Even the Liberal Supreme Court Justices Ceded Ground in the Fight for Trans Existence
The far-right Supreme Court majority marked the final day of Pride month with an anti-trans decision upholding state bans on trans girls from playing girls’ sports. That the ruling from the right-wing court had been long expected made it no less horrendous.
With a 6–3 judgment applying to two cases, one from Idaho and one from West Virginia, the court gave states nationwide carte blanche to discriminate against trans girls who want to play on teams consistent with their gender. The ruling does not constitute a nationwide ban on trans athletes, and trans girls can continue to compete in states without bans. Twenty-seven states currently have bans on the books against trans girl athletes. All those bans — and whatever new ones come into place — can stay in place.
One of the cases was just about a single girl seeking to participate in her school sports.
Genital inspection is a next logical step — a step already being proposed in several states.
Pointing to the absurdity, the legal scholar and trans rights advocate Alejandra Caraballo wrote on Bluesky, “Just absolutely insane to me how many millions were spent and the massive political and legal effort exhausted just so a state can ban a single trans girl from playing sports with her friends in school.”
This was always the plan for the anti-trans zealots who saw girls’ sports as an easy entry point from which to decimate trans people’s civil rights protections. It’s no surprise then that the consequences of the rulings threaten to go far beyond school and college athletics.
As multiple critics of anti-trans sports bans stress, efforts to exclude trans athletes also open the door to the abuse and harassment of any girls alleged to appear insufficiently feminine. Genital inspection and genetic testing requirements are the next logical steps — steps that have already been proposed by Republicans in several states.
The Supreme Court majority argued that the anti-trans bans do not violate either Title IX, the landmark civil rights law that proscribes sex-based discrimination, or constitutional guarantees of equal protection.
Even the dissenting liberal justices ceded vital ground in the moral struggle for trans rights. Though they sided with the trans students’ claims under the equal protection clause, they agreed with the conservatives that trans-exclusionary, sex-segregated school sports bans did not violate Title IX’s prohibitions in schools.
The liberal stance paints a telling picture of the decimated state of trans rights. The far right has been able to pursue its trans-eliminationist agenda to an extraordinary degree in part because liberals and even some leftists have been willing to throw trans people under the bus, if not fully align with fascistic anti-trans fearmongering.
The idea that trans girls pose a threat or danger to cisgender girls playing sports remains a myth without any evidence or grounding, conjured from whole cloth by anti-trans ideologues looking for a wedge issue to pass overreaching anti-trans laws.
Today, the strategies dreamt up by well-funded think tanks and advocacy groups like the rabidly anti-trans Alliance Defending Freedom have again paid off: According to the highest court in the land, trans exclusion in sex-segregated sports does not violate civil rights.
The West Virginia case was brought by Becky Pepper-Jackson, a high school student who has identified as a girl since she was 8 years old, takes puberty blockers, has a birth certificate recognizing her as female, and just wanted to compete on the athletics team with other girls.
Writing the majority opinion upholding the ban against her participation, Justice Brett Kavanaugh described trans girls and women and “biological males.”
Earlier this week, anticipating the court’s ruling, the American Civil Liberties Union’s Chase Strangio wrote, “I hope that everyone who, like me, loves sports will pause to think about what it means to exile a group of young people from the social, cultural, and emotional experience of being part of a team.”
The legal arguments for permitting anti-trans discrimination are by now familiar: The bans are not discriminatory, anti-trans bigots say, because they apply equally to those they deem biologically male and those they deem biologically female.
The fact that anti-trans discrimination is unavoidably a matter of sex-based discrimination is neatly avoided in a way that erases the sex-based reality of trans people from existence. Little matter that no current state laws are on the books relating to boys’ sports.
It evidently matters even less to the Supreme Court justices that sex and gender do not exist in the sharp binary that sports bans and other anti-trans policies demand.
In an unnecessary and cruel concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas went out of his way to note, “Men and boys with gender dysphoria are not women or girls, even if they believe they are.”
This tells us all we need to know about the right’s designs on trans existence, reflecting an anti-trans eliminationist ideology that flies in the face of medical consensus and empirical evidence.
[newsetter][/newsletter]
As New York Times Magazine writer Ruth Padawer noted in an extensive 2016 feature on the practice of so-called “sex-testing” in sports, endocrinologists and geneticists have for decades challenged the delineations and exclusions such tests purports to achieve.
“Relying on science to arbitrate the male-female divide in sports is fruitless, they said, because science could not draw a line that nature itself refused to draw,” Padawer wrote.
Not that this has mattered to the sports regulators and gender-conformity zealots, committed as they are to the brutal racist legacy of gender policing, and desperately pushing to exclude trans people from public life.
“No student-athlete on either side of the issue, whether a biological female or transgender, deserves to be ostracized or vilified,” Kavanaugh had the audacity to say at the end of his opinion, upholding laws designed precisely to ostracize and vilify trans children.
Trump sons set to profit from tax-funded Kazakh tungsten mine deal
Trump and his children Eric, Don Jr. and Ivanka are pictured in 2016. Photo: Paul Morigi / WireImage
A published report detailing how President Donald Trump’s eldest sons stand to profit from a tungsten mining deal negotiated by their billionaire father has sparked outraged calls for accountability, with Democratic lawmakers characterizing the taxpayer-funded project as yet another example of the administration’s unchecked and unprecedented corruption.
According to the New York Times report, Trump and his team – including billionaire Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick – “won an agreement from the Kazakh leader to give a little-known American company access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten, a metal that the United States desperately needs for the production of missile warheads, fighter jets, computer chips and other critical goods.”
Ahead of the deal’s completion last September, according to the Times, the Trump administration “approved preliminary applications for as much as $1.6 billion in federal financing for the American company, now called Kaz Resources, which plans to break ground on the project in rural Kazakhstan.”
Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., along with Lutnick’s sons Brandon and Kyle, are poised to benefit from the project. “Within weeks of the St. Regis negotiations, investors with a firm called Dominari Securities, which is housed at Trump Tower in New York and partly owned by the president’s two eldest sons … joined with other partners to take a 20% stake in a corporate entity related to the Kazakhstan project,” the Times reported.
Lutnick’s sons, meanwhile, “helped one of the lead investors … on the Kazakh deal raise $210 million in new capital for a related entity,” potentially resulting in a multimillion-dollar boon for Cantor Fitzgerald, the investment firm overseen by Brandon and Kyle Lutnick.
The Times found that at least “14 companies working on critical mining deals with the US government that have ties to Cantor Fitzgerald or the Trump family,” including Kaz Resources, Perpetua Resources and USA Rare Earth.
Trump’s family has profited massively from his return to the White House, thanks in a large part to a crypto scheme spearheaded by the president’s older sons. A “Trump Family Digital Grift Wealth Tracker” maintained by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee estimates that crypto projects have netted the president and his family over $2.4 billion in profits so far.
The US going 100% EV by 2040 would save more than 100k lives, study says
Although climate change is the primary motivation behind electric vehicle adoption, it isn’t the only consideration. Removing internal combustion engines from the road directly saves lives by reducing airborne pollutants that can cause and trigger asthma and other lung diseases.
Now, a report from the International Council on Clean Transportation has tried to quantify that effect, comparing various electrification scenarios over the next couple of decades. Currently, more than 41,800 premature deaths are attributable to air pollution from road transport, the ICCT says.
We’ve long known that living near a busy road is associated with worse health outcomes. Combustion products like nitrogen oxides (NOx), carbon monoxide (CO), particulates (PMs), and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are all found around highways and busy intersections in concentrations high enough to cause health effects, and studies have repeatedly shown that living close to a major roadway is associated with increased mortality.
The ICCT worked with the FIA Foundation—yes, the road safety nonprofit is related to the same FIA that’s in charge of F1 and other global motorsport—to create a model to estimate road transport emissions through to 2050. The model included light-duty vehicles (passenger cars and trucks), heavy-duty vehicles (delivery trucks, buses, tractor-trailers, etc), and two- and three-wheel vehicles. It predicted levels of NOx, black carbon and organic carbon, sulfur oxides, ammonia, CO, and VOCs.
The study then calculated the heart impacts from conditions like asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), diabetes, ischemic heart disease, lung cancer, and stroke (all linked to PM2.5 exposure and ozone exposure), as well as pediatric asthma incidence caused by NOx and NOx-attributable premature mortality in adults.
Several scenarios were then run. The primary reference scenario uses August 2025 as the baseline, with a US government that’s openly hostile to the idea of clean energy. Another scenario considers what would happen if there is an ambitious effort to adopt EVs, assuming that 100 percent of all vehicles are zero-emissions by 2045, with some regions going all-EV for light vehicles by 2035 and for heavy vehicles by 2040.
Even under the baseline 2025 scenario, high-income regions like North America and Western Europe should see significant reductions in PM2.5 and NOx pollution. But in other parts of the world where incomes are lower, pollution could rise by 50 percent or more due to lax regulations and slower vehicle replacement. The ambitious scenario sees these disparities largely eliminated, with even the poorest countries seeing as much reduction in PM2.5 and NOx as the richest did in the baseline 2025 scenario.
A disproportionate amount of pollution comes from heavy-duty diesel-powered vehicles. Even though they account for only about one in 20 vehicles on the road, heavy-duty vehicles are responsible for 36 percent of transport energy consumption, 60 percent of tailpipe NOx, 55 percent of tailpipe PM2.5, and 65 percent of tailpipe SO2. Two- and three-wheelers are also rather dirty; despite representing just 4 percent of transport energy consumption, they contribute 14 percent of tailpipe PM2.5, 19 percent of tailpipe VOC, and 12 percent of tailpipe CO, according to the ICCT report.
The current health impact from transportation pollution amounted to almost 700,000 premature deaths worldwide in 2024 and nearly 250,000 new pediatric asthma cases. China saw the highest number of premature deaths, but the US was at the top of the chart for new asthma cases, with 23,100. Even under the baseline 2025 scenario, the US and other wealthy nations should see a 50 percent reduction in premature deaths and a slightly greater reduction in pediatric asthma cases. Ambitious EV adoption still has the potential to help prevent 108,400 premature deaths and 42,100 new pediatric asthma cases in the US by 2050.
While there is a growing number of zero-emissions heavy-duty vehicles, including both battery EVs and hydrogen fuel cell EVs, adoption lags behind light-duty passenger vehicles. Zero-emissions heavy truck adoption reached 4 percent in the second half of 2025, with a cumulative total by December last year of 72,308 nationwide. While that doesn’t sound like much, it’s almost 20,000 more trucks than at the end of 2024, which is promising growth, even in the absence of tax credits or corporate environmental stewardship goals.
“Zero-emission freight makes economic sense across a growing number of routes, especially where diesel health impacts are greatest,” said Ray Minjares, program director at the International Council on Clean Transportation. “With smart policies that further drive down the cost and drive up the sales of electric freight vehicles, US states will deliver economic growth, energy savings and a pollution-free future.”
It took less than a day for the detective to give up on the case. A patrol officer had reported a harrowing, violent midnight rape in a Syracuse, New York, park. Hospital records recounted that the victim, an 18-year-old freshman at Syracuse University, was “crying uncontrollably.” Her face was bruised, and she had scratches on her neck. Her hymen had been lacerated in two places. Her urine was “grossly bloody,” according to the hospital report, and there was semen inside her.
At 8 on the morning after the assault, after the victim looked fruitlessly through books of mug shots in hopes of identifying her assailant, Syracuse detective George Lorenz interviewed her. She had been awake most of the night for a first police interview, followed by forensic and medical exams: everything from gathering physical evidence of the rape to X-rays of her skull because the attacker had pounded her head on a brick walkway. To alleviate the pain from her injuries, she had been given Demerol, a powerful opioid.
Lorenz, a burly 17-year veteran of the department who had worked as a meat cutter and truck driver before becoming a police officer, seemed annoyed that she had trouble staying awake, according to her subsequent account. “That’s inconsequential, just the facts,” he barked when he thought she was providing extraneous detail.
The detective was dubious that a rape had occurred, according to his preliminary report. “It is this writer’s opinion, after interview of the victim, that this case, as presented by the victim, is not completely factual,” he wrote. After speaking to the male student whom the victim had been visiting before she was attacked, the detective checked the crime scene for anything his colleagues, who had recovered a knife and the victim’s glasses, might have missed.
That was the totality of Lorenz’s investigation. Five hours after receiving the case, in a report marked 13:00 on May 8, 1981, he placed it in the “inactive file pending further info.” The consequences of that decision are still playing out nearly a half-century later.
Alice Sebold returned to campus for the fall semester that year, aware that nobody was looking for her rapist. She happened to encounter a man on the street and, with a jolt of terrified recognition, was certain she recognized her attacker. Sebold brought him to the attention of the police. Her testimony convicted the man, who spent 16 years in prison and nearly 23 more as a registered sex offender.
Sebold was no ordinary survivor. At a time when few even reported rapes, she publicly described her experience in searing detail — in op-eds, on “Oprah” and then in a memoir about the attack and its aftermath — inspiring others to speak out rather than live in silent shame. That memoir, “Lucky,” was published in 1999, then sold a million copies after her first novel, “The Lovely Bones,” became a publishing phenomenon and, later, a Hollywood movie. Years after that, an attempt to turn “Lucky” into a movie led screenwriters and producers to examine the badly flawed police work and prosecution stemming from the assault of Sebold. The details had been sitting in plain sight in Sebold’s memoir.
The case publicly disintegrated in 2021 when a judge vacated the conviction of Anthony Broadwater and Syracuse’s district attorney said in court that the prosecution “should never have happened.” Involving, as it did, a white woman accusing a poor Black man of rape, and coming back to court a year after the convulsions caused by the murder of George Floyd, the news detonated in the media, with Sebold vilified even after she apologized to Broadwater. The case was yet another reminder, if reminder was needed, of the racism in the U.S. justice system. And what had once been a central identity for Sebold — a person who had built a voice and a career out of standing up to sexual violence — suddenly turned on its head.
As all of those details unspooled in court, on television, and in the pages of The New York Times and the Syracuse press, two former colleagues of mine began to report on the case. One detail lost in the frenzy raised the question of how many other victims had been left behind and what else the police might have missed: The district attorney said in court that there had been other rapes in the same park where Sebold had been attacked, including one a little over a week after Broadwater’s conviction. The DA expressed frustration that “nobody might have put two and two together back then.” My former colleagues moved on to other projects and publications.
Eventually my editors asked me to pick up where they left off. What could we uncover if we tried today to investigate the case that the Syracuse police never truly investigated — Sebold’s — as well as any others that may have been related? Could we untangle how things went so wrong and perhaps even point to a potential culprit? And if the authorities had bungled the case this badly, what mistakes had they made in other cases and what could be learned from those errors?
As an investigative reporter with almost two decades at ProPublica, many of those years focused on criminal justice, I have delved into countless cases gone wrong. On one occasion, I set out to report an article on a man unjustly convicted of murder — a case where an appeals court had belatedly found prosecutorial misconduct serious enough to overturn his conviction — only to have the man confess to me that in fact he had pulled the trigger. He recounted the victim’s dying words and told me, “I did what I had to do.”
Sebold’s case would turn out to be far more complex than that one, and its layers and effects far broader than what emerged in the wake of the exoneration. There were even more turns — including civil litigation that continues to this day — in what was already a baroque narrative.
Or so I would learn after I embarked on what became two and a half years of reporting, trying to excavate the Syracuse criminal justice system in an era before DNA evidence and cellphones, before the Police Department even had computers, a time in which cities all over the country were grappling with a massive rise in violent crime. Reconstructing the truth decades after the fact, needless to say, is even harder than trying to pin it down in the moment.
What’s clear is that no part of the system in Syracuse at the time could be depended on. Police brushed off rapes. Prosecutors bungled confessions or were defeated at trial. Judges overlooked irregularities. And one of the most powerful institutions in the city, Syracuse University, seemed more interested in suppressing news of a rape epidemic than solving it. There were police reports of sexual assaults near the campus marked “no press.” A former detective testified that the files were marked that way at the university’s request.
In this atmosphere, at least one serial rapist was on the streets — and sexual assaults that closely resembled Sebold’s continued for years, even while Broadwater was behind bars. Meanwhile, the case gnawed at former Syracuse detective Paul Clapper. He wondered whether the wrong man had been sent to prison. After he left the force, he raised the name of a confessed and convicted rapist who closely matched the physical description of Sebold’s assailant but committed most of his crimes indoors rather than outside.
That man’s record was lengthy and violent. I eventually found myself knocking on his battered door, wondering whether, at long last, I had found the true perpetrator. Or was I falling into the same trap that the Syracuse criminal justice system had tumbled into when it wrongly convicted Anthony Broadwater 44 years ago?
1
When Alice Sebold arrived as a college freshman in 1980, Syracuse was a city in decline. It had risen a century and a half earlier because of its proximity to the Erie Canal, then for decades was the site of factories for companies like General Electric and Carrier Corp. By the 1970s, those companies were closing facilities. Poverty climbed and the city’s population dwindled, emptying rows of Victorian homes that had housed generations of working-class families. Syracuse’s downtown, already severed by the interstate highway, withered.
One institution, however, was flourishing: Syracuse University. Enrollment surged, its sports teams excelled and new buildings rose. The university was a bubble inside the city, according to former students.
Sebold was drawn by the school’s distinguished poetry program. Raised in a household of voracious readers in suburban Philadelphia, her father a professor of Spanish at the University of Pennsylvania and her mother having worked for magazines, Sebold disdained the university’s frat culture. She preferred to skip the keg parties in her dorm and instead lounged in the basement of the art building, drinking endless cups of instant coffee and reading Emily Dickinson.
Alice Sebold, then a Syracuse University student, at her typewriterCourtesy of Alice Sebold
Just after midnight, on May 8, 1981, the last night of her freshman year, she was attacked. Sebold was crossing through Thornden Park on her way back to her dorm from a friend’s apartment. A stranger grabbed her from behind as she walked along a brick path. He put one hand over her mouth and threatened her with a knife. “I’ll kill you if you scream,” he said. Over a period of more than an hour, according to police reports and Sebold’s memoir, the assailant bludgeoned Sebold with his fists, pounded her skull into the brick and choked her.
Sebold frantically searched for words to deter him: She told him she was a virgin, then an orphan. She offered him the $8 she had in her back pocket. He laughed and said he wasn’t interested in that.
He forced her to kiss him, then to undress. He made clear she was not his first victim. “You’re the worst bitch I’ve ever done this to,” he said.
Then, when he was done, he fell asleep on top of her. She tried to escape, but he woke up and offered a tearful apology. “You’re a good girl,” he said. “I’m so sorry.” He told her to kiss him good night and called her beautiful. “It was a date to him,” she wrote in “Lucky.”
Just as quickly, he reverted to hostility. The attacker pocketed her $8 after all. He let her go, then asked her name as she walked away. “Alice,” she told him, writing later, “I didn’t have a name other than my own to say.”
“Nice knowing you, Alice,” he said. “See you around sometime.”
2
Thornden Park, where Sebold had been assaulted, was both a refuge and a menacing locale adjacent to the university. Once the estate of a salt baron, the rolling 76-acre park had broad fields — with tennis courts, a pool and an earthen amphitheater — as well as dense clusters of maple and oak trees that provided dark, isolated enclaves where an attack might go unnoticed.
The park had been the site of two sexual attacks seven months before Sebold’s rape. A third had occurred a block away. The reports in those cases had also been quickly consigned to the inactive file.
One woman had told police that a man dragged her into a wooded section of the park. When she resisted, the report stated, he “began to punch her in the face” and “ordered her to remove her pants.”
As with Sebold’s case, the police report was dismissive. One officer asserted that the victim was “retarded” and had run away from a nearby halfway house. The staff there said that she had complained of a similar incident two weeks prior and that she was having “difficulty adjusting.” The case was put on ice just hours after it had been reported.
Crime scene photos after the assault on Sebold depict Thornden Park, the tunnel where she was raped, and the knife and glasses (hers) recovered by Syracuse police.Onondaga County District Attorney
Four days later, another young woman was making her way across Thornden Park when a man in a ski cap grabbed her by the neck and put a knife to her face. As she squirmed and tried to push him off, the man struggled to pull off his pants and hers. The woman suddenly realized the weapon was just a table knife, so she screamed as loud as she could and he ran away.
There was no indication in the police reports that these attacks might have been connected. Nor was there much evidence of public alarm. I found no articles about any of these October 1980 assaults in newspaper archives.
Trying to piece this information together was daunting and complicated. My colleagues and I made more than two dozen requests for all manner of law enforcement records from the Syracuse district attorney’s office, Police Department, the state prison system, local jails, archives and courts. Many were initially denied. After appeals, I wound up with thousands of pages of documents. There was little or no organization among them, and some were scrawled in barely decipherable handwriting. Even the redactions were haphazard, with some names still visible.
I started to map out the attacks around Thornden Park, using police reports and stray newspaper clips for some of the later ones. The numbers and proximity were jarring. More than a dozen women reported being raped or attacked by strangers within half a square mile over four years.
Women were being sexually assaulted in their dorm rooms and in student apartments, walking out of grocery stores or on their way to the library. A nursing student was attacked at the same spot as Sebold, on the same day that her roommate was raped in their shared apartment. A freshman was raped in a sorority house by a man who broke in through a window. The descriptions of the perpetrators were often eerily similar. They frequently carried a knife. And several were roughly the same height, weight and race.
It appeared that there was a public safety crisis emanating from the park area, with no sign of urgency from law enforcement.
3
Syracuse’s criminal justice system was chaotic during the 1980s and ’90s. One prosecutor would get into a scuffle, on live TV, with a candidate who had just won the race for DA. The police crime lab would lose its accreditation. The doctor who led the county medical examiner’s office resigned after an investigation found he had routinely removed organs from corpses without consent from the victims’ families. His employees had posed playfully for photos over the body of a woman who had died by suicide.
Given the level of dysfunction — and the fact that DNA evidence hadn’t yet come into use in the early ’80s — rape was particularly difficult to investigate. Survivors were wary, corroborating evidence hard to find. The Syracuse Police Department had no separate sex crimes unit at the time, and officers were still using typewriters.
“We were doing everything from homicide to robberies,” one supervisor of detectives during this era told me. He remembered nights with 18 felonies and fewer than a dozen detectives to work them. “A person with a knife in their back or a guy who got shot is going to take priority over a two-week-old rape case,” he said.
“A person with a knife in their back or a guy who got shot is going to take priority over a two-week-old rape case,” one supervisor of detectives said.
There was another impediment in those days: Syracuse University. I found a police report from 1980 on which someone had scrawled the words “NO PRESS.” A 19-year-old university student had been walking near Thornden Park when she, too, was attacked by a man with a knife. She got away by biting him when he tried to force her to perform oral sex.
The “no press” designation on police reports was not unusual, according to deposition testimony by Clapper, the former Syracuse detective, who would play a crucial role in the Broadwater saga. “No press,” Clapper testified in 2025, “means that Syracuse University put their foot down and said no press for any kind of rape, robbery, burglary that’s anywhere in the area of Syracuse University.”
The university had influence in the Police Department, according to Clapper, and an obvious interest in making the campus seem safe: “If your little daughter wants to go to school at SU and calls the police, and says, How is the crime around Syracuse University? ‘No crime around there.’ There’s five girls raped within, let’s say, a six-month period … between campus and Thornden Park. And if it’s marked ‘no press,’ it’s like it never happened.”
4
Sebold’s case had been placed in the inactive file. That meant the police weren’t searching for her assailant. But she couldn’t help herself. According to Sebold’s memoir, she walked the university campus, “looking for Him.”
“I was very aware that he could be around any corner,” she told me decades later. A sense of “hypervigilance” coursed through her like “a bunch of electrical wires,” she said.
Five months after the crime, Sebold saw a man on a street filled with restaurants and bars near the university. She felt a sudden, visceral certainty: “right height, right build, something in his posture.” She wrote that the man walked up to her and said, “Hey girl, don’t I know you from somewhere?” He then began nonchalantly chatting with a police officer across the street. (Both Broadwater and the officer would testify that they said “don’t I know you” to each other.)
When Sebold reported the sighting to the authorities a few hours later, Clapper recognized himself as the cop she saw and Anthony Broadwater as the man he was talking to. Broadwater, then 20, had grown up as one of six children of a janitor who worked for Syracuse University. After a brief stint in the Marines, he was working as a telephone wiring installer. Growing up, Broadwater told me, he’d had run-ins with the police and had served time in juvenile detention for theft. (Clapper had known Broadwater since he was a boy, he would testify years later. When asked if he had ever known him “to be involved in anything like rape,” Clapper replied, “No.”)
Anthony Broadwater during his time in the MarinesU.S. Marine Corps via The New York Times/Redux
Broadwater was arrested. He vociferously protested his innocence and did whatever he could to prove it. He volunteered a pubic hair for comparison to one found on Sebold after the rape, and he agreed to participate in a lineup.
When Broadwater saw the other lineup participants, he began to worry. None of them looked much like him. They were all too tall or had a lighter complexion or both. He suggested that another inmate closer to his height and build be included to make it more fair. Broadwater’s court-appointed lawyer got the jailer to bring another man down from the detention facility above the police building.
Sebold looked at the row of men and picked the person who had just been added to the lineup. The man was standing next to Broadwater.
The case should have ended then and there, in the view of the DA today. “You know, she didn’t pick out the wrong guy. She picked out the guy. She picked out the guy that she thought had raped her. And it wasn’t Anthony,” Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatrick told ProPublica. “Case is over. Stop.”
But it didn’t stop.
5
The prosecution of Broadwater had been assigned to a young assistant district attorney named Gail Uebelhoer (pronounced EE-bull-hair). Sebold wrote that she felt an immediate connection to Uebelhoer, whom she described as “solid and female” with “sparkling, intelligent eyes.” As Sebold put it in “Lucky,” “She wanted what I wanted: to win.”
After Sebold failed to identify Broadwater in the lineup, she could sense that Lorenz, the detective who had overseen the process, was unhappy. (Lorenz died in 2017.) Sebold said she had been scared and confused, torn between the men in positions 4 and 5. Instead of seeking out additional evidence, Uebelhoer asked Sebold to draft an affidavit on the spot, explaining what had happened. Sebold wrote in the affidavit that she had picked No. 5 because that person had been looking at her. Broadwater was in position 4.
During a lineup, Sebold identified her assailant as the man on the far right; Broadwater was standing next to him.Onondaga District Attorney/New York Times/Redux
The prosecutor then told her it was only natural that she would make such a mistake, according to Sebold’s memoir. “They really worked a number on you. He uses that friend or that friend uses him, in every lineup they do,” Sebold said Uebelhoer told her. “They’re dead ringers.” Both men are adamant that they had never been in a lineup before.
Within three hours of the botched lineup, Uebelhoer presented the case against Broadwater to a grand jury. Sebold wrote that she put on “the best show” of her life and several grand jurors “fought back tears.”
At least one of them was uneasy about the manner in which Broadwater had been identified, according to a transcript. “When someone is picked out of the lineup, doesn’t it have to be absolutely sure that the person that they picked out of the lineup is the one they’ve seen before?” one grand juror asked Clapper while he was on the witness stand.
“That’s correct,” Clapper said.
Uebelhoer quashed the discussion. “He really can’t give you an opinion on that,” she told the juror, adding that Clapper hadn’t been present for the lineup.
The juror asked about it two more times, but Uebelhoer kept deflecting. Broadwater was indicted on every count she had presented, including rape, sodomy and robbery.
Illustration by Vanessa Saba for ProPublica
6
When Broadwater’s case was set for trial, Uebelhoer was visibly pregnant. It was passed to William Mastine. Mustachioed, 6’6” and pugnacious — Mastine is the prosecutor who would scuffle with the DA-elect a few years later — he was known for his swagger and courtroom theatrics. Fitzpatrick, then a fellow assistant district attorney, would dub Mastine the “Garbage Man” in a newspaper profile for his ability to bring cases with scant evidence or, as Fitzpatrick put it to me more pungently, “take shit and make it hit.”
This was no minor consideration. Acquittals in rape trials were common at the time in Syracuse. At one point in the 1980s, a local news article reported that the district attorney’s office had suffered nine trial defeats in a row. Uebelhoer was quoted saying “juries are looking for a perfect victim, but they don’t exist.” She saw Sebold as a standout, writing in a memo as the case was transferred to Mastine: “Good luck. Victim is excellent witness.”
Sebold’s testimony would be crucial at trial, since it was nearly the entirety of the evidence. Mastine repeatedly emphasized that she was a credible witness. She had been a virgin, he pointed out, arguing that it would more firmly cement the image of her rapist in her mind. He said her study of drawing as a high school student equipped her to remember facial characteristics. She was shaken during the lineup. The identification on the street was what mattered, he argued.
Uebelhoer saw Sebold as a standout, writing in a memo as the case was transferred to Mastine: “Good luck. Victim is excellent witness.”
Aside from Sebold’s identification, the only other piece of evidence was the pubic hair Broadwater volunteered, which was compared to a hair found on Sebold after the rape. The two hairs were examined under a microscope by a lab expert who testified that they were “consistent” with each other. That essentially meant that both had come from a Black person. There were approximately 27 million Black Americans at that time. (In the absence of DNA technology, the prosecution could have tested the semen found in Sebold to determine its blood type, but it never did. That would have narrowed the list of possible perpetrators to only those with the specific blood type.)
The trial was peppered with irregularities. Broadwater and his lawyer had opted for a bench trial, hoping that a judge would see the paucity of evidence and wouldn’t be swayed by emotion. But the judge seemed to have a soft spot for Sebold. During a break in the proceedings, he spoke to Sebold privately, according to her memoir, expressing concern about how she was holding up and asking about her family. Had a juror done such a thing, they would likely have been kicked off the jury and a mistrial might’ve been declared. (The judge died in 2009.)
In a final, highly unusual turn, Uebelhoer took the stand herself, as a witness for the prosecution. She testified that Broadwater was unhappy with one of the people in the lineup and that he managed to swap that person out for the man Sebold picked. She seemed to imply that Broadwater was responsible for any confusion in the lineup process.
When it was over, the judge didn’t even leave the bench to deliberate. He found Broadwater guilty directly after Mastine finished his closing argument.
Mastine defends the trial and the verdict. When I reached him by phone, he noted that he was brought onto the case after the indictment had been handed up. Mastine otherwise repeated what he’d said at the time: that Sebold’s identification of Broadwater on the street trumped the one in the lineup room, so it was appropriate to take the case to trial.
Mastine said that Fitzpatrick anointed him the “Garbage Man” after his work on the Sebold case and congratulated him on the victory. Mastine denied that he felt any pressure in light of the defeats his office had endured. “A trial lawyer has to have a bathtub mind,” he told me. “During trial, you fill the bathtub up. When the verdict comes in, you empty the bathtub and start all over again.” (Years after the Broadwater trial, Mastine, by then in private practice, pleaded guilty to possessing a check on which he forged a client’s signature. He agreed to give up his law license.)
Syracuse Assistant District Attorneys Gail Uebelhoer, who oversaw the lineup and indictment of Broadwater, and William Mastine, who prosecuted him at trialOnondaga Historical Association
Through her lawyer, Uebelhoer declined to be interviewed. In a 2025 deposition, she testified that she could remember little of the Broadwater case. She said repeatedly that she could neither admit nor deny what Sebold had recounted in her memoir. But Uebelhoer emphasized that she had no way of knowing whether the man Sebold picked had appeared in a lineup with Broadwater before. “How would I know that?” she testified. “I’m not down there for every lineup.”
Responding to Fitzpatrick’s assertion that the case should have been dropped after the lineup, Uebelhoer testified that he likely would have been at meetings where the case was discussed but “registered no objection.” (Fitzpatrick denies this. “I’m not saying I don’t have a recollection of the meeting,” he told me. “I’m saying that meeting did not take place.”) Uebelhoer, for her part, added, “I thought that I did my job by putting it all in front of the grand jury to let them hear and see if they found her to be believable or not.”
Two months after the guilty verdict, Broadwater was sentenced to 8 1/3 to 25 years in state prison.
7
Broadwater was sitting in the local jail after his trial, he told me, when a Syracuse newspaper reported that another woman had been raped in Thornden Park. “I told you it wasn’t me! It never was me,” he said he told his attorney. “That guy is still out there doing it.”
A police report seems to line up with Broadwater’s description. The attack happened on May 27, 1982, and resembled the rape Broadwater had been convicted of just nine days earlier.
At about 9 that evening, a 19-year-old actress was jogging through a wooded section of the park when she heard someone behind her. Suddenly she was in the grip of a man dragging her by the neck behind a cluster of trees. He forced her to perform oral sex, then pulled her sweatpants down and raped her. She reported that her assailant was Black, about 5’9”, 140 pounds, muscular and around 16 years old.
Those details did not draw a lot of notice at the time. But they fit the description of a rapist who would soon become well-known to the Syracuse police. Only four months after Broadwater was found guilty, a high schooler named Thomas Weakfall admitted raping five women. The crimes had begun in late 1981, he said in a statement taken by Clapper. Four of them occurred less than a mile from Thornden Park. Weakfall, according to police reports, had provided “certain facts only the perpetrator would have known.”
“I told you it wasn’t me! It never was me,” Broadwater said he told his attorney. “That guy is still out there doing it.”
Weakfall seemed at war with himself, conscious of the brutality he inflicted. “I go to sleep Tommy Weakfall,” he would say in one confession, “and then in the middle of the night I wake up in a cold sweat. … I feel this pressure pushing me to go out side and do something.” He admitted burglarizing houses and raping women. When he was done, according to an account Clapper gave years later, Weakfall would “wrap them in a blanket, hold them in his arms and tell them he was sorry he did it.” Many of the police reports I examined, including Sebold’s, noted that the rapist had apologized to the victim.
There’s no evidence that Weakfall assaulted Sebold, but there’s no denying he matched key elements of the description she gave. Sebold had told police her rapist was Black, 16 to 18 years of age, about 5’7” and 150 pounds. Weakfall was Black, 16 years old, 5’9” and 140 pounds, according to police reports. Broadwater was 20, stood 5’6” and weighed about 175 pounds.
Despite Weakfall’s confession, the rape case against him collapsed. Officers learned — after taking his statement without a defense lawyer present — that he was being represented by an attorney on an unrelated burglary charge. Weakfall’s confession wouldn’t be admissible in court.
He ended up pleading guilty to second-degree burglary. Weakfall’s sentence wouldn’t require a single day of jail time. He got five years of probation and remained on the streets.
8
On the morning of Sept. 29, 1983, a man matching Weakfall’s description led police on a dramatic foot chase through downtown Syracuse after being interrupted while attempting to rape a woman inside her car.
Records show Weakfall was arrested for the offense and released on Oct. 11, 1983. Four months later, he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, attempted sexual misconduct, and was sentenced to one year.
During the four months that Weakfall was still free, there was another notable assault. Sebold’s roommate was raped that November in the apartment they shared. She was one of five women attacked in the same cluster of blocks over five months, according to news accounts at the time. Police suspected that one man had committed the crimes. The homes had been burglarized and the women had been raped at knifepoint and beaten; some were also bound and gagged.
These elements matched Weakfall’s methods, though the reports suggested a noticeably taller, older perpetrator. Several survivors were asked to look at a photograph of Weakfall as part of an array of mug shots, but they didn’t identify him.
Sebold’s roommate told police that after the rapist broke into the apartment, he gagged, bound and blindfolded her, then became “very gentle” and “took his time.” She added that “he didn’t talk street talk either. He had a good use of the English vocabulary.”
He led her into Sebold’s room, put a “thin metal object” to her throat and told her, “I just want you to be good.” When he finished raping her, he tossed her jeans to her and covered her with a blanket.
The roommate also reported an exchange that suggested her rapist may have encountered Sebold in the past. 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.”
Clapper viewed this as significant enough that he put it down in capital letters in his report. But he never followed up, Clapper testified years later. The perpetrator was likely fabricating a connection that didn’t exist, he said. Clapper never suspected that it was Weakfall or that the same man raped both Sebold and her roommate. He said the description didn’t match Weakfall, and Broadwater was locked up by then. He acknowledged that victims sometimes get these descriptions wrong, but he had another reason for ruling Weakfall out: “I think he was incarcerated then,” Clapper testified. But the records I had seen showed that his memory was incorrect: Weakfall had been a free man at the time Sebold’s roommate was attacked.
9
In 1985, three years after Broadwater’s conviction, Clapper encountered Weakfall again. The detective identified him in a surveillance photograph of a man using a stolen bank card at an ATM. Clapper interviewed him again. Once again, Weakfall confessed.
The police reports, along with the signed confession, spelled out in chilling detail how Weakfall had raped at least three women between September and November of 1985. He would spot a vulnerable location — an accessible window, a woman home alone — and climb in quietly, first ransacking for valuables, then threatening them with a knife, sometimes beating or tying them up if they resisted.
When Weakfall was done, some women got an apology. One said he was “soft spoken” and did not use “slang or street type language.” He kept calling another one ma’am. Others got nothing but raging hostility. He told one woman that he felt understood by her, then threatened to burn her house down if she called the police.
Weakfall went on to say, effectively, that he had raped so many women in so many different places that he couldn’t remember them all. In the final paragraph, he made a garbled cry for help. He described sexual violence as a compulsion. The rapes were “accidents,” he said, and the courts “haven’t helped me at all.” He hoped that the next judge would get him some counseling.
This time Weakfall’s confession held up. He pleaded guilty to three rapes and a burglary and was sentenced to a maximum of 18 years. He served 12. While in prison, Weakfall participated in a treatment program intended to stop people from committing sexual violence.
Illustration by Vanessa Saba for ProPublica
10
Accusations against prominent men eventually began bringing the issue of sexual assault to the forefront in Syracuse. In 1986, a star Syracuse University football player was accused of rape. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was initially allowed to remain on the team. An uproar ensued, prompting the university’s chancellor to intervene and suspend him for five games.
Then, in November 1988, came another attack with a notable defendant, a crime that would inspire a second rape memoir by a Syracuse University student. The book describes how Laura Gray-Rosendale, a 20-year-old sophomore, had fallen asleep while studying in her bedroom when 23-year-old Michael Holm broke in, then bound and beat her. “He raped me every way someone can be raped,” she told ProPublica. “It was excruciating to be in my body.” A roommate called the police and officers kicked down Gray-Rosendale’s door, finding Holm with a screwdriver in his hand, standing over Gray-Rosendale, as he pulled his pants up. Her hands were tied and she was naked from the waist down. Holm tried to flee, injuring three officers, before they finally subdued and arrested him.
The defendant was white, the grandson of Melvin Holm, a former chairman of the university’s Board of Trustees who had been the CEO of Carrier Corp., one of the city’s largest employers and the eponym for the university’s domed stadium. In her book, “College Girl,” Gray-Rosendale recounted getting a phone call from a university administrator who told her the Holm family made major donations to the university. “I’m like, why are you telling me this?” she said. “But I know why. … She’s trying to dissuade me from testifying.”
In an interview, Gray-Rosendale described having a “complete breakdown” in the months after the assault and said that seeing “anyone who resembled [Holm] physically would be like a trigger and send me into a full out panic attack.” Through years of therapy and writing her memoir, she eventually found healing. But, she said, “I was never the same.”
Despite being caught mid-assault, Holm pleaded guilty to burglary. The word rape did not appear in his plea allocution. He ultimately served eight years in prison. (ProPublica could not locate him to seek an interview. His lawyer declined to comment.) “I was very glad that he got jail time,” Gray-Rosendale said of Holm. “But … that term, burglary. It did not in any way account for the multiple crimes that he committed, and that stuck with me then, sticks with me now.”
11
Pressure was building in Syracuse. In 1989, six rapes had been reported in the first two months of the school year, including one on the chancellor’s front lawn. Students began marching, organizing nighttime campus patrols and pressuring university officials. Gray-Rosendale told the university’s trustees at a campus meeting on sexual violence that she had been raped by one of their grandsons. “I’m not a statistic,” she said. The turmoil attracted the attention of media ranging from talk show host Geraldo Rivera to The New York Times.
Finally, that year, the university convened a task force and began to implement security measures that advocates had been demanding for years, including improvements to transportation services off-campus, the expansion of “blue light” emergency phones and the provision of counseling services and public speaking events on sexual assault.
In response to detailed questions regarding events from the 1980s, a spokesperson for Syracuse University said in an email that “we are not in a position to speak to the actions or decisions of prior administrations,” but the university is now equipped with “comprehensive policies, a steadfast commitment to preventing sexual and relationship violence and robust support structures to help every survivor that comes forward.”
By this point, the city had become the leading edge of a national issue. In March 1990, a Syracuse University student named Kristin Eaton-Pollard testified before a congressional subcommittee in Washington. She described being raped as a freshman in 1988 in Thornden Park, which she “later learned was notorious for its frequent occurrence of violent crime, located only about 100 yards from my residence hall.”
Eaton-Pollard criticized the university for being too slow to appreciate the need for the new security measures. “The programs at Syracuse University should have been initiated of their own accord a long time ago,” Eaton-Pollard said. Her testimony helped inspire the passage, that same year, of the Jeanne Clery Act, legislation named for a Lehigh University freshman who was raped and murdered by a fellow student. The law requires all colleges that accept federal financial aid to publicly report campus crime statistics every year.
12
Broadwater was unaware that the issue of sexual violence was roiling Syracuse. He remained in prison and had never stopped trying to prove his innocence. He kept a transcript of his trial with him as he was shuttled among 13 prisons in the 16 years he served for the Sebold conviction. He would show it to gang leaders to prove he shouldn’t be there.
“Rape charges here,” a cousin and fellow inmate had warned him when he entered Attica state prison, “they kill you.” As Broadwater puts it, “I caught holy hell” while incarcerated. He took to wrapping his torso with copies of National Geographic magazine in case an inmate came at him with a knife. In a riot, he saw a friend stabbed to death, took 12 stitches and nearly lost an eye trying to defend himself.
He filed myriad appeals and requests to reexamine the evidence, some without the help of a lawyer. Each was rejected. One petition was handwritten, laying out his logic in angled handwriting across lined notebook paper. Broadwater raised some of the arguments that eventually got him exonerated. He wrote, for example, that Uebelhoer’s testimony missed the point: “Whether or not I know the man … or was happy about the composition of the lineup had nothing to do with the victim’s failure to pick me out.”
“Whether or not I know the man … or was happy about the composition of the lineup had nothing to do with the victim’s failure to pick me out.”
Four times Broadwater came before the parole board. Four times he was denied. He refused to go to his fifth scheduled appearance. Commissioners wanted an admission of guilt, not claims of innocence, and Broadwater wouldn’t apologize. He didn’t come home until Dec. 31, 1998. He was 38.
Broadwater was free but unable to escape the shadow of a rape conviction. Even members of his family shunned him. He was required to register as a sex offender, which made it impossible to get any but the most menial job. Broadwater eventually managed to get a position on an assembly line, stamping the logo of Syracuse China on dishware from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. He liked that he had to punch in, and that the factory was filled with security cameras. Broadwater wanted to work at a place that always documented his whereabouts in case anyone tried to accuse him of something.
13
For her part, Sebold had struggled to get her life on track over the years. Rootless and experimenting with drugs in her 20s — heroin was her favorite, by her own account — it was only as she confronted the consequences of the attack that she slowly began to grapple with her trauma. She began by writing an op-ed for The New York Times on the rape in 1989, then later appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” By the mid-’90s, she had started work on a memoir about her assault and the aftermath.
When Sebold began conducting research for her memoir, “Lucky,” she returned to Thornden Park as her then-boyfriend watched from a car.Courtesy of Alice Sebold
Sebold returned to Syracuse to research the book. She nervously walked around Thornden Park while her then-boyfriend stood by and took snapshots. And Sebold met with Uebelhoer at the district attorney’s office.
Uebelhoer helped her gain access to records, including a box of evidence from the original case. Both Uebelhoer and Sebold recall seeing the clothing Sebold had worn the night of the attack, and Sebold remembers seeing the pubic hair that was key to Broadwater’s conviction. (It was yet another example of the scrambled Syracuse justice system: An evidence log stated that all of the evidence in the case had been destroyed in the late 1980s, but both women have said they saw the box of materials years after that.)
The prosecutor helped promote Sebold’s memoir when it was published. Uebelhoer’s sister created a packet of publicity materials that, according to Sebold, included a glossy 8-by-10-inch photograph of Uebelhoer. Uebelhoer, who had left the district attorney’s office by this point to clerk for a judge, spoke at book clubs and introduced Sebold to discuss the book on a panel at a law enforcement conference in New York City. “She was incredibly proud,” Sebold said.
14
Sebold and Broadwater weren’t the only people who couldn’t let go of the case. There was a third person: Clapper, the veteran Syracuse detective who’d been chatting with Broadwater when Sebold first identified the man she thought had assaulted her.
Lanky with striking red hair and a cocky demeanor, Clapper was dogged and respected by his fellow cops. He would stay on cases for months, scouring for witnesses, checking in with informants, interviewing anyone he could find. Clapper’s work was threaded through the wave of Syracuse rape cases. He had investigated many of the attacks in and around Thornden Park and elicited Weakfall’s confessions.
Clapper initially indicated he was open to an interview for this article, then demurred, saying he’d had only tangential involvement in the Broadwater case. When I kept pressing, he eventually sent me a sprawling, 13-page statement that spanned the 50-odd years of his career. It was filled with brackets and parentheticals, written in different fonts and colors, much of it in capital letters, at once detailed and cryptic.
Clapper emphasized that he had been through a lot since Sebold was assaulted. Over the years, he had worked undercover, participated in hundreds of drug busts, been stabbed and “struck over the head with bats, wine bottles, and fallen down several flights of stairs.” He spent the better part of nine years caring for his sick wife and today, at age 74, his hair still thick but now snowy white, he works as an investigator for a district attorney in another county. Given all that, his statement maintained, it would be “close to ridiculous” to assume he could recall the particulars of Sebold’s case or other crimes with much specificity.
Still, the document provided revealing details, including one that hinted at the disturbing scale of Weakfall’s crimes. Not long after Broadwater’s conviction, according to Clapper’s statement, he had become aware of Weakfall’s “first series of rapes” and gotten him to confess. He had driven Weakfall around Thornden Park, during which Weakfall pointed out 23 buildings where he had raped and robbed women. Weakfall wasn’t charged in multiple cases, Clapper explained, because many of the survivors “just wanted to forget it” and refused to cooperate.
Clapper said Weakfall willingly admitted raping women inside buildings near the park but “flatly denied any involvement” in crimes outdoors at the park. Clapper found that distinction persuasive. Noting that the crimes Weakfall committed indoors involved rapes, burglaries and stabbings, he said, “Why would Weakfall honestly admit to all of these other [more serious] cases and not take credit” for those in Thornden Park?
Weakfall was always under scrutiny, Clapper would say in a 2025 deposition. “I know this guy better than I know my own brother,” he testified, repeating that Weakfall never admitted to any rapes in the park.
One by one, the attorney questioning Clapper got him to acknowledge the similarities between Sebold’s rape and those that Weakfall had confessed to: that she had been threatened with a knife, that her rapist took a small amount of money from her, that the rape happened blocks from others that he said he had committed at around the same time, and that afterward, her rapist held her and apologized to her.
The lawyers asked Clapper about four other cases of sexual assault in or near the park, three within months of Sebold’s, the other nine days after Broadwater was convicted. All involved Black assailants, at least three aged between 15 and 20 and nearly the same height and weight as Weakfall or Broadwater. Clapper pursued several of them but never thought to connect any to Sebold’s rape.
“Why would I?” he said.
15
It’s one of the many oddities of this decades-long saga that Sebold’s memoir of her assault — a 1999 book that portrayed Broadwater’s conviction as righteous — is what would ultimately lead to the unraveling of his conviction.
Sebold’s memoir, which ultimately sold 1 million copies after “The Lovely Bones” became a hit, eventually generated interest in Hollywood. Producers wanted to make a film version of “Lucky,” and several contacted Clapper as part of their research for writing a script.
Sebold in 2017Neville Elder/Corbis/Getty Images
Laurie Parker, a producer then working with director Jane Campion as part of a project that Sebold was cooperating with, reached Clapper in 2013. Parker said Clapper emailed her that there were questions about the case: No. 1, was the right person arrested? No. 2, was Sebold a good witness? No. 3, if DNA testing had been available, would there have been the same outcome? Parker tried to get him to elaborate, but he didn’t respond.
Clapper himself looked into getting a DNA test done on the pubic hair more than 20 years after Broadwater’s conviction, according to his statement. But when Clapper called the Syracuse police crime lab, he was told the hair had been destroyed.
Parker, tasked with writing a script based on “Lucky,” became increasingly consumed with doubts: “I had a feeling, a very strong feeling, that at best it was an illegal conviction and at worst, they got the wrong person,” she said. Her script was rejected in 2014. (The director had gotten busy with other projects, according to Sebold.)
Illustration by Vanessa Saba for ProPublica
16
The next year, in 2015, came an unrelated event — unknown to Broadwater — that further undermined the credibility of his conviction. The FBI, working with the Department of Justice and two advocacy groups, released the findings of a national review of cases in which hair evidence had been used. The study reported that expert hair testimony in 90% of the 500 trial transcripts they’d examined included “erroneous statements” and noted that the FBI no longer used such evidence. The study “strongly” encouraged states to review past convictions in which hair analysis had played a role.
At the time, Fitzpatrick was on a state commission that sets standards for crime laboratories. He was also feuding with the Syracuse Police Department. The two sides publicly savaged each other, with dueling allegations of mishandling forensic evidence, among other things. The Police Department, Fitzpatrick told me recently, was run by “fucking morons” back then and its lab was antiquated. Shawn Broton, a deputy police chief at the time, said Fitzpatrick had used the state commission as a “weapon” against the Police Department and worked to consolidate power for himself.
As a result of the FBI review, Fitzpatrick’s office examined New York cases that had used hair evidence. But that effort did not unearth Broadwater’s case. It relied on electronic searches for the word “hair” in appeals court opinions. The appeals court opinion in Broadwater’s case — all of two paragraphs long — didn’t mention the word. Fitzpatrick told me that his staff had also reviewed all the cases in which the hair analyst in Broadwater’s case had testified, but it concentrated on defendants who were still incarcerated. Broadwater had been out of prison for more than a decade by then. Another chance to reveal the flaws in his case had been missed.
The study reported that expert hair testimony in 90% of the 500 trial transcripts they’d examined included “erroneous statements” and noted that the FBI no longer used such evidence.
Eventually, a second movie producer got interested in Sebold’s story, and like the first producer, he began delving deep into the case. The producer got suspicious enough that he ultimately hired a private investigator to look into it. (The producer in question, Timothy Mucciante, has a backstory that could fill its own movie: He is a disbarred lawyer who served time in prison on an array of bizarre fraud charges. He promised money to finance the movie version of “Lucky” but never delivered, then tried to make his own documentary about the debacle called “Unlucky,” which also fell apart. Mucciante did not respond to requests for comment.)
The private investigator, Dan Myers, called Clapper, who left him with the strong impression that he thought Broadwater was innocent and Weakfall was guilty. Clapper denies he went so far as to say Broadwater was innocent. Still, Clapper acknowledged in his statement that he spoke “cop to cop” with Myers, a former officer, and told him, “Like ANY investigator, you wonder ‘if’ Weakfall was involved.”
That conversation had a domino effect. Myers got two Syracuse lawyers, David Hammond and Melissa Swartz, involved. (Swartz had previously worked in the DA’s office under Fitzpatrick.) They were shocked by what they read in the book and the trial transcript. They filed a motion to vacate the conviction in 2021.
In a matter of weeks, the long-stalled process of examining the conviction was resolved. Fitzpatrick joined in the motion to vacate the conviction, and in a brief hearing on Nov. 22, 2021, the judge agreed.
At the defense table that day, Broadwater, wearing a gray pinstripe suit, choked back sobs and hugged his lawyers. At 61, with hints of gray in Broadwater’s cornrows and a cane in his hand, it was hard to picture the 21-year-old he had been when a judge had found him guilty.
Broadwater with his wife, Elizabeth, after his exoneration in 2021Matt Burkhartt/The Washington Post/Getty Images
17
Unlike Broadwater, who has no criminal record since his release in 1998, Weakfall found it harder to stay out of trouble. He got out of prison in November 1997. Six months later, he was caught stealing speakers and cash from the apartment of a woman he had just met. He told police the burglary was “meant as a joke.” Weakfall pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of criminal trespass and served 135 days in jail. He was arrested four more times through 2015, pleading guilty on separate occasions to patronizing a prostitute and resisting arrest. Records show police responded to multiple allegations of domestic violence against him through 2017, but the victims all declined to press charges. His record shows no involvement with the police since then.
Weakfall still lives in Syracuse, in an area some former officers refer to as “the Gut.” I made my way to his door on a Saturday in the fall of 2024. His apartment was on the ground floor of a clapboard building along a block of dilapidated homes surrounded by overgrown weeds. A gaggle of stray cats curled up against one another around the corner from his front door, which had a bumper sticker on it that read “Let’s Pray for America.”
After a few knocks, the face I recognized from the New York state sex offender registry poked out. He was bald with a full beard. Well-built for a man of 60, with a scar across his upper abdomen, Weakfall was wearing nothing but royal blue boxer-briefs. He said he had just gotten out of the shower.
I knew I might never get another shot to speak to him, so I started talking without giving him a chance to get dressed. We spoke for more than an hour. He never opened his door more than a foot.
Weakfall was, quite reasonably, skeptical of me. He kept saying, “You’re catching me off guard here, dude.” He said he carried a lot of guilt over his crimes and was “disgusted” with himself. He told me he had found religion and wasn’t inclined to revisit a period of his life that he had left behind. Weakfall also said he realized during his 12 years in prison that he may not have served as much time had he not been so open with the police. He didn’t want to make the same mistake again. I assured him I wasn’t a cop.
After a while, Weakfall seemed to relax. He spoke softly in gushes of information followed by sudden pauses. He described growing up without a father in a tough neighborhood; the pressure of bad influences leading to drugs; a graduation of sorts from shoplifting to home invasion, then sexual assault, or, as he put it, “violating someone” when he happened to find a woman home alone.
He acknowledged raping women. But he said that once he began to make admissions, the police saw him as a scapegoat and tried to put “all the load on one person just to satisfy the community.” Once in custody, he said, he was “scared out of my boots.” He said the police had dragged him out of his cell repeatedly, driving him to places he had never been and asking him about rapes he said he hadn’t committed. “Man, they had me admitting to things that I know I did not do,” he said.
Full of contradictions, Weakfall spoke in loops that were hard to follow. He said that he had confessed honestly to the rapes he committed in 1985, but that the confession in 1982 was coerced by the police. (He later said something that seemed to undercut that assertion: “What they didn’t understand in 1982 is that if you’re not really giving me any counseling … it’s bound to happen again.”)
When I started to ask about Thornden Park, describing what happened to Sebold, he cut me off. “More of my encounters was invading a home, if you do the search,” he said. He vociferously denied assaulting any woman in a car and said the police “mixed me up with other people that were doing things at the same time.”
This did not strike me as implausible, given what had happened with Broadwater and all I’d learned about the Police Department at the time, not to mention the sheer volume of assailants and assaults back then.
I kept pressing, asking if he would be willing to go through each case with me. He said no. He wouldn’t be able to remember them anyway, he said. I brought up the rape of Sebold’s roommate and several others, but the whole exercise began to feel futile. I thanked him for his time, handed him my card and asked if we could speak again after he had some time to think. He said he’d pray on it.
Weakfall called me the next morning. He was rattled and rambling. More aggravated this time. He started denying things that he had either confessed to or that were well-established in the criminal records: He claimed he had never stolen anyone’s ATM card; he had never taken property from anyone’s home; he had never apologized to any of his victims.
18
I returned to Syracuse twice more in 2026 and spoke with Weakfall each time. He got more sweeping and more adamant in his denials. By the third visit, he was insisting that he had confessed to only one rape and that the police had embellished or fabricated the rest.
When I called Fitzpatrick, the Syracuse DA, to discuss what I had learned in my broader reporting, he was at a loss. “It escapes me, honestly. I mean, it’s just staggering,” he said of the police and prosecutorial failures in the 1980s. “The level of misattention to detail. I just don’t have an explanation.”
But now it was too late. The best shot at making a conclusive determination on who raped Sebold would come through DNA analysis of the physical evidence. But the evidence from her case is gone.
Even if evidence that implicates a perpetrator were to turn up in a hidden corner of a dusty warehouse, Fitzpatrick couldn’t do anything. The statute of limitations on these rapes expired decades ago. Prosecution would be out of reach, he said.
As it happens, one legal proceeding continues in the Broadwater saga. After his conviction was vacated in 2021, Broadwater filed two civil lawsuits, one against the state of New York for wrongful imprisonment and a second against Syracuse and its surrounding county for constitutional rights violations in his prosecution. The state settled its case in 2023, agreeing to pay Broadwater $5.5 million.
But the city and county are contesting the claims. The lawyers declined to comment for this article, citing the litigation. But expert witnesses they have retained are defending the conduct of the police and prosecutors, questioning the accuracy of Sebold’s book and arguing that there was no pattern of rapes in and around Thornden Park worthy of disclosure to the defense.
19
I met Sebold on a recent, drizzly morning at her home in San Francisco. We sat in a room appointed with an ornate rug, fine photography and rare works of literature hugged by striking geode bookends.
Always an introvert, Sebold sank deeper into isolation after Broadwater’s exoneration. She went from hero to villain overnight. Strangers yelled at her on the street. A tabloid reporter badgered her on camera as Sebold, wearing a COVID-era mask and gingerly carrying a bag of dog poop, walked her sick French basset to the vet.
Afterward, she said, she didn’t step out of her house for a month. Even now, five years on, she can’t bring herself to leave the city limits. “There’s something about the safety of being near my home,” she said, “which has become increasingly important to my sense of mental health.”
As I laid out what my reporting had uncovered, she betrayed little surprise at the number of sexual assaults in Syracuse; she thought there might be more. “It’s my nature to believe that there’s more violence than people like to admit to, especially back then,” she said. It provided no comfort to learn that the police had failed other women, too.
Now fully convinced of Broadwater’s innocence, Sebold looks back on the entire episode with deep mortification. She feels shame that she was ever raped. And she now questions her decision to go to the police. “What if I hadn’t reported my rape?” she said. “None of this would have happened.”
Sebold recently completed a letter to Broadwater. She declined to share a copy but described its contents. It’s more personal and considered, she said, than the apology she released right after the exoneration, which was criticized as tepid and which she said was hastily written. Sebold said the letter takes responsibility for her role in Broadwater’s wrongful conviction and offers details about her recent life, her dog and the Dao, the Chinese philosophy she has come to rely on. The letter describes, she said, “the deep sorrow I hold for what happened.”
It took her four years to compose those three pages. “I’ll never write anything good enough,” Sebold said. It is “probably, in my mind, the most important thing I’ll ever write.”
Through intermediaries, Sebold and Broadwater have broached the possibility of meeting. Like Sebold, though, Broadwater is fearful of traveling. He is worried something bad will happen if he leaves New York state. He has floated the idea of meeting in Niagara Falls. Neither of them have been there before.
I last met Broadwater at his lawyer’s office in Syracuse. Now fixing up a modest farmhouse he bought outside town, he had taken a break from his hobby of barbecuing and still smelled faintly of sweet smoke from a batch of baby back ribs.
He keeps his distance from people, too. He told me that some who shunned him after he went to prison are now reappearing in his life. They tease him about all the media attention he received. Their questions also trigger his paranoia, making him think they got word of his civil settlement and want a piece of it.
Broadwater said the stigma of being a convicted rapist was still hard to shake, even after his exoneration. “I’m still embarrassed that I was convicted and sent to prison for rape for 16 and a half years,” he said, his gentle voice catching as he reached for a Kleenex. He likened the experience to being scalded with boiling-hot water. The exoneration, the celebrity, the settlement, it’s like “a skin graft” over a festering wound, he said. “Still ain’t normal. Ain’t never gonna be normal. How could it be normal?”
In a bold move, Rocket Lab acquires Iridium Communications
Rocket Lab announced on Monday that it is acquiring the satellite communications company Iridium. The deal, made for cash and shares of Rocket Lab stock, values Iridium at about $8 billion.
The deal pairs the launch company, founded and led by Peter Beck, with a decades-old profitable satellite company whose network of 80 satellites in low-Earth orbit provides telecommunications services.
“We believe this will be one of the most transformative deals in the space industry,” Beck said in a short promotional video announcing the deal. “It’s the ultimate combination for growth.”
Missions that matter
Beck said the deal provides a shortcut for Rocket Lab to enter the “space applications” business—that is, providing space-based services rather than launching the satellites that offer voice, Internet, and other communication services to customers on Earth. This is where the majority of revenue in the space industry lies.
“This is a deal where one plus one equals three,” he said. “One being Rocket Lab—we have unfettered access to space and the ability to build spacecraft at scale. We also do missions for people that matter. Then you think of Iridium, they have an already operational constellation; spectrum, and not just any spectrum but extremely valuable spectrum; millions of customers and they’re a profitable business. The result of these two things is a fully integrated, self-launching space superpower.”
Iridium holds a substantial chunk of L-band spectrum, and the company currently serves 2.55 million customers around the world. In addition to its telecommunications capabilities, the company is also developing a commercial position, navigation, and timing service as an alternative to GPS.
Beck said Rocket Lab will “unlock” more growth from Iridium’s existing network of satellites and build new constellations to provide additional services from space.
Longtime Iridium chief executive Matt Desch said the move would allow Iridium to deploy new services more quickly.
“Success will come from those who can bring new innovations to space quickly and sustain them over time as efficiently as possible,” Desch said in a statement. “We’re excited about being able to accelerate the next generation of IoT, aviation, maritime, PNT, and national security capabilities, and pursue new innovative applications as part of Rocket Lab.”
Competing with SpaceX
This is a bold move by Rocket Lab, which has been on a buying spree as it seeks to scale up its operations to compete with SpaceX and Blue Origin, both of which also have launch capabilities and seek to operate large constellations. In the last two years, Rocket Lab has acquired both Geost and Mynaric to improve its spacecraft-building capabilities. But both of these acquisitions, valued in the low hundreds of millions of dollars, were dwarfed by the Iridium deal.
Iridium is a company with a long history. First founded in 1998, it had to be rescued from bankruptcy only a couple of years later by the US government due to the difficulty of building and launching a commercial satellite communications network. Arriving as CEO in 2006, Desch developed a plan for a next-generation constellation and worked with SpaceX and its Falcon 9 rocket to get it launched in the 2010s. For a time, Iridium was SpaceX’s most important commercial launch customer. Those satellites generate the bulk of Iridium’s revenue today.
To become, in Beck’s words, a “self-launching space superpower,” Rocket Lab will need to complete the development of its Neutron launch vehicle. The company’s existing workhorse rocket, Electron, is simply too small to deliver most of the kinds of communications satellites that Rocket Lab envisions developing.
The company originally targeted 2024 as the debut date for the medium-lift Neutron rocket, which will feature a reusable first stage and a novel fairing design. There have been teething pains with Neutron, however, including engine failures and structural test anomalies. Nominally, the company is still planning to launch during the fourth quarter of this year. But given the testing issues, it’s not even certain that Neutron will make its debut in 2027.
CIA Accused of Explosive Cover-Up After Passenger Jet ‘Blows Up’ Over NYC
Nearly 30 years after TWA Flight 800 exploded in the sky off Long Island, a new lawsuit is dragging the CIA back into one of America’s most haunting aviation mysteries.
The watchdog group Judicial Watch has sued the spy agency, demanding records about its role in the investigation into the 1996 disaster that killed all 230 people on board.
The Boeing 747 had taken off from New York’s JFK Airport on July 17, 1996, bound for Paris, when it suddenly blew apart over the Atlantic Ocean. The official conclusion blamed a fuel tank explosion caused by a spark.
But for decades, critics, investigators and grieving families have questioned whether the public was ever told the full story.
Now, Judicial Watch says the CIA has failed to answer a Freedom of Information Act request filed on March 25, 2026, asking why the agency was involved in a domestic plane crash probe in the first place.
That question has fueled years of suspicion.
The National Transportation Safety Board normally handles U.S. civil aviation crashes. The CIA, critics argue, would not usually be expected to step into a domestic air disaster unless terrorism, foreign intelligence, or some other national security issue was being examined.
“It’s always been a mystery why the CIA was involved in this case,” one intelligence insider told RadarOnline. “This case could finally provide the answers the devastated families have been seeking for decades.”
The lawsuit is also demanding records about the CIA’s controversial “witness animation,” a video that attempted to explain away the accounts of people who said they saw something streaking upward toward the doomed jet before it exploded.
More than 200 witnesses reportedly described seeing a rising streak of light before the fireball. Some said it looked like a flare. Others believed it resembled a missile with a white smoke trail.
The official explanation dismissed those accounts as optical illusions or misperceptions. But critics have never been satisfied.
Former senior NTSB investigator Henry F. “Hank” Hughes has claimed in a public affidavit that the CIA’s animation misrepresented eyewitness testimony.
The issue was also raised in the documentary TWA Flight 800, where several aviation insiders questioned whether the mechanical failure explanation matched what witnesses said they saw.
TWA investigator Bob Young said those who worked on the case were not allowed to fully discuss their concerns while they were still inside the investigation.
“We weren’t allowed to talk about the TWA 800 investigation when we were inside,” Young said in the documentary. “What witnesses told us doesn’t fit the mechanical failure scenario that was presented to the public.”
Judicial Watch says it wants to know why the CIA got involved, what records the agency has about the crash, and how the witness animation came to be produced.
To skeptics of the official story, the agency’s silence only raises more questions.
“The agency clearly has no interest in addressing these questions, and now they could be forced to in open court,” the insider said. “It smells of a cover-up.”
For the families of the 230 victims, the case reopens a painful chapter that has never truly gone away.
Flight 800 remains one of the deadliest and most controversial aviation disasters in modern U.S. history. And after nearly three decades of unanswered questions, this lawsuit could force one of America’s most secretive agencies to explain what it knew, when it knew it, and why it became involved at all.
The greatest source of risk “comes from spoilers—leaders and parties who believe that peace emerging from negotiations threatens their power, worldview and interests, and use violence to undermine attempts to achieve it.”
Spoilers can be inside or outside a peace process. Those inside have signed an agreement but fail to fulfill key obligations; those outside are either excluded from it or have excluded themselves. In terms of managing spoilers, it is important to determine why a particular party is refusing to honor a peace agreement.
Spoilers are already causing problems for the memorandum of understanding (MOU) between Iran and the US announced on June 14, after weeks of Pakistani mediators trading proposals back and forth between the parties.
The 14-point MOU was officially signed by President Donald Trump on June 17 in Versailles and by President Masoud Pezeshkian in Tehran the next day.
But because heavy fighting in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah was violating the first clause of the MOU, which called for the termination of military operations “including in Lebanon,” the Iranians declared that they would not attend and threatened to reclose the Strait of Hormuz. Vice President JD Vance, who was to lead the US delegation, also canceled his flight to Switzerland.
Nonetheless, on June 20, after Iranian state TV announced that Iran’s delegation, led by the Speaker of Parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, had arrived in Switzerland, Vance departed the US to join Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who had traveled there earlier.
The talks, dubbed the Lake Lucerne Summit, began on the morning of June 21 with separate meetings between the leaders of each delegation with the mediators, followed by quadrilateral talks in the afternoon between the two parties and two mediators.
Vance presented a promising opening statement, saying: “Never before has the Iranian and American leadership met at such a high level… What the President has asked us to do is turn over a new leaf to transform our relationship with the people of Iran, and to extend an outstretched hand that says to the people of Iran that if your leadership is willing to give up being a driver of regional instability, if they are willing to give up nuclear weapons ambitions for the long term, then the United States is willing to fundamentally transform our relationship.”
In response, the Iranian delegation protested to the mediators, saying this was an unacceptable threat to their personal safety and then staged a walkout. Their absence was apparently temporary, because Vance, describing the talks as “messy,” later said: “Yes, they did threaten to walk out… but we were negotiating well past one in the morning… so they didn’t [permanently] walk out.”
The talks produced a road map for a final deal within 60 days and created a High-Level Committee for Political Oversight to manage the process and coordinate the three working groups who will report to the committee weekly: a Nuclear Working Group, a Sanctions Tracking Group, and a Monitoring and Dispute-Resolution Group.
Two crisis management mechanisms were also agreed: a Strait of Hormuz Secure Communication Channel (i.e., a hotline) to provide communication links between maritime security forces to “avoid incidents and miscommunication” and guarantee safe passage for shipping through the Strait of Hormuz; and a Lebanon De-Confliction Cell to prevent further military escalation and ensure compliance with the cessation of hostilities.
In the end, the talks were more successful than the first round in April in Islamabad. Vance called them “a good foundation;” Araghchi said the mediators delivered “major progress.” A joint statement by the mediators described “encouraging progress” and cited a “positive and constructive atmosphere.” The Swiss Foreign Ministry also welcomed “constructive progress.” Technical talks between the working groups began the next day.
Spoiler Issues
Although the negotiations were successful, several parties—Israel, Hezbollah, Trump, and hardliners in Iran—almost derailed the process and are still attempting to do so.
The success of the process appears to be due to the mediators employing “the departing train strategy, which implies that the peace process is a train leaving the station at a preordained time: Once set in motion, anyone not on board will be left behind.”
It is a determination that the peace process will go irrevocably forward regardless of spoiling efforts. Other strategies that Stedman proposes for managing spoilers include: inducement, socialization, deterrence-coercion, and withdrawal.
Although a comprehensive accounting of each spoiler’s motivation and strategies for dealing with them exceed the scope of this article, some general points can be made.
Israel and Hezbollah
Long-term enemies, Israel and Hezbollah, reengaged in fighting on March 2, when Hezbollah launched missiles against Israel to protest Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s assassination, followed by intense hostilities between them.
In response, the US established a separate mediation process between Israel and Lebanon (with Hezbollah again outside the process) which agreed to ceasefires of varying lengths, subsequently violated by both Israel and Hezbollah.
More recently, Lebanon and Israel have agreed to a lasting peace and security deal, whereby the Lebanese Armed Forces would gradually assume control over all Lebanese territory as Hezbollah is disarmed; in parallel, Israeli forces would engage in a staged withdrawal. Hezbollah, however, rejects this and says that it will not disarm until Israel withdraws totally.
Both Israel and Hezbollah fit the description of “total spoilers,” who are often “led by individuals who see the world in all-or-nothing terms” and are opposed to compromise. “Any commitment to peace by a total spoiler tends to be tactical—a move to gain advantage in a struggle to the death.”
The “departing train strategy,” used by the mediators at the Lake Lucerne Summit, is a good way to manage total spoilers. Another effective approach is for the spoiler’s patron to warn the spoiler of dire implications if it escalates attacks, which apparently Trump has done, much to Netanyahu’s annoyance.
It has also been argued that Hezbollah might moderate its actions for now by inducement, e.g., the promise of renewed assistance from Iran if economic benefits accrue from the peace process, but if this allows it to rearm later, that would merely postpone the problem.
Trump the spoiler
Trump is, of course, inside the peace process and probably fits the description of a “greedy spoiler,” i.e., one who “holds goals that expand or contract based on calculations of cost and risk. A greedy spoiler may have limited goals that expand when faced with low costs and risks; alternatively, it may have total goals that contract when faced with high costs and risks.”
Although Trump reportedly wants out of the war, his firm belief that any provocation must be met with a response of greater intensity inevitably causes conflict escalation. When four days after the Lake Lucerne Summit, Iranian hardliners attacked a vessel trying to exit the strait, Trump ordered bombing of Iranian missile and drone sites.
He also praised the efforts of the Iranian negotiating team, which is seen as an attempt to silence opposition from hardliners. As well, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) leadership, the Supreme National Security Council, and some members of parliament support it.
The recent incidents in the Strait of Hormuz are an example of how this opposition can manifest itself. Like Trump, IRGC hardliners believe that every provocation must be met with a greater response, which accounts for their recent attacks on US bases in Kuwait and Bahrain, following Trump’s bombing. These hardliners were also outside the peace process and fit the typology of total spoilers.
Conclusion
The four spoilers mentioned above are currently presenting significant challenges to the MOU and must be managed if the peace process is to go forward.
One problem is that the lack of specificity in the MOU allows for different interpretations that spoilers can exploit to disrupt the process. This relates to how the MOU was negotiated, i.e., through the long-distance exchange of each party’s preferred positions, as opposed to the mediators sitting with the parties to explore their underlying interests before developing options.
The current dispute is apparently related to Iranian interests to have control of how clearing of the strait takes place, i.e., with vessels exiting on the Iranian side, rather than the Omani side, which the US is encouraging. If parties’ interests with regard to this issue had been thoroughly explored during negotiations, a more specific formulation could have been included which might have avoided this problem.
Another issue is the inclusion of conditions in the agreement (e.g., the termination of military operations in Lebanon) that must be fulfilled by parties who are outside the process and don’t agree (notably, Israel and Hezbollah).
Attempts to overcome this through US mediation between Israel and Lebanon, but with Hezbollah still outside the process, are not addressing the interests of one of the major parties and are thus stalemated.
It also appears that the procedural mechanisms established at the Lake Lucerne Summit to deal with such problems are not being utilized. A Strait of Hormuz Secure Communication Channel is apparently non-operational.
Presumably, the new Monitoring and Dispute-Resolution Group could also be engaged. Hopefully, the mediators will quickly assist the parties in resolving the current dispute and ensure that these mechanisms become operational.
Of particular concern is Stedman’s warning that history has shown that when peace processes are scuttled by spoilers and war resumes, the results are often catastrophic, with the casualties being infinitely higher than those of the original conflict. Rwanda offers a horrifying example.
Such an ominous possibility is foreshadowed by Trump’s recent post on Truth Social: “There may come a point when we are no longer able to be reasonable, and will be forced to militarily complete the job that we very successfully started. If that happens, the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist.”
In order to keep the peace process on track, the international community needs to be aware of the role of spoilers and do everything in its power to manage any disruptions before the conflict escalates again, perhaps tragically.
Dr. Connie Peck is the founder of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research Programme in Peacemaking and Conflict Prevention — the first training program in negotiation and mediation for senior UN staff and diplomats (now in its 33rd year). She is the author of a number of books and numerous articles and book chapters on conflict resolution and the nuclear threat.
Commercial ship traffic through Strait of Hormuz rises more than 50% over past week
Commercial vessel traffic through the Strait of Hormuz rose more than 50% from the previous week amid ongoing negotiations following a temporary deal between the US and Iran, Anadolu reports.
Negotiations between the two countries remain fragile despite the deal reached on June 14, which took effect on June 18.
Before the war broke out at the end of February, an average of 130 commercial vessels transited the Strait of Hormuz each day. Following a virtual standstill after joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran and Tehran’s subsequent retaliation, maritime traffic through the strategic waterway has begun to recover following the US-Iran deal.
Despite the recent increase, traffic through the strait remains around 70% below pre-war levels.
Industry representatives remain cautious about using the waterway because of the fragile state of US-Iran negotiations and continuing uncertainty.
According to data from analytics firm Kpler, 223 commercial vessels transited the Strait of Hormuz during the week of June 15-21, averaging 32 transits per day.
READ: Oil prices rise as US-Iran tensions escalate
The lowest daily traffic was recorded on June 17 with 19 vessels, while the highest was 54 on June 22.
During the week of June 22-28, 343 commercial vessels passed through the strait, with the daily average rising to 49 vessels. The lowest daily total was 24 vessels on June 28, while the highest reached 76 on June 24.
June 24 recorded the heaviest traffic through the Strait of Hormuz since the war began on Feb. 28.
Compared with the previous week, traffic through the strait increased by nearly 54%, with tankers carrying crude oil and petroleum products—primarily from Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq and Kuwait—accounting for most transits.
At least 6 million barrels of crude oil transited the Strait of Hormuz on Monday, the data showed.
A significant share of vessels continued to use the route designated within Iranian territorial waters, with most of those transits carried out by shadow fleet and sanctioned vessels.
READ: Iran says $6B of its funds in Qatar ‘should be released’ under US deal
Netanyahu’s Ultra-Orthodox Draft Deal Turns Unity Pitch Into Election Fight
Gabriel Colodro captures the moment Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to celebrate a Lebanon security understanding and instead stepped straight into Israel’s next election fight. The issue is not only Hezbollah, Lebanon, or Washington’s mediation. It is the ultra-Orthodox draft crisis, and whether Netanyahu can credibly promise a “broad national government” while keeping his current coalition alive through a deal that slows enforcement against yeshiva students who ignore military call-up orders.
The political collision is sharp because Israel is still at war, soldiers are still being killed, and the burden of service has become a national fault line. Netanyahu says his future coalition will be open to anyone who accepts principles such as Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, individual rights, a free economy, defense independence, draft understandings, judicial compromise, and rejection of Palestinian statehood. His critics hear something else: a unity pitch from a leader still bound to ultra-Orthodox parties that resist broad military service.
Likud lawmaker Moshe Saada defends the freeze on arrests as practical politics, arguing that coercion will not bring haredim into the army and that economic pressure would work better. Yesh Atid’s Moshe Tur-Paz calls the arrangement “disgraceful,” saying Netanyahu is trying to keep ultra-Orthodox parties locked to him before the election while Israel’s security needs grow more urgent.
The numbers make the drama worse for Netanyahu. A Channel 12 poll found 62% opposed the ultra-Orthodox deal, while the current coalition bloc remained short of a majority. Gadi Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett, Yair Golan, Benny Gantz, and others are all circling the same question from different angles: Can there be a broad government with Netanyahu still leading it?
Colodro’s full report shows how one draft deal turned “unity” from a campaign slogan into a stress test. He lays out the real choice now facing Israeli politics: whether national service, coalition survival, and postwar governance can fit inside the same government—or whether one of them has to break.
Women in the Army Are More Likely to Be Killed by Fellow Soldiers Than Enemy Combatants
Twenty-three-year-old Sarah Roque had been in the Army for just over four years when a man fatally shot her in the head.
Roque wasn’t in a war zone, and the killer wasn’t an enemy combatant. It was Wooster Rancy, a fellow soldier stationed at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, who had gone to Walmart for trash bags on the last day Roque was seen alive in October 2024. The Army found her body in a dumpster behind the barracks.
“Even now, I still can’t believe it,” her mother, Ana Roque, told The Intercept. “That murderers could exist in one of the supposedly safest places in the country.”
A first-of-its-kind analysis by The Intercept found that in the Army, women are more likely to be killed by their fellow service members than by enemy combatants, in a reversal of the threat soldiers are trained to face. Between 2011 and August 2025, at least 41 women died by homicide in the Army — more than half of them at the hands of other service members or veterans. Using Defense Department manpower data to calculate per capita death rates, The Intercept found that active-duty Army women face a higher risk of homicide than male soldiers, the opposite of national and global trends.
The Intercept found that active-duty Army women face a higher risk of homicide than male soldiers.
In many cases, women in the Army are killed by current or former romantic partners. Over 70 percent of victims had an intimate relationship with the perpetrator at one point, and the rate of homicides among women soldiers from intimate partner violence is at least three times higher than the national average. In others, like Roque’s case, it’s unclear how male soldiers chose their victims.
“There was no connection between Sarah and Rancy. They never spoke, never texted, and their paths never crossed,” said Ana Roque. Given that Rancy was convicted of murder in February, Roque added, “I can’t complain about the prosecutors, they did their job. But my grievance is that they didn’t push to uncover the truth behind why he did it.’”
Research points to the military’s hypermasculine culture, which historically devalues women, as a contributing factor to high rates of violence against them. But the existing scholarship is insufficient, said Erin Siegal McIntyre, a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has spent years digging into the hidden structures of militarized institutions.
“There’s no way to know how bad the problem really is,” Siegal McIntyre said. “There is an abysmal amount of data collected on domestic violence perpetrated by law enforcement officers, for example, many of whom are former military.”
Analyzing over 14 years of Defense Department death data obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, The Intercept’s investigation is the first to compare rates of violence against women in the Army to factors like duty location, jobs, and relationships with perpetrators. The FOIA data also reveals deaths not previously announced by the Army and the Department of Defense.
Violence against women in the military also appears to take a mental toll. In addition to the 41 women who died by homicide, another 128 died by suicide, the majority of them lower-ranking enlisted soldiers. From 2011 to 2024, the last complete year of data, homicide and suicide rates for women in the Army were double their equivalents for women nationwide.
The Army doesn’t make any of this public, and the Intercept’s investigation has found flaws in what data collection currently occurs: Homicide and suicide death rates are not separated by gender or calculated per capita, preventing deeper analysis and comparison.
There’s also nothing publicly accessible on how many homicides are committed by service members, who their victims are, or where homicides occurred. The Defense Department’s annual suicide report doesn’t note how many of the deceased had experiences with sexual assault or harassment.
Meanwhile, systems meant to protect women are being rolled back and dismantled.
In September, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth eliminated the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services. It had existed for nearly 75 years, focusing on issues including sexual harassment and assault. In January, he ordered a six-month review of women in combat roles. In April, a woman who had been a whistleblower on sexual harassment within the Army Special Operations community was accused of sharing classified information and arrested by the FBI. Hegseth has also intervened to block the promotions of women officers.
In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for the Army denied that its protections were insufficient.
“The Army has several programs and policies to protect service members who experience sexual assault or domestic violence,” said Army spokesperson Heather Hagan.
A Pattern of Abuse
When Spc. Mayra Diaz was assaulted on the Army base at Fort Hood, Texas, she was lucky to survive.
Diaz was blindfolded, with her hands bound over her head, having water poured on her face — “waterboarding me and causing me to choke,” Diaz later wrote. Her attacker “then wrapped a cord around my neck in an attempt to kill me.”
The assailant was a superior, Sgt. Greville Clarke, who knocked on her door at the barracks before threatening her with a pistol and raping her during the attack. The Army knew two other women had been assaulted at the barracks in similar attacks; officials chose not to issue a public warning, citing concerns about compromising the investigation and causing potential panic.
The problems of homicide and suicide among women in the Army are inextricable from the prevalence of sexual assault. In some cases, like Diaz’s, a sexual attack involves an attempt on a woman’s life. Rape and sexual abuse are known to be detrimental to mental health, increasing the risk of suicide or self harm.
“There’s a huge correlation between sexual assault and suicide rates,” said Josh Connolly, senior vice president of Protect Our Defenders, an advocacy group for victims of military sexual trauma. “It’s unambiguous — sexual assault rates are higher than in the civilian world.”
The Intercept’s investigation found suicide is the leading cause of death of Army women.
Male soldiers faced a smaller increase in suicide rates compared to civilian men than Army women did compared to civilian women, and men in the Army have a lower risk of dying by homicide than their non-military counterparts.
In fact, The Intercept’s investigation found, suicide is the leading cause of death of Army women.
Some cases have made national headlines, such as the March 2023 death of Pvt. Ana Basaldua Ruiz at Fort Hood, who took her own life at 20 years old after reporting sexual harassment.
For Ruiz’s family, the timing of her death raised troubling questions, echoing fellow Fort Hood soldier Vanessa Guillén’s infamous 2020 murder by an Army specialist. A subsequent Army inquiry into Ruiz’s case, reported by Telemundo, pointed to a “persistently toxic culture permissive of harassment.”
Years earlier, in the wake of Guillén’s death, an independent review revealed “a total disregard and disrespect for female soldiers.” Investigators issued 70 recommendations, including a sweeping overhaul of the military’s sexual harassment and assault prevention programs.
But the violence didn’t stop. Women at Fort Hood continued to experience a grim roll call of harm: Homicide. Sexual assault. Suicides.
Three deaths at Fort Hood were never reported publicly by the Army but appeared in the data obtained by The Intercept.
Counting Guillén and Ruiz, there were nine fatalities from homicide or suicide among women stationed at the base in five years. The Defense Department’s most recent suicide report does not provide data on how many suicide decedents experienced sexual trauma, although the Pentagon has provided this data in previous years.
From 2001 to 2023, nearly 1 in 4 women service members experienced sexual assault, according to the Brown University’s Costs of War project, much higher than the numbers annually reported by the Pentagon. Research identifies those experiences as a key driver of suicide risk. Over the past two decades, suicide rates among women veterans have risen faster than among men.
In Diaz’s view, institutional failures were a key factor in her assault.
“Because the Army took no action to address the string of female soldiers attacked in their barracks,” Diaz wrote in a federal tort claim, “Sergeant Clarke was empowered to continue preying on the female soldiers at Fort Hood, including me.”
Clarke assaulted five women before he was apprehended October 2022 and convicted in 2025 of charges including attempted premeditated murder. He died by suicide in custody.
Diaz was “in a U.S. Army base in a locked barracks, opening the door to someone in uniform. It was very reasonable for her to think that that was a safe thing to do,” Christine Dunn, an attorney representing Diaz, told The Intercept. “You don’t expect someone who’s in a uniform to be a serial predator.”
“Sergeant Clarke was empowered to continue preying on the female soldiers at Fort Hood, including me.”
Diaz wrote that leadership denied repeated requests to move her into family housing off-post, and only after she and her sexual assault representative made clear that remaining in the barracks was “an untenable environment” was she finally allowed to leave.
“I suffered from extreme paranoia, exacerbated by my attacker remaining at large,” Diaz wrote. “I abused alcohol in an attempt to forget what happened to me. … I began going to weekly therapy but have stopped going because I still find the attack very traumatizing to talk about.”
The Army did not provide comment on Diaz’s case or reports of Clarke’s predation specifically.
The anxiety, Diaz wrote, has never fully gone away.
“What happened to me was a result of the United States Department of the Army’s and the Department of Defense’s negligence,” her complaint stated. “It was entirely preventable.”
False and Frivolous
Last year, Pete Hegseth directed the Army to change its 15-6 regulation, which governs the process for investigating military-related misconduct like sexual harassment. Now the first step is verifying the “credibility of accusers with new disciplinary measures for soldiers who submit knowingly false or frivolous complaints.
Some fear the rule may discourage those experiencing sexual harassment from reporting incidents, perpetuating a “culture of victim blaming,” according to Protect Our Defenders’ Connolly.
While Hegseth rolls back protections, the issue of violence against women in the military appears to be getting worse. The Intercept’s analysis shows that from 2011 to 2020, the per capita rate of women dying by suicide or homicide in the Army was 15 per 100,000. From 2021 to 2024, following the Army’s attempted reforms in the wake of Vanessa Guillén’s killing, the rate increased over 35 percent, to 21 per 100,000.
And deaths continued their pace in 2025.
Siegal McIntyre, the UNC professor studying domestic abuse, pointed to cases like that of Sgt. Francine Martinez, who was just weeks away from her 25th birthday on a night out at Fort Hood in September 2021, when she ran into the father of her child. He was a fellow soldier with whom she had recently separated, and Martinez had filed for child support weeks earlier.
An argument broke out, and when Martinez got into a car to leave, he followed, and eventually shot her in the head. She was hospitalized for two weeks before dying from her injuries, leaving behind her 1-year-old.
Martinez’s death was one of three cases the Defense Department reported in 2021 in which service members killed someone in a domestic or interpersonal dispute.
“When the situation involves a marriage or partnership between agents and service members, it only complicates reporting,” said Siegal McIntyre.
A Naval Criminal Investigative Service report from 2021 suggests the number could be higher still, identifying several additional domestic violence-related homicides. The Intercept’s investigation also found other years’ congressionally mandated reports also have data tracking problems.
A Project on Government Oversight investigation revealed thousands of abuse cases involving Army personnel were mishandled, many never entered into tracking systems. Investigators could only look at 10 out of more than 60 Army installations. A GovernmentAccountability Office report found the Pentagon doesn’t reliably screen for sexual assault when service members seek care or leave service and lacks systems to prioritize treatment or ensure confidential, long-term support.
“I don’t think there’s a mechanism within the Army for holding itself accountable,” said Dunn, who is also representing some of the 80 victims suing Army gynecologist Maj. Blaine McGraw, who was assigned to Fort Hood in 2023; he has since been accused of recording and making harmful physical contact with women during gynecological exams. (The Army did not comment on McGraw’s case, which remains ongoing.)
“When the institution is facilitating the assaults and allowing them to happen, the institution needs to be held accountable,” Dunn said. “Almost every client who comes to me wants to come forward so that this wouldn’t happen to other women.”
A Failing System
In response to questions from The Intercept, the Army acknowledged having recorded more homicides than were noted in the dataset provided based on The Intercept’s FOIA request.
Between 2021 and 2023, the Army recorded a total of 16 homicides among active-duty women, Hagan told The Intercept. The data provided to The Intercept for its FOIA request counts only nine.
Hagan did not respond to follow-up questions on the discrepancy, and the Army did not provide data outside the years 2021 to 2023.
But the additional homicides would make the disparities found by The Intercept’s investigation even wider. If the same pattern of undercounting extends across the full 14-year span of our data, the true toll could be substantially higher.
After the independent review of Fort Hood following Guillén’s killing, Hagan said, the Army “implemented a series of major reforms to strengthen prevention, reporting, and accountability for sexual harassment and assault.” It shifted its criminal investigations division to civilian leadership, requiring more independent investigations, establishing stricter missing-soldier response protocols, and expanding data-driven oversight of cases.
But the deaths have continued, including another homicide at Hood last year. To advocates, there are other solutions to address these failures.
“You have to call DoD into Congress and demand answers on why progress hasn’t been made,” said Connolly. “Congress could scrutinize the data on domestic violence and other issues. They can appropriate more resources to DV investigations and hold hearings.”
“The potential solution lies with how funding is or isn’t tied to oversight,” Siegal McIntyre said. “Without Congress doing its job, nothing can change.”
Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., a House Armed Services Committee member and Air Force veteran, said The Intercept’s findings reflect a broader failure of leadership and oversight.
“This report is staggering, and unfortunately, unsurprising,” she said. “Servicewomen consistently bear the brunt of harassment, assault, retaliation, and systemic failures within the ranks, and it is costing them their careers, their safety, and in far too many cases, their lives.”
In a 1995 Defense Department study on homicide victims by gender, female service members across active-duty branches were killed at higher rates than both their male counterparts and women nationally. A Marine Corps and Navy-specific study covering 1995 to 1999 found similarly elevated risks.
The Pentagon never did further analysis. Ana Roque believes that change would fundamentally start with how the military builds itself to protect women like her daughter.
“I understand that the country needs soldiers, but recruiters need to be more careful regarding where these individuals come from,” Roque said. She called for more police and camera surveillance on bases, arguing that if it had been present, “they could have seen him moving my daughter’s body in broad daylight.”
She wishes she could have her daughter back.
“She always had a smile, no matter how difficult her day was,” Roque said. “She made time to help colleagues with various issues and never said no. I have many stories written in my notebook from soldiers and civilians who knew her and told me, ‘She saved me,’ simply by taking a minute to listen to them. She loved her family; we would talk three times a day: at 7 a.m., during my lunch break, and at night, when she would always say ‘Good night, Mommy.’”
How we analyzed the data
Reporters working for The Intercept submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to the Pentagon seeking data on all U.S. Army active-duty noncombat deaths from 2011 through August 2025. In response, the Department of Defense provided a spreadsheet detailing 5,285 U.S. Army deaths over the 14-year period categorized by rank, gender, military occupation, and cause of death. The latter was classified as either illness, self-inflicted, accident, pending, or undetermined.
To calculate the per capita suicide and death rates for women in the U.S. Army in this time period, The Intercept pulled manpower data from the Defense Department for each year in our analysis to provide the total number of women in the Army. National and international data on homicide and suicide was pulled from the FBI Crime Data Report, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in order to compare suicide and homicide rates.
There is no publicly available equivalent data for Army veterans, nor has such an analysis been done for the Navy, Air Force, or Marines.
The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline offers 24-hour support for those experiencing suicidal thoughts or for those close to them, by chat, text, or telephone.Service members can dial 988 and press 1 to reach the Military and Veterans Crisis Line. Support is free and confidential.
