Alice Sebold's 1999 memoir, Lucky, will soon be unavailable. Perhaps for a short period, or, possibly, for a long one.
In a statement issued yesterday, Lucky publisher Scribner said it will "cease distribution of all formats" of the book, while it consults with Sebold on "how the work might be revised."
The bestselling book, which details the effects of a sexual assault Sebold suffered as an undergraduate in college, has become embroiled in a controversy after the man convicted of raping the author was exonerated of the crime last week.
A day after the November 24 verdict, the New York Times reported that the decision for Anthony J. Broadwater, who spent 16 years in prison for the crime, came about, in part, through work conducted by the producer of a film adaptation of the book.
According to the Times, Anthony Mucciante, who was executive producing the film adaptation (which has since been abandoned), began investigating the crime (and the ensuing trial) after noticing what the paper called "discrepancies between the memoir and the script." For Mucciante, his concerns drove him to leave the film. He went on to hire a private investigator who turned up key information that was later passed on to Broadwater's lawyers.
Mucciante told the paper that he had no doubts about the brutal attack Sebold details, but that he began to have questions about the trial, which the author covers in the second half of the book. (The Times reported that Broadwater was arrested after Sebold saw him on the street, months after the attack, contacting the police to tell them she might have seen her assailant. Although she picked a different man in a police lineup, Sebold wrote in the book that she immediately felt she'd made a mistake; she would later identify Broadwater in court. Mucciante's investigators argued that the prosecutor had falsely told Sebold that Broadwater and the man next to him were friends who had purposely appeared in the lineup together to trick her — and that it had improperly influenced Sebold’s later testimony. The conviction relied on Sebold's identification and a now-discredited forensic method which relies on hair analysis.)
Sebold, who initially declined to speak to the Times, has since opened up about the situation, writing directly to Broadwater in this statement posted on Medium. In it she says that "no apology can change what happened to you and never will." She also states that she "will continue to struggle with the role that I unwittingly played within a system that sent an innocent man to jail."
Asked to elaborate on what form the revisions mentioned in its statement might make, Scribner declined to comment. And, when asked what kind of timeline the publisher was looking at to make such changes, the spokesperson said "we have no timeline."
