Alice Sebold's 'Lucky' Loses Funding After Victoria Pedretti Drops Out

Netflix had been hyping a movie based on the 1999 book "Lucky" for quite a while. The book is an autobiography of Alice Sebold who wrote primarily about her struggles to survive a traumatic experience after allegedly being raped by an unknown man in her freshman year of college. In real life, the man was later identified as Anthony Broadwater.

Sebold had reached a deal with Netflix to create an original movie for the streaming service. Netflix had already chosen "You" star Victoria Pedretti to headline the project. Recently, Anthony Broadwater was actually exonerated from the charges of rape that he faced over the incident that is detailed in the book!

Anthony Broadwater spent 16 years behind bars for whatever ultimately happened at Syracuse University. Even after being released from prison his life didn't exactly get better. According to reports, he had a real rough time trying to find a job since he had to register as a sex offender. Tim Mucciante was on board the project for Netflix as an executive producer. He wanted to make sure that the streaming service was telling the real story and not just what Alice Sebold had written in the book. Mucciante actually went out and hired a private investigator to look into the case. He told the Associated Press at the time,

“I started poking around and trying to figure out what really happened here,”

Mucciante had mentioned also that he became skeptical of the entire story when he read the first draft of the script that was going to be used in the movie. There were plenty of things that just didn't add up to what had originally been described in the book!

With Anthony Broadwater now being exonerated attention has turned back to Sebold. In the book she describes that she wasn't able to put a face to the man that she claims raped her. She does describe though what she believes was a second meeting with the man at a store months after the attack. The book doesn't name Broadwater directly, but there is a character that essentially depicts him. He's the one who has a second encounter with Sebold. The whole story though has now come into question. After the exoneration neither Sebold nor the book's publisher Scribner claims to have plans to update the story in the book! Sebold has now apologized to Broadwater though saying recently,

“My goal in 1982 was justice – not to perpetuate injustice,” she went on to say. “And certainly not to forever, and irreparably, alter a young man’s life by the very crime that had altered mine.”

Allegedly, the film that would've also been titled Lucky, just like the book was already in filming when news broke of Anthony Broadwater's exoneration. That prompted Victoria Pedretti to exit the film. She also has not commented on her decision to leave. However, the entire thing is essentially unrivaled after the exoneration. With the film losing funding. How could it not? An executive producer on the film helped in the exoneration process! Going ahead with a story that you'd helped to discredit seems counterintuitive.