Now you're just being antagonistic.

When she testified, she had the mistaken belief that he was the perpetrator. Was this foolish? Perhaps. Was she mixed up? Yes, probably. Was it racism? Probably not. There was never much doubt that the perpetrator was black. It just wasn't Broadwater.

But there's no reason to believe she testified maliciously. If that were true, she wouldn't have publicly apologized, recently.

When she wrote her book about the assault, Broadwater was already tried, convicted and locked up. She used a pseudonym for Broadwater, but she repeatedly wrote about the guy who was caught and prosecuted. She wrote he was the one who did it. She seems to have believed it, until, much later, she better understood what had happened and how the police improperly influenced her testimony.

Lucky did not sell well. After she published Lovely Bones, the public got interested in her previous book, Lucky, and started to buy it. By then, Broadwater had been locked up for years.

> she, on the stand, said that Broadwater was the one to do it under oath.

That's a terrible mistake she will have to live with for the rest of her life. She clearly regrets it.

She was very young and traumatized by an awful sexual assault. You'd have to read Lucky to understand how bad it was.

I'm not trying to defend her or excuse her mistake. I'm not ready to condemn her, either. Life is hard. Life is complicated.

> Will she support him and use her platform to bring more attention to the book?

The books are old news, don't sell like they used to.

I don't know how much money she made from her books. Even though they were successful, she didn't necessarily make millions.

I would glad to know she has offered to help Mr. Broadwater. On the other hand, he just won a $5.5 million settlement. He may have more money than her, at this point. If she does offer him some kind of assistance, she will probably keep it private. Grandstanding about helping him would really be tacky.

Alice Sebold is the author of two really moving, well-written, troubling books. I read both, several years ago.

Obviously, she has a heart. She now knows what happened, she publicly apologized to Broadwater, and she is heartbroken over it. There is no doubt that she suffered a horrible, traumatizing attack. She was very young at the time, in her first year of college.

The books:

The Lovely Bones It's the story of a delightful little girl who is kidnapped, imprisoned, sexually abused and murdered by another man who lives in her town, told from the point of the little girl.

Lucky is the terrifying story of how she was raped by a stranger in a remote area when she was a first-year student at Syracuse University. The perpetrator was identified as Anthony Broadwater.

Sebold has publicly apologized to Broadwater, though she blames a faulty legal system more than herself. She said,

>“I am grateful that Mr. Broadwater has finally been vindicated, but the fact remains that 40 years ago, he became another young Black man brutalized by our flawed legal system. I will forever be sorry for what was done to him."

She also said,

>Forty years ago, as a traumatized 18-year-old rape victim, I chose to put my faith in the American legal system. My goal in 1982 was justice – not to perpetuate injustice, and certainly not to forever, and irreparably, alter a young man’s life by the very crime that had altered mine.”

Broadwater probably wouldn't have been convicted if it hadn't been the hair analysis, which was junk science, though it's possible that the police and DA felt it was legitimate at the time. Sebold feels she was pressured by the police and district attorney to identify him as the perpetrator, after they persuaded her that the hair analysis proved that he was the attacker.

It's a horrifying story from Broadwater's point of view. He was denied parole at least five times because he refused to take responsibility for a crime he didn't commit.