Joaquin Sapien

A few weeks ago, after two years of work, I published a story unlike any I’d encountered in my 18 years at ProPublica. I’ve been off social media for a while, but I felt compelled to share some of my reporting journey here. 🧵

This describes only a tiny part of my journey through memory, handwritten records, confessions, denials and a series of events that changed the law on campus rape. By the end, I learned that no part of the Syracuse criminal justice system back then could be depended on.

propublica.orgThe Wrong Man: The Bestselling Author, the Exoneration and the Rape Crisis the Police IgnoredFive years after Anthony Broadwater was belatedly cleared for the sexual assault of Alice Sebold, the questions of how he came to be wrongly convicted and how one or more serial rapists operated for y...

I hope you’ll read the story here: www.propublica.org/article/alic...

I later learned that he confessed to five rapes just four months after Broadwater’s conviction. All but one of those rapes took place within a mile from Thornden Park. But the case against him fell apart. He wasn’t punished for any of them.

I eventually found myself knocking on his door. We spoke for more than an hour. Our conversation left me wondering if I had found the true perpetrator — or if I was making the same mistake that wrongly convicted Broadwater …

After the assault, she tried to get him to leave by yelling out that her roommate was coming home. The assailant replied: “I know her, we had a thing, we had a deal in the past.”

At least one serial rapist known to police was operating in that area at the time. There is no evidence that he raped either woman. But there is no denying that he matched key elements of the descriptions they provided, in terms of either his methods or appearance.

(A spokesperson for the university said that “we are not in a position to speak to the actions” of past administrations, but SU now has systems to help survivors.)

Two years after Sebold’s rape, the rash of sexual violence even reached Sebold’s roommate in their shared apartment. Broadwater, by then, was in prison. The roommate’s police statement suggested the same man may have been responsible for both rapes.

Women were assaulted all over Syracuse at the time: dorm rooms, student apartments, walking to the library or out of grocery stores. The descriptions of the perpetrators were often eerily similar.

Early on, few of these made much news. I eventually found one police report that had “no press” written on it. A former detective testified that meant Syracuse University “put their foot down and said no press for any kind of rape, robbery, burglary” near campus.

What could we uncover if we tried to investigate her case and those surrounding it? Could we untangle how things went wrong? Maybe even point to a culprit?

I started gathering police documents and began to map out the other attacks around Thornden Park, where Sebold had been assaulted. More than a dozen women reported being raped or attacked by strangers in half a square mile over four years.

Two former colleagues had begun reporting the story before moving on to other projects and publications; trying to uncover the truth in a botched case decades after the fact would border on the impossible; most people in power then were long gone.

But the questions were hard to resist: Police initially gave up on Sebold’s case in hours, dismissing her, despite clear evidence she’d been raped.

After the exoneration, an internet backlash exploded against Sebold. But the media frenzy over the case glossed over a key detail: There had been other rapes in the same park where Sebold had been attacked at around the same time.

The DA expressed frustration that “nobody might have put two and two together back then.” When my editors asked me to take on that challenge, I almost said no…

That news spread quickly. The BLM movement roiled the country the year before. Now, here was a Black man who had been wrongly convicted of raping a white woman, based almost exclusively on her testimony — even after she had identified a different man as her rapist in a lineup.

He spent 16 years in prison, then 23 more as a registered sex offender. She went on to literary fame as the author of “The Lovely Bones” and portrayed Broadwater’s conviction as just in a bestselling memoir called “Lucky.”

It started with a high-profile exoneration. In 2021, a judge vacated the conviction of Anthony Broadwater for the rape of writer Alice Sebold decades earlier, when she was a student at Syracuse University in upstate NY.