DailyWire.com
Anthony Broadwater, at his lawyers office, CDH Law, Wednesday, December 1, 2021.
Matt Burkhartt for The Washington Post via Getty Images

The man wrongfully convicted of raping “The Lovely Bones” author Alice Sebold will receive $5.5 million in compensation from New York state.

Anthony Broadwater spent 16 years in prison for allegedly raping Sebold, who detailed the alleged crime in her 1999 memoir, “Lucky,” The Daily Wire previously reported. Broadwater was exonerated on November 22, 2021, more than 20 years after his prison sentence ended in 1999.

After his name was finally cleared, he sued the state of New York for $50 million for unjust imprisonment and the decades he spent on the sex offender registry stemming from his wrongful conviction. Now, the state has agreed to pay him $5.5 million to settle the lawsuit, The Daily Beast reported.

One of Broadwater’s attorneys told Gothamist that his client was “relieved” by the settlement, calling the original conviction “the epitome of racism.”

Broadwater’s attorneys have signed the settlement agreement, as has the New York attorney general’s office, but it still has to be signed by a judge to be finalized, The New York Times reported.

Sebold had written in “Lucky” that she was a first-year student at Syracuse in May 1981 when she was raped. Sebold, who is white, claimed she saw a black man months later and believed he was her attacker.

“He was smiling as he approached. He recognized me. It was a stroll in the park to him; he had met an acquaintance on the street,” Sebold wrote. “‘Hey, girl,’ he said. ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’”

She wrote that she said nothing in return.

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“I looked directly at him. Knew his face had been the face over me in the tunnel,” she wrote.

She later went to the police, not knowing her alleged attacker’s name.

“An officer suggested the man in the street must have been Broadwater, who had supposedly been seen in the area. Sebold gave Broadwater the pseudonym Gregory Madison in her book,” the Associated Press reported.

Sebold was unable to identify Broadwater in a police lineup after he was arrested, instead picking the photo of a different man and claiming, “the expression in his eyes told me that if we were alone, if there were no wall between us, he would call me by name and then kill me.”

During the trial, however, Sebold identified Broadwater as her attacker. The other piece of evidence that led to his conviction came from an expert who said microscopic hair analysis determined Broadwater had committed the crime. As the AP noted, that “type of analysis is now considered junk science by the US Department of Justice.”

Broadwater’s attorney, David Hammond, would later tell the Post-Standard of Syracuse: “Sprinkle some junk science onto a faulty identification, and it’s the perfect recipe for a wrongful conviction.”

Sebold has apologized for getting the wrong man convicted.

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The Daily Wire   >  Read   >  He Was Falsely Accused Of Rape By ‘The Lovely Bones’ Author. New York Will Pay Him $5.5 Million.