Alice Sebold, a freshman at the University of Syracuse soon becomes a victim of rape on “dead leaves and broken beer bottles” while on the way from campus late one night in a tunnel under an amphitheater. Sebold soon contacts the local officials to tell them about what has happened and they tell her that she was “lucky” because someone had just been killed where she was raped. She is then known as “the girl who was raped” by her inconsiderate classmates. This questionable “luck” and that she seemed to have shaped how her life will turn out in the future. Soon after she moves from New York to Pennsylvania to live with her family before the beginning of her sophomore year at Syracuse, having moved there instead of dealing with her classmates and peers now she has to deal with her mother’s panic attacks every time she is in car, her father’s ignorance of thinking it could have been prevented and the unwanted attention and …show more content…
She sees the man who raped her, Gregory Madison, walking down the street in her neighborhood and recognizes her from the occurrence then she notifies the police again to tell them the details of the rapist and they take him for questioning. She finds herself having the face the rapist face to face in court with her professor Tess Gallagher, which became someone she trusted and accompanied her to many legal proceedings. Madison brings someone with him who looks similar to him during a lineup to confuse her which made it difficult to remember who the right person who raped her was. After he was chosen, he was eventually convicted and tried for rape and she had to testify against him and he was sentenced and given the maximum sentence. Ironically, her apartment was broken into while her roommate was there and her roommate was raped. Collectively, they had to deal with the same trauma that Sebold had already gone