Lucky (memoir)

Sebold began writing Lucky after taking a memoir class with Geoffrey Wolff at the University of California, Irvine,^[11] where she completed her MFA in 1998.^[12] She published the book in 1999, about a year after Broadwater's release.^[5] The title stemmed from a conversation with a police officer who told her that another woman had been raped and murdered in the same location, and that Sebold was "lucky" because she hadn't been killed.^[9] In Lucky, Sebold used the name "Gregory Madison" for her rapist.^[7][5] Sebold wrote that the trauma of the rape had made her feel isolated from her family, and that for years afterwards, she experienced hypervigilance. She resigned from a job which required her to work at night, fearing danger in darkness. She became depressed, suffered from nightmares, and began drinking and using heroin. Eventually, after reading Judith Lewis Herman's Trauma and Recovery, she realized she had developed post-traumatic stress disorder.^[13]

In 2019, a film adaption of the memoir was announced with director Karen Moncrieff. Victoria Pedretti was later selected to star as Sebold.^[3] When Timothy Mucciante began working as executive producer on the project, he noticed discrepancies in the portion of Lucky that described the trial. He later told The New York Times: "I started having some doubts—not about the story that Alice told about her assault, which was tragic, but the second part of her book about the trial, which didn’t hang together".^[5] He ultimately left the project because of his concerns about the story, and hired a private investigator to review the evidence against Broadwater.^[5]

In November 2021, Broadwater was officially exonerated by a New York Supreme Court justice, who determined there had been serious issues with the original conviction.^[14] The conviction had relied heavily on Sebold's testimony, as well as on microscopic hair analysis, a forensic technique the United States Department of Justice later found to be unreliable.^[8] At the police lineup, which included Broadwater, Sebold had identified a different person as her rapist. When police told her she had picked out the "wrong person", she said the two men looked "almost identical".^[8] Onondaga County District Attorney William J. Fitzpatrick, who joined the motion to overturn the conviction, argued that suspect identification when the suspect is a different race from the victim is prone to error; Sebold is white and Broadwater is black.^[5] The prosecutor had also lied to Sebold, telling her that the man she identified in the lineup and Broadwater were friends and that they both came to the lineup to confuse her; attorneys argued that this falsehood had influenced Sebold's testimony.^[5] Sebold also wrote in Lucky that the prosecutor had coached her into changing her identification.^[4] Sebold apologized to Broadwater after his exoneration.^[15]

The film adaptation of Lucky was canceled after losing its funding in mid-2021.^[3] Scribner, the publisher of Lucky, released a statement following Broadwater’s exoneration that distribution of all formats of the book would cease while Sebold and the publisher determined how to revise the work.^[16]