LOS ANGELES - Author Alice Sebold's memoir, Lucky, is no longer headed for the big screen.

This is in the wake of the exoneration last week of Mr Anthony Broadwater, 61, who served 16 years in prison for Sebold's rape.

Entertainment magazine Variety reported last week that the movie was dropped after losing its financing months ago, according to a source close to the production.

Insiders also said that actress Victoria Pedretti, best known for her role as Love Quinn in Netflix series You (2018 to present), was no longer involved in the film.

In 1999, a year after Mr Broadwater was released, Sebold, 58, published her memoir about the rape, which happened when she was 18, and how the trauma had shaped her life.

Lucky kicked off her writing career and she went on to pen best-seller The Lovely Bones, published in 2002. The novel about the rape and murder of a teenage girl was adapted into a Oscar-nominated movie in 2009, directed by Peter Jackson and starring Saoirse Ronan.

A New York Times article last week after the exoneration of Mr Broadwater detailed how the film's executive producer Timothy Mucciante raised concerns about the events in the book and left the project in June.

Mr Mucciante "began to question the story that the movie was based on earlier this year, after he noticed discrepancies between the memoir and the script", it wrote.

He hired a private investigator to examine the evidence against Mr Broadwater, which included a method of microscopic hair analysis that has now been discredited, and played a crucial role in getting Mr Broadwater's conviction re-examined.

Mr Mucciante said: "I started having some doubts, not about the story that Alice told about her assault, which was tragic, but the second part of her book about the trial, which didn't hang together."

A spokesperson for Scribner, Sebold's publisher, told British newspaper The Guardian last week that "neither Alice Sebold nor Scribner has any comment. Scribner has no plans to update the text of Lucky at this time".