The Tortured Bond of Alice Sebold and the Man Wrongfully Convicted of Her R*pe

The Tortured Bond of Alice Sebold and the Man Wrongfully Convicted of Her R*pe

Afew months ago, the writer Alice Sebold began to experience a kind of vertigo. She looked at a cup on the table, and it no longer appeared solid. Her vision fractured. Objects multiplied. Her awareness of depth shifted suddenly. Sometimes she glanced down and for a split second felt that there was no floor.

Sebold and I had recently begun corresponding, a little more than a year after she learned that the wrong man had been sent to prison, in 1982, for raping her. In 1999, she had published “Lucky,” a best-selling memoir about the rape and the subsequent conviction of a young Black man named Anthony Broadwater. Then she wrote “The Lovely Bones,” a novel about a girl who is raped and murdered, which has been described as the most commercially successful début novel since “Gone with the Wind.” But now Sebold had lost trust in language. She stopped writing and reading. Even stringing together sentences in an e-mail felt like adopting “a sense of authority that I don’t have,” she said.

Sebold, who is sixty, recognized that her case had taken a deeply American shape: a young white woman accuses an innocent Black man of rape. “I still don’t know where to go with this but to grief and to silence and to shame,” she wrote to me.

In February, I met Sebold in San Francisco for the first time. She lives alone with her dog. She wore fingerless woollen gloves and kept the lights off; her living room was lit by a window. Several times she started explaining something she’d once thought, and then stopped, midsentence. Although she’d quickly accepted the news that Broadwater was innocent, she felt as if she had “strapped on the new reality” and was still in the process of inhabiting it. She allowed that her experience with vertigo represented a kind of psychological progress: she was absorbing the fact that “there was no ground when I thought there was ground,” she said. “There’s that sense of standing up and immediately needing to sit down because you’re going to fall over.”

She was fearful of taking in new details too quickly. “It’s not just that the past collapses,” she said. “The present collapses, and any sense of good I ever did collapses. It feels like it’s a whole spinning universe that has its own velocity and, if I just stick my finger in it, it will take me—and I don’t know where I’ll end up.”

She was struggling to figure out what to call Broadwater. She had avoided his name for forty years. “Broadwater” felt too cold. “Anthony” felt like a level of closeness she didn’t deserve. And yet their lives were intertwined. “The rapist came out of nowhere and shaped my entire life,” she said. “My rape came out of nowhere and shaped his entire life.”

Sebold and Broadwater had defined themselves through stories that were in conflict. But Broadwater, too, felt that they were bound together, the same moments creating the upheaval in their lives. “We both went through the fire,” he said. “You see movies about rape and the young lady is scrubbing herself in the shower, over and over. And I’m saying to myself, ‘Damn, I feel the same way.’ Will it ever be gone from my memory, my mind, my thoughts? No. And it’s not going to be gone for her, either.”

Sebold was raped in a pedestrian tunnel in a park around midnight on May 8, 1981, the last day of her freshman year at Syracuse University. “I heard someone walking behind me,” she wrote in an affidavit. “I started to walk faster and was suddenly overtaken from behind and grabbed around the mouth.” When she tried to run away, the man yanked her by the hair, dragged her along a brick path, pounded her skull into the ground, and said he’d kill her if she screamed. Eventually, she stopped resisting and tried to intuit what he wanted. “He worked away on me,” she wrote in “Lucky.” “I became one with this man.”

She walked back to her dorm, bleeding, and a student called an ambulance. According to a medical exam, her nose was lacerated, her urine was bloody, and her clothes and hair were matted with dirt and leaves. When she was interviewed by the police that morning, she said that her rapist was a Black man, “16-18 yrs. of age, small and muscular build.” In the affidavit, she wrote, “I desire prosecution in the event this individual is caught.” But the detective on her case seemed skeptical of her account—he wrote, without explanation, that it did not seem “completely factual”—and recommended that “this case be referred to the inactive file.”

Sebold went home for the summer to a suburb of Philadelphia, where she rarely changed out of her nightgown. Friends from her parents’ church, where her mother was a warden, were told of the rape and treated her as if she had contracted a spiritual disease. Sebold saw herself as a misfit, an “earthy loose cannon,” she said, and felt that being raped confirmed her separateness. She sensed that her father believed she was at fault somehow, for walking through a park