‘Your life was robbed' How an author's rape led to racist miscarriage of justice

On 4 November 1981, five Black men in matching light blue shirts filed into a narrow, well-lit room on the third floor of a police station in Syracuse, New York, and turned to face a one-way mirror. On the other side, a 19-year-old white student stepped towards the glass, and tried to identify which of them was her rapist.

- Archie Bland

The student, Alice Sebold, would go on to a celebrated literary career. She had been the subject of a horrific attack late one night in May of the same year, dragged into a tunnel from a path in a public park and forced to lie down among broken bottles. More than 40 years later, the events that entirely changed the course of two lives have come back to prominence, and the story of a woman’s reclamation of her life from her rapist has been vastly complicated by a court’s decision that he was never caught – and instead an innocent man was the victim of an inescapably racist miscarriage of justice.

The events that led to that conclusion began when Sebold was walking down the street in Syracuse, five months after her rape, and saw a man from behind who she thought seemed familiar.

Later, in her memoir, Lucky, Sebold wrote of the telltale signs that seemed to show it was her attacker: the same height, the same build, something about his posture. She doubled back, wondering if she had felt “just a more intense version of the fear I had felt around certain black men ever since the rape”. Then he appeared again, this time walking towards her, and this time, Sebold said, he spoke to her. “He smirked at me, remembering,” she wrote. And she thought she knew it was him.