«Счастливица»: История изнасилования и ложного обвинения.

1999 memoir by Alice Sebold

Lucky is a 1999 memoir by the American novelist Alice Sebold, best known as the author of the 2002 novel The Lovely Bones. Lucky describes her experience of being raped and beaten when she was eighteen in a tunnel near Syracuse University where she was a student, and how this traumatic experience shaped the rest of her life. Sebold has stated that her reason for writing the book was to bring more awareness to rape and rape survivors. The memoir sold over one million copies. Anthony Broadwater served 16 years in prison after being falsely accused as the rapist, and was released in 1999. He was exonerated in 2021 after a judge found serious issues with the initial conviction.

In the early hours of May 8, 1981, while Sebold was eighteen years old and a freshman at Syracuse University, she was assaulted and raped while walking home through a tunnel to an amphitheater near campus. She notified police, who were initially unable to find the man she had encountered. After an officer suggested the man might have been Anthony Broadwater, who had reportedly been seen in the area, police arrested and charged Broadwater. Broadwater ultimately served 16 years in prison, maintaining his innocence throughout. Because he would not admit to the attack, he was denied parole five times.

Sebold began writing Lucky after taking a memoir class with Geoffrey Wolff at the University of California, Irvine, where she completed her MFA in 1998. She published the book in 1999, about a year after Broadwater's release.

In 2019, a film adaption of the memoir was announced with director Karen Moncrieff. Victoria Pedretti was later selected to star as Sebold. 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. The film adaptation of Lucky was canceled after losing its funding in mid 2021.