Syracuse, NY – Best-selling author Alice Sebold in her memoir “Lucky” recalls the moment in court that she could finally let herself lay eyes on the man accused of raping her in Syracuse’s Thornden Park in 1981.
“I did what I was warned not to,” she wrote. “I focused my attention in (his) face. I stared at him. For a few seconds, I was unaware of (the lawyers), or of the courtroom … I wanted my life back.”
Asked to identify her attacker, Sebold looked across the courtroom and picked Anthony Broadwater.
That was a moment Broadwater remembers, too: He looked around and saw he was the only Black man in the courtroom, he recalls. He realized he was going to be convicted for a crime he insisted he didn’t do.
That moment sent their lives in very different directions.
Sebold, then 18, went on to sell millions of books as an award-winning author, building a writing career that included her story of the horrific rape she endured May 8, 1981 and how she reclaimed her life afterward. She’s most famous for her best-selling novel “The Lovely Bones,” that was made into a movie.
Broadwater, then 21, was convicted of first-degree rape and endured more than 16 years in prison – including stints in Attica, Sing Sing and Auburn. He was a registered sex offender for nearly 40 years. He’s had to scrape by since his release from prison in 1999, working in factories and odd jobs, burdened by the reputation of a convicted rapist.
Their life stories crossed again Monday in a different Syracuse courtroom when a judge threw out Broadwater’s rape conviction. By Tuesday, his sex offender profile on the state registry was erased and – in the eyes of the law – it’s now as though the conviction never happened.
Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatrick argued for Broadwater’s exoneration in court, siding with two defense lawyers, David Hammond and Melissa Swartz, who recently pointed out serious problems with the 1982 trial.
“I’m not going to sully this proceeding by saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ That doesn’t cut it,” Fitzpatrick told a judge.
Broadwater’s exoneration, first reported by Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard, reverberated around the country this week. It was a dramatic twist for a globally known author and the scrap-collecting ex-con who burst into tears at the judge’s decision. Broadwater’s story could be a book or film, too.
Perhaps the most serious questions that led to the conviction being overturned surrounded Sebold’s misidentification of Broadwater in a lineup before the trial. She picked the wrong man, an act that Fitzpatrick said should have led to Broadwater’s immediate release in 1981.
Instead, Broadwater was indicted, leading to the day that the two locked eyes in the Syracuse courtroom in May 1982. Sebold was on the witness stand, describing her assault, when she was asked to point out her rapist.
In “Lucky,” Sebold writes about deliberately avoiding describing Broadwater as Black as she pointed him out. But for Broadwater, his race was all too real.
“I’m the only Black man in the courtroom,” Broadwater recalled to Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard, adding later, “I didn’t realize that no matter what I did, I was probably going to be convicted.”
The evidence against Broadwater? Sebold’s identification of him in court and a forensic case built on microscopic hair analysis, a type of evidence later considered junk science by the FBI.
Broadwater said he volunteered for every test that police wanted to perform, including hair and fingerprints. He said he hoped something would prove his innocence.
“I’ll give them whatever evidence they want,” Broadwater recalled thinking. “It’s still not me.”
He had opted not to have a jury trial, but Judge Walter T. Gorman found him guilty and sentenced him to 8⅓ to 25 years in state prison.
After Broadwater had been in prison for nearly a decade, the rape kit was destroyed. The records show that happened in 1989, his lawyers said. That’s more than a decade before modern DNA technology might have been able to identify the rapist.
Following his prison release, Broadwater saved what money he could to try to prove his innocence. He once spent $300 on a polygraph test (which he passed) and later tried to hire O.J. Simpson’s lawyer, Johnnie Cochran, with a $1,000 check (later returned after Cochran noted he didn’t do appeals on convictions).
One of his current lawyers, Hammond, said that Broadwater has volunteered for every test ever asked of him. Before knowing that the rape kit had been destroyed, Broadwater volunteered this year to give DNA samples, said his other lawyer, Swartz.
Hammond said he’s convinced Broadwater didn’t do it, but without the rape kit, it can’t be proven conclusively.
“I know Tony Broadwater is innocent,” Hammond said. “You read the trial transcript, you read Ms. Sebold’s book and you talk to Tony Broadwater and you know he’s innocent… He’s simply not the man Ms. Sebold described in her book.”
Broadwater stands by what he has said for 40 years: He did not rape Sebold. Besides the overturned rape conviction, he has no criminal record, his lawyers said.
Broadwater’s lawyers said the state of New York bears responsibility for his wrongful conviction and they plan to seek financial compensation for him.
Sebold did not respond to multiple inquiries for comment from Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard.
Alice Sebold, pictured in 2002, wrote the 1999 memoir "Lucky" about being raped as a Syracuse University student in 1981 and fighting for her attacker's conviction. (Scribner; Associated Press)Scribner; Associated Press
A haunting book
Sebold’s searing memoir of her rape did not mention Broadwater by name. She used an alias for her attacker, Gregory Madison.
The night of the attack, Sebold returned to her dorm room and contacted the police. It would take another five months before Broadwater’s arrest.
Sebold, a student at Syracuse University, left for summer recess after the attack. She surprised nearly everyone, she wrote in “Lucky,” by returning in the fall: After all the rapist had taken from her, he wouldn’t be able to take that, she wrote.
While walking on Marshall Street near SU in October that year, she saw a man who she believed resembled her attacker. That man was Anthony Broadwater.
He had just been discharged from the Marines to care for his cancer-stricken father, Broadwater later testified in court. That day, he was riding with a friend in a Jeep around the university area.
Sebold wrote in “Lucky” that she was convinced that Broadwater was her rapist. And, she wrote, he recognized her and laughed.
“He was smiling as he approached,” Sebold wrote. “He recognized me. It was a stroll in the park to him; he had met an acquaintance on the street. I knew him, but I could not make myself speak. I needed all my energy to focus on believing I was not under his control again.”
Sebold wrote that Broadwater called out to her.
“I did not respond,” Sebold wrote. She wrote that she was too afraid to call out: “That’s the man who raped me!” Instead, she kept walking as she said she heard him laughing.
“He had no fear,” Sebold wrote. “It had been nearly six months since we’d seen each other last. Six months since I lay under him in a tunnel on top of a bed of broken glass. He was laughing because he had gotten away with it, because he had raped before me, and because he would rape again. My devastation was a pleasure for him. He was walking the streets, scot-free.”
Broadwater says that he doesn’t remember seeing Sebold on Marshall Street. After all, he says, he’d never met her before. Instead, he said he was calling out to a police officer who he’d known from his teenage years. (The officer later confirmed during the trial that he was talking with Broadwater at the time.)
After Broadwater’s arrest, Sebold took part in a lineup in which Broadwater and four other men were shown to Sebold through one-way glass.
Before the lineup, Broadwater’s lawyer at the time, Steven Paquette, successfully had one of the men replaced. Paquette described the switch as justified because none of the other men looked similar to Broadwater, other than they were Black.
Sebold ultimately picked the man added to the lineup – not Broadwater. She testified at trial that she thought Broadwater and the man added looked like twins.
In asking for Broadwater’s exoneration, Fitzpatrick wrote in court papers last week that he didn’t see any particular resemblance between Broadwater and the man Sebold picked.
This is a photo of a lineup out of which Alice Sebold mistakenly picked the wrong man in November 1981, nearly six months after her rape. The suspect, Anthony Broadwater, was standing second from right. Sebold picked the man at the right as the man who raped her.
The prison life
In the weeks after the trial in 1982, Broadwater remained in the local jail, still hopeful that his conviction might be overturned, he said. But one day, he was loaded on a bus and sent to Attica, the infamous maximum-security prison near Batavia.
There were gates upon walls upon tunnels keeping inmates from the outside world, Broadwater recalled. It was a far cry from a childhood spent playing sports and making mischief with his five brothers.
Broadwater said his father, a widower, and his aunt, who helped raise him, never doubted he was innocent. But his father was suffering from terminal cancer.
“I’m gonna be all right, I’m going to still fight the case. I’m going to be home one day,” Broadwater said he told his father during the one visit he made to Attica.
Broadwater made three friends, all from Syracuse, who had all decided to seek transfers to Auburn prison because it was closer to home. Broadwater hoped his dad might still be well enough to visit him.
But his father died while Broadwater was in prison. And his friends fell one-by-one: one was murdered in prison, another later committed suicide in jail and a third was killed while on his own, Broadwater said.
He spent his prison days playing football, reading cowboy books and trying to find some way to prove his innocence.
Broadwater was denied parole five times before he was eventually released, according to prison records. He said he kept getting rejected because he wouldn’t admit his guilt.
He was eventually released Dec. 31, 1998.
By the time he was exonerated Monday, his beloved aunt who helped raise him was 99 years old and no longer in shape to understand the news, Broadwater said.
“Don’t ever give up,” she’d once told him. “You’ll be blessed.”
Anthony Broadwater cries and holds his wife Elizabeth after Judge Gordon Cuffy overturned his 40-year-old rape conviction. Monday, Nov. 22, 2021 (Katrina Tulloch | ktulloch@syracuse.com)
Rebuilding a life
Less than a year after leaving prison, Broadwater went on a date with a woman, Elizabeth. At the end of the night, Broadwater recalled, he needed to level with her.
“If you’re going to be with me, this is what I have on my back,” Broadwater said. He said he gave her a file on his case.
That night, Broadwater slept on the couch as his date read the file. “The next day, she came out crying and said, ‘I believe you,’” Broadwater recalled.
Elizabeth later became his wife. And, just like Broadwater had with his father, he made her a promise.
“I met a person that believed in me. And she’s been with me since 1999,” Broadwater said. “I told her I’d never stop fighting this case.”
But there was one thing he never would do: have children.
“I wouldn’t bring children into this world because of this,” Broadwater said. “And now, we’re past (that) age. We can’t have children.”
Broadwater, a registered sex offender, couldn’t get most jobs he sought. Instead, he worked as a roofer, did demolition and cleanout work, and got temporary jobs doing everything from bagging onions to mopping floors.
One time, he landed a job at Syracuse China, he said. When the plate manufacturer closed, Broadwater said, he signed up for BOCES classes in heating and air conditioning. But after a couple of days, Broadwater said, his past caught up to him and he was barred from campus.
Now 61, Broadwater lives on Syracuse’s South Side and gets by hauling debris and repurposing old metal containers into outdoor meat smokers.
“Today, I’m still struggling,” Broadwater said.
Still, Monday night felt different. For the first time as an adult, Broadwater said he felt content.
“It’s hard to have that stigma on your back,” Broadwater said. “Hard and shameful. You don’t want to be introduced to anybody. To this day, I can count on two hands how many people have invited me into their house.”
Broadwater said he feels badly for Sebold. But if they ever met, he’d tell her about his suffering.
“I would sympathize with her and tell her how I felt,” he said. “She’s been a victim and I’ve been a victim.”
Anthony Broadwater, 61, gives a small smile in the court hallway after Judge Gordon Cuffy overturned the 40-year-old rape conviction that wrongfully put him in state prison for Alice Sebold’s rape. Broadwater was released in 1999, and has remained in the state’s public sex offender registry. Nov. 22, 2021. (Katrina Tulloch | ktulloch@syracuse.com)
Staff writer Douglass Dowty can be reached at ddowty@syracuse.com or 315-470-6070.
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