Did she care who she stamped on in her pursuit of fame? Credit: Neville Elder/Corbis via Getty Images
20 years ago, an American creative writing graduate called Alice Sebold published a novel called The Lovely Bones. It was about a 14-year-old girl who is raped and murdered. She narrates most of the novel while looking down from heaven, in the company of other victims of her killer. The novel did extremely well in America, rapturously reviewed and selling in huge numbers, and in 2002 was published in this country.
A lot of the kudos and awestruck response to the novel came from an awareness of Sebold’s previous memoir, Lucky. In it, she wrote in detail about a horrifying rape she suffered as a teenager. It was a violent rape by a stranger, without a doubt. In the memoir, Sebold explained that she had identified her rapist months later when a black man, Anthony Broadwater, greeted her in the street. Broadwater must have been a friendly man: he smiled at Sebold and, she claims, went as far as to say “Hey girl” to her. Although she identified a completely different man in a police line-up, Mr Broadwater was prosecuted and convicted on her evidence, backed up by some now discredited scientific analysis of hair types. The memoir, rather skating over some details, told a redemptive story of obtaining justice by finding the culprit and locking him up.
The years went by. Broadwater was released from prison the year before Lucky was published, after 17 years. Sebold, having told her true-life tale in a memoir, went on to publish The Lovely Bones. At the time, I was a book reviewer who sometimes worked for The Observer. They commissioned a review of it from me, and I panned it. I had a fundamental objection to it. I just didn’t believe it.
Although a work of fiction is not true or false in the usual sense, there is no doubt that a novel can be entirely made-up, and yet fundamentally true. I didn’t believe a single word that The Lovely Bones said about human beings. I said, rather briskly, that 14-year-old girls were not like that; that Sebold thought people were defined by race (“Indian, and therefore mystic”) in absurd and damaging ways; that the novel went straight to courting emotion without troubling to be truthful.
It is bad manners to quote oneself, but I think my line that it was “a slick, overpoweringly saccharine and unfeeling exercise in sentiment and whimsy” is bang on. I wish I’d known what effects that unfeeling quality might have had in real life on an innocent man. In the review, I also suggested that this huge bestseller, in the usual way of these things, would be succeeded in five years by a difficult second novel that did zip business and then she would disappear.
That was more or less correct. She published a second novel, not much liked, in 2007, and then fell silent. All the same, The Lovely Bones sold an enormous number of copies and was made into a big-budget movie directed by Peter Jackson. I got a tremendous amount of angry flak from some people involved with the publication of the book, some rather personally homophobic in tone, some bringing up the horror of Ms Sebold’s rape as if to show she was the sort of person who could not write an untruthful word. In the meantime, Mr Broadwater tried to put his life together, working in menial jobs, and choosing, he says, not to have children so as not to inflict the shame of his conviction on them.
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SubscribePassive or active, don’t you love the way she sent Broadwater down for rape, then blamed the system.
You are talking about a young woman who had suffered the trauma of a violent, invasive attack. Do you think she sent him down deliberately? Or is there just a possibility that she honestly thought it was him? After all, this issue must play out frequently in line-ups.
And yes, the system supporting this conviction failed.
Unpopular opinion coming here: If we, on Unherd, make the mistake of running trials of public opinion based on our emotions and prejudices, without full access to the facts, we are no better than the mainstream sources we have fled.
Just less numerousl
Most of us (me included) have no access to the facts whatever.
We should not judge therefore
Do you have access to the “facts” about Hitler ? Have you tried obtaining access?
Do you even know that such a dictator (as opposed to an actor playing the part of a dictator) ever existed ?
No, of course not, except on the word of others.
Godwin’s Law upheld, only three comments in.
But Hensher’s article is a full resume of the facts – and is supported by Alice Sebold’s apology !
What MORE do you want ?
You believe that the Battle of Hastings took place, and moreover in 1066, without even glancing at any evidence about the matter.
Tony, when I am asked to serve as a juror for William the Conqueror’s trial, I will refer to your very wise advice on seeking evidence on the matter.
I am sorry to see that your comment seems to have attracted negative approval.
I suppose it is because her ready identification of the black man who greeted her might now mark her down as something of a “Karen” and writing a poor but highly successful book makes her an even less sympathetic “Karen”.
However, the judicial system did fail both her and him. The unreliability of eyewitness identification, particularly where it involved cross-racial identification, was highlighted by Elisabeth Loftus by the 1970s but US justice was extraordinarily slow to incorporate this knowledge into the legal system. I haven’t seen a transcript of the trial but I suspect that no or inadequate warnings were give regarding the unreliability of eyewitness identification particularly where there had been a failure to identify in the line up. The bogus nature of the hair identification science compounded the problem and was not established until some time later.
What is a “Karen” ???
“Karen” is a pejorative term used by racists to refer to white women voicing opinions.
Thanks.
Now how am I supposed to understand that ?
I’ll find a way.
Haha! It just means “no problem”.
a surprising definition and much less on point than the one by Jeremey Bray given in a comment below.” a white woman who was standing up for what she perceived as her rights in opposition to a black man in a way that some found irritating or objectionable – ”
or by David Morley “Initially it was a bossy, entitled (probably white) woman. She tended to be rude to service staff (that she perceived of lower social status) and was constantly asking to see the manager. She was associated with the name “Karen” and with a certain hairstyle and taste in clothes. It was mostly about petty social snobbery and middle class female entitlement.”
You mean it is used by the wokerati to describe white women who voice opinions with which the do not agree
The Karen is an indigenous tribe in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. And by using “Karen” in this way, people are being racist.
My use of “Karen” was to identify her as a white woman who was standing up for what she perceived as her rights in opposition to a black man in a way that some found irritating or objectionable – which seems to be the way it is popularly used.
Unfortunately the fact that she survived her rape and indeed flourished as a writer partly on the back of it and misidentified her rapist with tragic consequences for him seems to have thrust her into the Karen role in the eyes of many – in my view unfairly.
Please stop using “” Karen” in this or any way. The Karen are an indigenous tribe in Myanmar and have said they think that people using the term Karen in this way are racist.
I would imagine the Karen tribe are horrified. Thank you so much for speaking in their defence. You are a progressive hero.
The term “Karen” has shifted a fair bit in meaning.
Initially it was a bossy, entitled (probably white) woman. She tended to be rude to service staff (that she perceived of lower social status) and was constantly asking to see the manager. She was associated with the name “Karen” and with a certain hairstyle and taste in clothes. It was mostly about petty social snobbery and middle class female entitlement.
After a specific case in Central Park it came to be associated with racist, white women.
Its a shame. The original concept really did identify a deeply unpleasant type of woman. And it gave a name to a very specific kind of female entitlement. Everyone has met these “Karen’s”.
It’s now become rather meaningless.
I don’t like the sound of any of it. There is no “type of woman”, there are only individual human beings, some are thoroughly unpleasant I grant you, but I’m very wary of jumping to conclusions or labelling of any kind.
Like ‘toxic masculinity’? I think all the chatter about the use of the term Karen is that it is directed at women. Women and society routinely generalize negatively about men.
Did you imagine you were talking to a feminist ? Big mistake.
It is very like “toxic masculinity”, and therefore I would steer clear of it.
Nobody conforms completely to a type – but yes, there are types, and playwrights have been making use of them since Aristophanes at least. We all recognise them. Some are almost eternal, some are of their time.
I would say that one of the revelations of maturity is discovering that we are all a bit less individual than we took ourselves to be.
https://www.eudaemonist.com/biblion/characters/
The real revelation of maturity is that other people aren’t “types” for us to pigeonhole.
Doing so is great in a comedy, not in life.
It’s a bit of both.
And it probably depends on you. If you start off as a pigeonholer you need to recognise individuality.
If you start off with an exaggerated view of your own individuality, you need to recognise that it’s not as marked as you thought.
I’m put in mind of the Kinks line: “I’m not like everybody else. Like everybody else.” Social media in a nutshell.
https://youtu.be/PaghIdSJKvQ
There’s also the issue of girls and women actually named Karen who suffer as a result of the Woke making mischief with a fairly common name.
The term was hijacked late by the woke. See my post.
So, are there no male ‘Karens’?
Portugal is full of them. Nobodies that unload their frustrations on people performing menial jobs.
Yes, but arguably it failed them by giving too much weight to her evidence. The evidence of a (white) woman against a (black) man. And the slogan “believe all women” is precisely suggesting that this is what the legal system should do.
And he paid the price for that. She did not.
Yes, she was a victim of rape he of a miscarriage of justice.
I agree that the jury were probably more inclined to believe the misidentification of a white woman over the denials of a black man, and probably did not have access to all the research highlighting the unreliability of such identification evidence. They were no doubt additionally swayed by the bogus scientific hair evidence.
I certainly agree that “believe the woman” is a dangerous slogan and has no place in the judicial system.
i understand your point, but the rape was not perpetrated by the judicial system.
I was slightly puzzle by your reply until I reread the exchange.
The failure of the judicial system was of course devastating for him whereas its erroneous endorsement of her misidentification of the rapist had much less adverse consequences for her. Indeed, insofar as it provided a neat narrative for her literary career to prosper from, could be regarded as a benefit.
However, it failed her in the sense that once Broadwater had been convicted the search for the real rapist ceased, and she now has to carry the guilt that her erroneous identification resulted in the destruction of Broadwater’s life. The extent to which that affects her we can’t know.
Completely accept your second point.
But he has spent all those years in prison knowing he was innocent.
She has spent all those years at liberty, entirely content that the right man was in jail, and making money out of it to boot. Only now is it having any impact on her. And that, not much in comparison.
She is clearly a victim or survivor of rape depending on your preferred terminology. She has turned the experience into something positive for her through her writing so might prefer the term survivor.
She misidentified Broadwater as the perpetrator but I have no reason to think she did not genuinely believe he was the perpetrator. We know from the work of Elisabeth Loftus and subsequent research psychologists that memory is plastic and not an unalterable snapshot so that someone can genuinely but mistakenly believe that a man is the perpetrator of their rape who is in fact not the rapist. The blame for his conviction lay in the too ready acceptance of that misidentification by the jury as a result of an inadequate judicial process.
In the case of stranger rapes by rapists of a different colour to the victim a jury should be made aware of the fact that identification can be unreliable despite the genuine certainty of the victim that she has identified her attacker.
In this case the issue of identification seems to have been bolstered by the presence of a hair that appeared to confirm the identity, but subsequently the scientific basis for this expert testimony has been shown to be pretty valueless. Often the defence team is not in a position to effectively challenge supposed scientific expert evidence and juries tended to be over-influenced by scientific evidence that is actually not as watertight as is presented.
One of the problems in the US judicial system is that prosecutors are inclined to value their success by the number of convictions they achieve. Hence the rather unedifying way that the prosecutor acted in the Rittenhouse case.
I didn’t know that. and I wish I didn’t now
Wrong. She was perfectly aware that her identification of Broadwater might be mistaken, having previously made a different identification !
Yes, she has made the experience into something very lucrative for her – something few victims have the opportunity (and entrepreneurial skill !) to do.
Your root error is to regard victims / survivors as saints and as oracles of truth.
Very few of them are. They have a right to our compassion, not to our admiration.
I am not certain which of my comments above you are replying to, but I think you will find that far from suggesting victims/ survivors are saints and oracles of truth I have consistently pointed out that identification evidence is sometimes completely mistaken and should be treated with caution.
Unfortunately, in the absence of appropriate evidence or directions to this effect juries tend to give too great credence to identification evidence, but in this case it appears her misidentification was bolstered by hair evidence that is now regarded as questionable or bogus science.
I don’t know how she explained her identification of someone else at the line up when cross-examined on the point but clearly it was sufficiently credible to lead to Broadwaters conviction, and presumably was sufficiently convincing in her mind to enable her to remain convinced she had identified her rapist correctly.
Of course, it is not impossible she is a vicious woman who randomly chose to accuse Broadwater without a genuine belief in his guilt but I suspect evidence to that effect might have emerged by now if that was the case. My view is that it is much more likely she mistakenly thought he was her rapist despite her failure to identify him in the line up.
Pretty much rules out any rape conviction lacking forensic evidence then.
Yes of course. All witnesses must be subject to rigorous scrutiny just as all suspected perpetrators should be.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply Jeremy and your general support of my opinion. I have long thought that line-ups must be questionable – re-living the experience and the potential of facing (seeing) their attacker must be emotional and terrifying and for many victims, they only had a fleeting glimpse of their attackers. I don’t know why this is a contentious point to 16 people and counting!
I do have a question – why do you think the book was poor? Did you read it? I remember reading it many years ago and didn’t think it was a classic, but don’t remember thinking it poor. (I have read many of the classics, so don’t think I can be classified as a chick-lit reader). I didn’t ever consider it to be anything other than fiction.
Line outs are useful if only it establishes that the victim can’t remember exactly who the attacker was for all the reasons you mention. The problem arises when the victim declares confidently in Court that the man in the dock was the attacker even though she failed to pick him out in a line out. Juries tend to believe someone couldn’t be mistaken over something like that, and the victim will often believe the police must have got the right man and she must have been confused at the line out. I am afraid there are a fair number of misidentified prisoners who never get exonerated.
I haven’t read her books, but was simply taking at face value the comments of Philip Hensher in the article and Adrian Maxwell in the comments. Her books are not the sort of thing I would read but I am happy to accept your view that they are not poor.
Her literary success would, however, be all the more galling to anyone who thought the books poor, and so they would be more inclined to be critical of her quite fairly seeking to highlight the judicial failure rather than simply stick to a simple mea culpa.
PS The disapproval of your post continues to rise. I am not quite sure why as it seemed a perfectly reasonable comment and it is usually only obviously “woke” comment that attracts multiple down votes.
I suspect the reason is that you seem to be defending a highly successful author, successfully partially on the back of her background as a survivor of rape who put her rapist away – except she fingered the wrong man.
Worst of all instead of expressing devastated remorse for her mistake and leaving it at that, she seemed to seek to exculpate herself from blame by pointing out the systemic failure. Not good PR. She should have left her agent or a friend to point out the systemic failure and stuck to expressing her remorse. It suggests a bit of a tin ear. Not a good look for an author.
PPS
Having now read the full apology I can see what might have got the back up of those who read the full text given its woke tone including a reference to her honest which only too easily reminds one of the saying “the more he spoke of his honesty the faster we counted our spoons”.
it doesn’t alter my views previously expressed except to say I can understand a somewhat jaundiced approach by those more critical of her part in the Court proceedings than I. I imagine the apology might go down better with Guardian readers than Unherd readers.
It suggests not merely a tin ear, but a tin heart.
The quality of her book is irrelevant to this debate.
And if identification in a line-up is contentious, that based on a chance encounter months later, is even more so.
I was agreeing specifically to Jeremy, who politely replied.
Alice Sebold wasn’t failed by the system – her supposed attacker was jailed.
A failure of the judicial system occurs where the wrong man is convicted even if that is the result of erroneous identification by the victim since that possibility has to be factored in.
At the time of the conviction the unreliability of cross-racial identification evidence was known. Unfortunately, bogus hair science seems to have bolstered Sebold’s misidentification evidence.
Unless you think criminal justice is simply there to endorse and support the belief of the rape victim regardless of the actual facts then Sebold was failed by the judicial system – although the effects on Sebold are incomparable to those on Broadwater whose whole subsequent life was devastated.
Of course up to now Sebold has mistakenly believed that the system served her well but we don’t need to take that view now.
Please stop using the word “Karen” in a derogatory way. The Karen are an indigenous tribe in Myanmar and are furious that out of all the words there are for people who discriminated against others, people have picked “Karen” as being acceptable. As it would be if any other tribe’s/nation’s name that was used, this is racism.
“Do you think she sent him down deliberately?”
Oh, so you think she reported him to the police by accident?
She did not send him down, the Court did after hearing the whole case against him including the hair evidence.
Her deliberate mistaken identification of him as the rapist when he greeted her and subsequently identified him as her rapist in Court clearly had a pretty decisive influence on the Court’s decision. However, I think what Lesley van Reenen was seeking to convey, as her next sentence suggests, was that she was not arbitrarily fingering Broadwater as a random black man but that as a result of the trauma of rape she mistakenly believed she had discovered her rapist.
In one case Elisabeth Loftus quoted a woman mistakenly identified a TV commentator as her rapist because his face was showing on the TV at the time of her rape. The Mind can play tricks on people when it comes to questions of identity in traumatic attacks.
This is what the author said today on Twitter
“ I wrote a piece for unherd about the miscarriage of justice Alice Sebold was responsible for and profited from.”
Charming individual.
Indeed… generating a pile on.
She sent him down deliberately – from poor memory, not in malice – but deliberately nonetheless.
Her conscience must have told her that her identification of Broadwater was questionable at best, downright wrong at worst.
How does trauma in any way excuse this?
The system has to rely on a victim’s sworn testimony supposedly identifying the culprit.
It isn’t the system that’s at fault.
Something that frequently plays out in the US justice system is black men going to prison for no reason whatsoever.
Don’t bring nuance to a black ans white debate. This article attracted a bunch of people that know exactly the state of mind of a woman after being raped.
The way Broadwater was sent down for rape and the system blamed by her is loved by me.
Yes, that’s exactly what I thought when I read her peevish apology. Although she knows she was wrong and that an apology is in order, instead of being abjectly and personally sorry (as a decent person would be) she chooses instead to place all blame on “the system” and none on herself. Saying snippily how concerned she’s always been with social justice is similar to Harvey Weinstein’s angry attempt to defend himself by stating how much he supported and funded feminist causes. Both people seem to think that their SJW credentials should absolve them from being blamed for the actual harm they do to others.
One commenter has described the author as smug, but in his shoes I think I would want to say “I told you so”.
There is also a serious point behind what he says. That even if we don’t have hard evidence, if we are a skilled reader, or have a honed sense of human motivation, some narratives just do not ring true. Perhaps we should be using those skills a little more often, and saying “I just don’t buy it, and this is why.”
When Pam Smart’s husband was murdered, she immediately went before cameras (she called the press conference). My husband and I were watching it live. Within less than a minute, I turned to him and said “She did it”. He was incredulous. “Why on earth do you think that?” “If you had been murdered”, I said, “I would be either hysterical or catatonic, not made up and coiffed and calmly talking to reporters.” And the cops, who were there, must have thought so, too. She was arrested for planning the killing shortly after. Still in jail, so justice was done in her case.
Yes, gut feeling is not proof. But it can be a good indicator of where to look.
Gut feeling is often based upon a broad and varied experience of life combined with acute perception and rapid logical analysis of the facts.
Indeed. It’s an expression to cover our assimilation of available facts against experience. We don’t actually feeling in our guts after all!
I disagree – the entire false conviction in Australia about the dingo and the baby came about because of perceived notions of how a mother ‘should’ react. The mother became a suspect because she didn’t act ‘appropriately.’
Which is why I said it isn’t proof.
Quite right.
Have you read the book?
Horrifying too to feel that this man has now been found innocent, not because the justice system is better, but only because the social justice scales have tilted a little from “believe all women” to “sometimes believe black people”.
Yes but your “sometimes believe black people” sounds a lot better than the two alternatives : never/always believe black people.
Well yes. I think my point is that it is probably still the case that in a rape case of this kind the scales would be tipped to favour a white woman over a black man. Just perhaps a little less.
As to who would now have the best chance, a black man or a white man, that currently looks a little less sure.
Try saying that out loud in Rotherham.
I understand your point, but Rotherham is not the US, and the perpetrators were not black, they were Asian. But yes, it’s some white women who get automatically believed, while some perpetrators seem to cause eyes to look the other way.
I don’t want to over-egg my dialectical pudding, but the legacy of kowtowing to racist hate groups like Black Lives Matter seems to be that black people are automatically believed and white people must be silent.
We’re probably not disagreeing.
The class background of the white women tends to be all-important.
Totally! And it’s the role of class that gets so forgotten in all this woke worry mongering.
The frailty of cross racial identification is now well researched and this type of hair evidence is no longer used. That’s at least something positive.
“Broadwater must have been a friendly man: he smiled at Sebold and, she claims, went as far as to say “Hey girl” to her. Although she identified a completely different man in a police line-up, Mr Broadwater was prosecuted and convicted on her evidence, backed up by some now discredited scientific analysis of hair types. “
It’s worse than that. According to Broadwater AND a police officer, Broadwater was looking at and greeting not Sebold, but a police officer he knew who happened to be standing near Sebold. The two men said that Broadwater did greet the police officer in more or less the same words as reported by Sebold but didn’t use the word “Girl.”
As a prosecutor I can tell you that it’s excruciating to make decisions on whether to charge in a situation such as this. It’s a weak case even in the best possible light. However, there’s yet another strike against the initial conviction: prosecutorial misconduct.
According to Sebold, after she picked the WRONG man out of a line-up conducted after she reported seeing Broadwater on the street, the prosecutor or police detective present at the line-up told her she’d picked the wrong person and she was somehow then allowed to select Broadwater instead. That’s information that should have been made available to the defense in pre-trial discovery and any judge would have then ruled that Sebold shouldn’t be permitted to make an identification of Broadwater in court.
Many thanks for that information. It did puzzle me as to why her selection of someone else in the line-up did not sink the prosecution case and I wondered how it was dealt with in cross-examination as the information should have been available to the defence if the case was proceeded with despite the line up failure. As you say a clear case of prosecutorial misconduct.
I do get the perhaps erroneous impression from the UK that prosecutors in the US are excessively eager to obtain convictions and often don’t present the case in a fair manner. Certainly the Rittenhouse case suggested this.
As you are a prosecutor I would appreciate your comments on this. I attended a couple of court hearings in the US many years ago and found the general conduct of them somewhat startling from an English perspective.
As to whether prosecutors in America are excessively eager to obtain convictions and if they present cases in a fair manner or not, it’s hard for me to say. The US has the third largest population in the world, and each of the 50 states has slightly different criminal statutes (although they are based on common law and all subject to the US Constitution so they are mostly similar).
I do have extensive experience, starting as a prosecutor in a rural county and then moving to Philadelphia, which is a large city with a lot of serious crime. The elected District Attorney of each jurisdiction is ultimately in charge of all prosecutorial decisions, and the people who vote for them generally expect a firm line on law and order. So, the individual assistant district attorneys absolutely DO have pressure on them to obtain convictions. But not convictions of the innocent, and not by the use of sleazy tricks.
There are strict ethical guidelines, and this is their foremost commandment: Seek justice, not convictions. Never break the law or the ethical restraints that protect the rights of the accused.
That’s why it was surprising to me, and sickening, to see the blatantly unethical and possibly illegal behavior by the prosecutors in the Kyle Rittenhouse case. I don’t know of any judge in Philadelphia that would not have tanned the hides of any prosecutor that acted in that manner. There should be an investigation and they should face possible disbarment or even criminal charges.
On the other hand, we have a strong and growing far-Left movement in the US that is achieving the election of extreme “progressive” DAs. Philadelphia elected one in 2018 (Soros-backed Larry Krasner) and he swept in, ordered that most low-level crime would not even be prosecuted, and fired almost all of the veteran prosecutors (legal, but unheard of) just because they were excellent prosecutors who believed in doing their utmost to convict the guilty. The kind of attorney that you would want if G-d forbid you were the victim of a serious crime and wanted to see that the investigation and trial were conducted with maximum skill and thoroughness.
Thank goodness I was already about to leave the office and take an early retirement when Krasner took over, because it would be hell working there now. He just “enforces” the criminal laws in exactly the way that you would expect a far-Left defense attorney would do.
Many thanks for that most interesting reply.
I suppose one tends to hear about the cases were justice failed rather than all the cases that proceeded ethically and satisfactorily to a fair conclusion. The Truloves and the Broadwaters and the Rittenhouse case etc tend to linger in the mind rather than all the uncontroversial cases. I was struck by the manner US attorney’s seem to keep a tally of their successes in a way English barristers would not – but may be that was just the brief impression I got from a San Francisco court many years – ago well before progressive DAs came on the scene and seemed to have rendered the city a byword for letting crime rip unmolested.
It seems Kamala Harris’s progressive DA office wasn’t so progressive in the Trulove case when it should have been.
A lot of people here think this is a smug, “called it” piece. But he DID call it. It wouldn’t have happened had people not been so smug themselves at the time about “believe all women”.
I agree with the first part of your comment but not the second; “believe all women” arose out of the #MeToo movement (2016), Alice Sebold was raped in 1981, I don’t think they are in any way linked.
However I do think the case, historically, is an example for us today that “believe all women” is a dangerous and unrealistic demand.
The sentiment, if not the slogan, goes back way before 2016. In fact, I’m not sure the slogan isn’t older than that. I suspect this is an idea with its origins in the 70s.
It’s worth noting that Mr Broadwater, with astonishing grace and generosity, has accepted her semi-apology and acknowledged that she too is the victim in this sad affair.
It’s also worth noting that according to Tim Muccianti, Broadwater intends to sue Sebold and her publisher.
I suspected she was a fraud …this is the review of The Lovely Bones I wrote on Amazon 6 years ago….
I clicked the ‘write your own review’ button and really had no settled idea what I was going to say about this book. Part of me was demanding a stellar singularity for the weary trudge through a family in crisis – and get it over with – but another part of me gazed into the abyss and considered I should give the author more credit for this journey deep into the nature and consequences of evil and the inherent, solid goodness of a family recovering from violent loss.
The narrator is Susie Salmon, a 13 year old girl. A serial killing (we later discover) neighbour created a secret underground room in a nearby dump. He abducts Susie, takes her to the room, rapes her, kills her and dismembers the body which is never found (save an elbow!). This sequence is necessarily dealt with quickly. The spirit of Susie moves quickly to a subjective heaven where she narrates and comments on the small town trauma as the years go by. So, there is an essential core element of the supernatural. This is not a crime thriller.
I did not identify with or feel sorry for Susie the narrator, as many 5 star reviewers did. I was not jerked into tears as many 5 star reviewers were. I deliberately use the word narrator because I was ambivalent to the demise of Susie. Her rape and murder was dealt with quickly, and not as grimly portrayed as other reviewers would have you believe. The life-ending event was a necessary precursor for the real point of the book – to observe, tongue in cheek, how a family reacts to deep and sudden trauma. In that sense the book could just as easily been predicated on the death of a family pet or the outbreak of war. I was tempted to ask would the book have succeeded if an elderly male criminal had been murdered and narrated the novel from hell. I doubt it. To me, therefore, the novel centred on sentimental mawkishness and would not have succeeded if based on observations from hell. To that extent the novel manipulated the reader. Can it be denied that the novel is founded on relentless, unremitting helpings of sentimental mawkishness?
Would men and women see the book in the same way? I ask the question with some post modern trepidation. Would the reader be subject to tear jerking and crying as they read the book on the bus or would they race through the pages churlishly laughing at the hopelessness of humanity and wanting the inept, morally corrupt cop to pay less attention to Susie’s mother and more to taking seriously Susie’s father’s suspicions of the odious serial killer Harvey. I enjoyed reading about the antics of Susie’s siblings, I laughed at the telegraphed moves of teenage love but I was bored to death with Susie’s banal musings.
This was pure American hokey. 1 star.
5 people found this helpful
Make that 6.
Alice Sebold is a despicable See You Next Tuesday. I’m disgusted that she has the temerity to whine about how racist the justice system was to the man she falsely accused. It wasn’t systemic racism that sent Anthony Broadwater to prison for a crime he didn’t commit; it was Alice Sebold. And now she’s deploying the usual woke tonk to weasel out from under it. Bollocks to her.
Regarding the rape and the wrongful conviction of an innocent man. Unfortunately memory is a tricky thing. Memories can be planted even without an intention to do so. She was very young, the event was brutal, intentionality or unintentionally during questioning she might have been led to believe an innocent man had raped her. Modern science supports this hypothesis. We can’t rely on witness accounts even in a situation of rape.
I have always felt that The Lovely Bones was unidimensional and bordering on unenlightened. Thanks for all the information for this overly rational Indian girl! 🙂
This is a very revealing piece. I disliked the book intensely myself, finding it typical of the self-obsessed sentimentalism which breeds the cognitive dissonance which blinds most of affluent humanity to the real injustices that our very lifestyles inflict on our natural world. There is a whole genre of books that are spun around self-pity relating to a single incident in the past. Many crime novels have this type of theme. We are seeing in America and to some extent the UK a surge of cognitive dissonance of the injuries that our coercive consumer culture inflicts daily on our natural world. We are very sick from decades of pursuing economic growth, we are destroying ourselves both mentally and physically. We need a global aspiration for ethical and urgent IPAT Degrowth. We cannot have our cake and eat it too. COVID is just one symptom of escalating ecological collapse. Individual suffering is increasingly paling into insignificance as we collectively continue in escalating the destruction of our natural world.
What sad disgusting story. Sebold should pay.
Yeah she no doubt deserved to be raped eh?
She doesn’t seem to have the talent to write an Atonement.
She doesn’t seem to have the talent to write an Atonement.
Rather pointless article even in the light of the admission of miscarriage of justice. What we need to be told is the extent to which her identification evidence was decisive in the verdict. Was she adamant under cross examination that it was Broadwater or was her assertion just not challenged?
“Cultures” do not create rapists (it’s a counterfactual: show me one that has failed to create them) but they can contribute to a climate in which questionable accusations are taken at face value lest one suffer social death for raising the doubts. Maoist “culture” talk merely enables third parties (the “system,” the jury) to be held responsible for the principal’s crimes.
I’m not sure I understand Sebold’s “identification” of Broadwater. Did she convince herself he was the guy, or did she know she was lying? I can’t get into the head of a person who was traumatized as much as Sebold was, but if she was psychologically messed up it seems that some of the blame definitely goes on the culture at the time, which allowed for such easy framing of a black man, and the legal system which made more than one error, including relying on junk science.
What we saw in the Rittenhouse trial, with the legal process focusing solely on actual evidence and witness testimony, casting aside cultural and political pressures that were entirely subjective, was completely missing in this rape trial. I’m trying to figure out whose fault it was, and it seems like it was everyone’s fault except for Broadwater. What he lost can never be returned to him.
She was beaten and raped by a man who had been killing and dismembering girls in that area. She initially picked a different man from the lineup. The police pushed her towards Broadwater.
Of course he was wrongfully convicted, but it was the work of the police and prosecutors that resulted in his conviction.
There will be men who will continue to believe that women lie about being raped, or that the risk of wrongful conviction is so high for men that every barrier to sexual assault prosecutions must be maintained. The fact that this one case has generated so much publicity due to its exceptionality will be lost on them.
Wow the smugness of your ‘victory’ is brilliantly presented. Why don’t you go on a victory lap boasting about how right you were?
Congratulations. Bloke 1 Lying Woman 0
Well done too on winning the Stonewall journalist of the year in 2007. You helped them achieve great things in retrospect.
She was raped by a black man and wanted the life of a black man to be destroyed in return. It didn’t matter which black man, because to her they are all the same.
And you know this, how … ?
Any black man would do. She didn’t care.
The second last paragraph really says it all…. every facet of what happened was appalling. Speaking to the two individuals, Sebold suffered a vicious, devastating attack as a young woman that she could never recover from and Broadwater suffered complete ruination.
It is apparently now Hensher’s job to lead a pile on on Sebold because apparently he is a seer (look at me, I was right all along), saw the truth about her character long ago, doesn’t like her writing and was criticised himself for some opinions he held. Very distasteful. Do I detect glee?
I agree, a smug piece which appears to be about how clever he thinks himself. Damn all sympathy about the rape or even really about the false conviction.
He is thoroughly off putting. Me. Me. Me. Even slid in a mention of homophobia to make himself a victim.
The whole article was an excuse for him to tell us all how wonderful he is. Frankly the ‘homophobia’ claim was nauseating. What he meant to say was “Don’t criticise me, I’m gay”.
I don’t agree, I think Philip Hensher is making a valid observation that there was something iffy about the story long ago. His final two paragraphs make it absolutely clear how appalling he thinks it was from the rape onwards, but most important is his point about the necessity for impartial, cool-headed justice. Sentimentality is dangerous and there should be no place for it in the justice system.
There are actually numerous stories of false convictions like this which have only been uncovered as forensic techniques have improved. We need to be so careful that particular prejudices of the time (whether traditional or social justice) do not distort our legal system.
Yes, you’re probably right, prejudice and sentimentality work together.
Do you think she deliberately fingered the wrong man? That would have to be the nub of your argument.
I think a young woman was raped in a tunnel, she was traumatised, for months afterwards she was probably paranoid and when Broadwater smiled at her she jumped to conclusions, and made a mistake, which led to a catalogue of mistakes as Hensher points out. However, then this young woman writes a novel about a rape which feminists and the left wing media like, but which to one reviewer at least does not ring true – maybe that was a sign that her evidence against Broadwater should not have been trusted.
That is the argument as I see it.
+ The case has relevance now, today, to the demand from feminists to “believe all women”, because that is a bad and dangerous idea.
Surely “believe all women” is about something else. Maybe whatever is alleged was in fact consensual, or didn’t happen at all. However, in this case there is no doubt at all that a rape took place, and the question is whether the physical conditions were such that a clear positive identification was possible. It appears that it wasn’t.
I understand your differentiation but I’m not sure it’s reliable. Some feminists now argue that they never meant “believe all women” at all, they actually meant just “believe women”, which changes the goal posts considerably, but there are still radical feminists who disagree, so it’s all a bit muddy and uncertain.
The problem being that if your starting point is “believe women”, that’s pretty much the same as the man being guilty until proved innocent.
Yes, but as far as feminist’s egos are concerned it’s not quite so blameworthy as “believe all women”, In other words the more intelligent feminist recognises there is something deeply wrong about the idea but can’t quite bear to let it go.
I am unsure as to the precise meaning of ‘believe (all) women’. ‘Believe (all) women’ about what exactly?
Oh who knows Michael, it’s all a load of nonsense anyway.
I assume that the main idea behind “believe all women” is that women do not lie. But it could also be taken to mean that women are never mistaken, and are not prone to the cognitive biases and deceptive memories that afflict the rest of us. To simply believe them is to assume this.
In any case, it’s a silly slogan. Obviously we should not automatically disbelieve women, but we need to expect the same level of proof that we would expect in any other case where the stakes are so high.
This man’s life has been largely take from him!
It is an appalling slogan because it is ambiguous or vague and therefore imprecise. We are not told what we are meant to apply our belief to.
So actually your opinion is identical to mine regarding the crime and the conviction. I differ on the book and on the review. That said, it appears that most here think she is guilty of something and I really wonder what that is.
Yes indeed, I upticked your response to Tony Taylor early yesterday morning but it’s been overwhelmed by the downticks.
I think the perceived guilt is because she has made a great deal of money out of the experience, including her terrible mistake, at the cost of innocent Broadwater’s lost 17 years of life accused of rape in an American jail, which is no picnic by all accounts. Many people, especially men, will feel for him and she is partly to blame.
Thanks…. so the opinion is that she is somehow guilty because she made some money by writing some books about her experience. Seeing we agree that she didn’t finger him deliberately, I can’t agree with this.
I think that generally most men underestimate the damage that rape does to women and especially a lot of men particularly on this site feel inflamed by an injustice done to a man by a woman, even if not deliberate. It presses buttons and they come out slugging.
Essentially the mood is that his punishment was greater (I agree), so therefore we have to apportion some guilt to her (I disagree). They are both victims.