the human stain (2003)

coleman silk is a distinguished new england college professor whose professional life is destroyed by accusations of racism and his personal life is thrown into crisis by a lie with which he lived for fifty years. with his career and reputation ruined, silk begins to rise again thanks to two unlikely encounters: one with the writer nathan zuckerman who is fascinated by his story, the other with a much younger woman with whom he will have a story that will explode to the extreme consequences. in reconstructing the history of the professor, zuckerman discovers the secret he has hidden even from his wife and children and begins to understand.