SuspiriaGoose t1_je8ap75 wrote on March 30, 2023 at 3:19 AM

Reply to comment by global_scamartist in N.Y. to pay $5.5 million to man exonerated in writer Alice Sebold rape case by OutsideObserver2

I apologize, I misread your statement. I read it as ‘I was a producer’, and found that highly unlikely, especially in conjunction with the username. That was on my reading comprehension. After immediately being blocked, I assumed it was back-pedaling. I was wrong. Thank you for unblocking me.

I’ve heard a mix of things about the woman and I think there’s room for bad feeling about her actions in this case. Unfortunately, I’ve often heard her name over and over again from certain unsavoury communities that are convinced that ‘rape isn’t real’ or that ‘most accusations are fake to gain clout’ - they’ve claimed to be involved in ‘investigations’ in the past, so I was wary.

I think she needed it to be this man, and was willing to overlook evidence against it because of her need to trust the police. Otherwise she’d realize she was responsible for incarcerating an innocent man for years, participated in racism, and that her attacker had been roaming free this whole time. I think she doubled down on her story because it let her be her story - otherwise she was an accomplice to a crime worse than her original rape. I don’t know enough about her to know that, but it seems a human reaction. I find it harder to believe she realized the truth and decided to forcibly keep an innocent locked up so she could profit off his suffering and her false victimhood. I suppose it’s not impossible, but I’d need to see some receipts before assuming the worst of a woman who was brutally attacked and violated.

global_scamartist t1_je8mqfr wrote on March 30, 2023 at 5:20 AM

Well, you're the second person to misread that so note to self: never use passive sentences in important posts related to rape and racism.

I understand where your initial bias is coming from and my intent isn't to speak ill of Alice Sebold. It's to provide someone else's critical and investigative research into these events, and draw conclusions from that. There are more nuanced takes on this in that she was a victim of rape, perhaps had a racial bias or was influenced by the racial bias of the justice system, was young and naive, but also had additions in her memoir that aren't as truthful in order to sell the memoir, for example. These are the discrepancies the producer, Mucciante noticed - which I'm sure will be explored more in the eventual movie he's making.

https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article256385927.html

Behind a paywall, but he explains a statement by the DA at the time didn't "ring true", along with other discrepancies. Further, as someone else commented - a black actor felt this film could contribute to violence from white people against black men due to the subject matter so the script was changed to make the rapist white which the producer mentioned other producers and directors were OK with (claiming they dealt with Sebold for years and she'd be OK with these changes). None of this suggests that she is a racist, knew Broadwater was innocent and falsified her rape BUT it does suggest that she may have embellished certain aspects of her story for publishing standards (DA statements, potential other details from the justice system perhaps), and further on - was OK with altering huge details like race for film standards to Netflix. This at the worst paints her as business minded - packaging up her trauma for consumption regardless of the truth, but again, until Unlucky or someone else involved with the exoneration goes into depth the exact discrepancies - it's hard to exactly say whether she was racist, naive, deceptive, etc. but for me, a few things would have stood out after time such as the hair analysis method used to link Broadwater was discredited in 1996, and that there weren't otherwise any evidence linking him. Then again, as the victim she obviously wouldn't have been critical about the forensic aspects but it definitely doesn't leave a good impression that she was at least willing for Netflix to make a completely unrealistic version of the events.