What Set Me Free (The Story That Inspired the Major Motion Picture Brian Banks) Read online

  “Did you do anything out of the ordinary today?” she asked me.

  I looked at her and I was like, “No, everything was normal today.”

  I meant it. It wasn’t unusual to go make out with someone at the Spot, and nothing else that could even be described as “unusual” had taken place the entire day. Everything was regular.

  “Boy, you ain’t got nothing to worry about, then,” she said. “Somebody overheard the wrong thing is all. You’re fine.”

  She gave me a hug, and I truly thought everything was all right.

  “You’re right. I’ll let it go,” I said. “I’m gonna get in the shower. I’m sweaty. I’ve been running,” I told her.

  “Okay,” she said.

  I went up to my bedroom. I got undressed. I threw my sweaty clothes into my clothes hamper and took a long, cool shower. It was still hot when I got out, so I put some boxers on and lay down on top of my bed.

  And I fell asleep.

  The pressure on my back woke me up. Something painfully pressing into my spine.

  “Wake up!” a man’s voice yelled.

  I had no idea how long I’d been out. I was still in the fog of sound sleep, flat on my stomach with my head up near the wall, when I realized it was someone’s knee in my back. I panicked. I opened my eyes and saw a gun.

  “Don’t move, don’t move!” another voice yelled. “Stay still, stay still, don’t move. Put your hands on your back, put your hands on your back!”

  “What’s going on? What’s going on?” I yelled.

  My face was facing the wall so I didn’t even know for sure if it was the cops or someone else for a second, until I put my hands behind my back and they handcuffed me and yanked me up off the bed. Besides the cop who was holding me there were three other police officers with their guns drawn. The guns were down, pointed toward the ground, but they were drawn. In my bedroom. Even though I had no clothes on. Even though I had no weapon.

  They stood me up and started barking at me, “Find something to wear!” “What do you want to wear?” “Pick some clothes right now!”

  I started pointing at clothes with my foot because my hands were behind my back. I was half falling over, extending my leg out like, “All right, those pants right there, and then this and that,” while I kept asking, “What’s going on?” and calling for my mom. “Mom. Mom!”

  “I’m right here,” I heard her yell from another room. “They won’t let me in. They won’t let me in! Let me see my boy!”

  They held me and forced my clothes onto my body and one of them asked, “Where are the clothes you wore today? Today?!”

  “They’re in the dirty clothes. Right there in the dirty clothes,” I said. One of them pushed over the whole dirty clothes hamper, which was full to the top, and all my clothes spilled out. “Which ones did you wear today?” he yelled again, and I said, “They’re under everything now.”

  They shifted everything out of the way until I pointed, “That right there, right there,” and they gathered my school clothes into a big clear bag.

  “Mom!” I screamed again.

  They led me out of my room, and I saw my mom across the hall in her bedroom, on her knees, screaming and crying at the top of her lungs with two cops bracing her, holding her back. The look on her face. It was as if she had just seen me lying on the street. Dead.

  “Mom!” I yelled, as they rushed me down the stairs and out of the house and shoved me in the backseat of a police car. I could barely fit. There was nothing but inches between the back seat and the front seats. I had to turn sort of sideward with my knees were all pressed up against the back of the front seat, and it felt like it was a thousand degrees in there. They slammed the door and left me alone with all the windows up and my hands cuffed behind my back and they went back inside the house.

  I felt like I was going crazy in there. I don’t even know how long it was. It felt like an oven. I was sweating so much. They finally came back out and two of the cops got into the car and we started driving.

  I didn’t want to yell. I didn’t want to provoke anything. But I couldn’t stay quiet.

  “What the hell is this?” I said. “What’s going on? Why is this happening?”

  That’s the first time they told me why I was in handcuffs.

  The police officer in the passenger seat looked back over his shoulder and said, “Yeah, man, there’s a girl on your campus accusing you of raping her.”

  “Raping her?” I said. “I didn’t rape nobody.”

  “Well, that’s what she’s saying you did,” he said.

  I couldn’t believe it. I just couldn’t believe it.

  I’d seen enough cop shows on TV to know I shouldn’t go running my mouth off, so I just sat back in silence. I stayed quiet the rest of the ride. But my mind wasn’t quiet. My mind went crazy. The whole time we were in that car for the long ride back from my mom’s house to Long Beach, I just kept thinking, Why would Tiana accuse me of rape? Why? Why?! I don’t get it. This is crazy. And then I’d start talking to myself in my head, like, Just stay calm. Just stay cool, man. You didn’t do anything. You didn’t do anything wrong. It’ll be okay. Just be honest. When you get the chance, tell them exactly what happened and it’ll all be okay.

  I thought they’d be taking me back to a precinct in Long Beach, but instead they drove me to St. Mary Medical Center. They put me in a room and told me they needed to do a rape kit. We waited and waited, just me sitting on a paper-covered exam table and a detective in the corner, until a woman in scrubs came in and told me they needed to undress me. A woman. They pulled my clothes off. No johnny, no robe, no privacy of any kind. As a sixteen-year-old, it was the most embarrassing thing I’d ever experienced.

  They started taking pictures of my naked body. She lifted up my scrotum and looked all around and took pictures of that. She got this brush out, this really hard brush, and brushed through my pubic hair so she could take samples of that. Then they got me back into my clothes and sat me in a little room right next to that exam room, and the detective started talking to me. He came at me all heartfelt, like, “All right, man, I know this is a lot. You know, just listen here, if you just tell me what happened, we’re gonna figure this out and you’re gonna be okay, all right? Just tell me what happened and everything will be figured out.”

  I didn’t know shit about the law. I didn’t know that I shouldn’t talk without a lawyer. I didn’t know that it’s a mistake to talk if you’re a minor and your parents aren’t present. I felt like this guy was trying to help me, like he was trying to figure out what happened.

  “First, I’ve got to tell you,” he said, “you have a right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. . . .”

  He recited those Miranda rights just like we’ve all heard in movies and on TV a thousand times, and they went in one ear and out the other because I wanted to tell him what happened. I wanted to clear this whole thing up and go home.

  All I kept thinking was, Finally, I get to tell somebody I didn’t do this!

  And that’s what I told him: “I didn’t do it.”

  “Okay, well, I know you didn’t do it,” he said. “Just tell me what happened so I can figure this out.” So I told him exactly what happened. I told him everything I’ve laid out in this book right here, every detail.

  I told him we were together in that stairwell, at the Spot, and that we’d been messing around, and right after I explained all that, he said, “Okay. All right. Give me some time, we’ll figure this out,” and he got up and left the room.

  I wound up sitting in that room for a solid two hours and my mind kept running over everything again and again. I wanted to make sure I told that detective everything that had happened. And I had. Every bit of it. I don’t think I left anything out. I was sure that Tiana would corroborate that story. Why wouldn’t she? This whole thing was crazy. It had to be some kind of misunderstanding. I remembered seeing her mom with her and thinking maybe her mom
just got mad at her or something and this whole story got mixed up. No matter what happened, I hadn’t raped her! They had to let me go.

  At the end of those two hours of waiting, two officers came in and calmly said, “All right, come with us and we’ll take you to the precinct. We have some more investigating to do, but you should be all right.”

  They took me to the Long Beach precinct downtown, a gray concrete building with a modern glass front. They took off my handcuffs and put me in a holding cell, which was like a glassed-in room in an office building or something. And I sat there. And sat there. I kept rubbing my wrists. I couldn’t believe how tight those cuffs had been. They hurt! And why’d I need ’em, anyway? Didn’t anybody know who I was? I’d never committed a crime. I’d never been arrested or put in the back of a police car. I’d never even gotten a jaywalking ticket. I’ll admit I was kind of a class clown sometimes. I wasn’t the most serious student. But even that was a while ago, before I got serious about football and got my first draft letter from USC at the end of my sophomore football season. And no matter how anyone looked at it, I wasn’t a criminal.

  The whole time I was at that precinct, no one spoke to me. No one told me anything. Through the windows of that cell I could see all these officers on their computers at their desks, and it made me crazy that no one would come talk to me. I didn’t see a lawyer. I didn’t see my mom. Where’s my mom? Why hasn’t she come to get me? I wondered.

  Four or five hours went by with no word, no explanation of what was happening. But the way those cops acted when they brought me over left me feeling positive that this would all be over soon. So I kept that mind-set. I kept telling myself, This is gonna be figured out, it’s just taking a while. They’ll figure it out it. They’ll figure it out. It’s all gonna be okay.

  Finally two officers came over and unlocked the door. “All right, Banks, come on,” one of them said. Yes, I thought.

  But as I stepped to the doorway they put the handcuffs back on me.

  “Is everything cool?” I asked.

  “Well, it looks like you’ve got to see a judge,” one of them said. I was dejected. But I still thought everything was going to be okay. So I shrugged my shoulders and said, “Okay.”

  I didn’t fight it. I tried not to let myself get upset. I was innocent. I hadn’t done anything. The judge would know that instantly. This will all get sorted out, I told myself again.

  “Well, you ain’t gonna be able to see him tonight,” the other cop told me, “but you’ve got to see a judge within seventy-two hours, so you may see him tomorrow, but in the meantime, we gotta take you to Juvenile Hall for holding, and you got to stay at the Juvenile Hall.”

  My whole body got stiff.

  “Oh my God,” I said. “I don’t want to go to jail.”

  “You don’t have a choice,” they told me. “We can’t keep you here.”

  I started to freak out. I could feel myself shaking. My stomach got all twisted up in a knot. I could feel my heart beating fast in my chest.

  They took me out and put me into the back of a police car again, only this time there was someone else in there. A girl. Handcuffed, just like me. We didn’t say anything to each other. We just sort of nodded and then looked away as they started the car and took off. It was a twenty-five-minute drive to Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey. Twenty-five minutes of wondering what in the hell I was going to face on the inside. I had no idea. No concept of what Juvenile Hall would look like. I’d never talked to anyone who’d been there. I’d never imagined I would go to jail, ever.

  The cops got out when we pulled into the parking lot, and the girl and I were alone for a minute.

  She looked out the window and said, “Yeah, I’ve been here before.”

  She was around my age, but the way she said it, it was like she was a veteran criminal or something.

  “You’ve been here?”

  “Yeah, man. I’ve been to this place. This ain’t shit,” she said. “You been locked up before?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Oh. It’s crazy as fuck in there, man,” she said. “It’s crazy.”

  Before I could ask her what she meant by that, the cops were back, opening our doors and pulling us out.

  I was scared.

  They walked me into a room and handed me off to another set of officers, or prison guards, or whatever they were. I didn’t know. I just stayed quiet. I didn’t want to cause trouble. I didn’t want to do anything that might make things worse.

  They took the handcuffs off. They took me into a room. They told me to take my clothes off. All of them. “Right in front of you?” I asked.

  “Right now,” they said.

  I closed my eyes. This ain’t happening right now, I told myself. This ain’t happening.

  “Now!” they yelled.

  I stripped down naked, completely naked, and a guard said, “Hands on,” and ran his hands over my body. They made me put my arms up in the air and checked my armpits, and open my mouth and stick out my tongue while they looked inside. They told me to bend my head down while they ran a hand in my hair and over my ears, then spread my legs and lift up my scrotum to make sure I didn’t have anything hiding under my sac. I felt so violated. So helpless.

  “Turn around,” they said, and they asked me to lift up one foot at a time and wiggle my toes. Then spread my butt cheeks, squat, and “cough two times.”

  “That’s it,” they said. “Remember that routine. You’ll be doing it again.”

  From there they marched me into a shower stall and made me shower while they stood there watching. Then the handed me some inmate clothing, blue and gray, like a cheap sweat suit.

  “Get dressed,” they said.

  They marched me to the medical ward, where a doctor or nurse or somebody poked and prodded me and took my temperature and stuff, and by the time all that was through, it must have been two or three o’clock in the morning.

  I was wired. On edge. Exhausted. Scared. I kept telling myself, This is not my life. This is not happening. This is not real right now.

  They took me to this place that they said would be my module, but someone said the module was full, so they put me into a “day room” instead, and told me that’s where I’d sleep for the night, “Until we put you in a cell tomorrow.” There was a little plastic cot, like a tiny boat almost, down on the floor with a thin mattress on it. It was about the thickness of an exercise mat.

  I was shaking. I was so scared. I couldn’t believe any of this was happening. I was alone in that room with one window, and I was glad. I didn’t want to be in some cell with some criminal. Who knows what some of the kids in there had done? Who knows what they would do to a new kid like me?

  My body finally gave out. The exhaustion of it all took over. I fell asleep. It felt like I’d just closed my eyes when a loud bang woke me up. “Fuck!” I said, popping my eyes open. Somebody had banged on the window, and I couldn’t believe it but light was streaming in through the glass. It was morning already. I was so far down on the ground that I couldn’t see anything, so I lifted myself up onto my knees, and I stood up. Outside that window I saw a line of about thirty inmates, all dressed in orange, each of them standing with a small towel in his hand, getting ready to go brush his teeth and wash up.

  These were kids. Like me. A couple of them noticed me looking and elbowed each other, and pointed, and started joking around about something. The guys behind them looked my way, too. I felt like an animal in a cage. In a zoo.

  I wasn’t dressed in orange yet. I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t know what was gonna happen. I couldn’t understand why I was there, why no one had fixed this, why I hadn’t seen my mom.

  And it all just hit me: I’m in jail. God. Help me, please. God help me. I’m in jail.

  FOUR

  Caged

  I heard the key turn. A guard I hadn’t seen the night before opened my door. He couldn’t have been more than five foot six. He took one quick up-and-down loo
k at my six-foot-one, football-ready body and his eyes went wide.

  “God damn,” he said. “You are not a juvenile. There’s no way you’re a juvenile.”

  I didn’t respond.

  “All right, come with me, son,” he said, and I stepped with him into the hallway. As we passed another guard he said right out loud again, “There’s no way this kid is a fucking juvenile!”

  He brought me into an office, where they made me sit in the corner on the floor. They started calling all of these places, trying to verifying my birth certificate. A bunch of guards stopped in one by one to take a look at me, and I realized I was bigger than every guard there. There was not a guard my size in Juvenile Hall.

  In between phone calls, that first guard took a look at my charges, which were printed on a piece of paper he had on a clipboard, and he asked me what happened. And I told him. I explained the whole thing, just like I’d explained to the detective the day before. I said a little bit about who I was, and what high school I went to, and how I’d already committed to USC, and he said, “Oh, yeah! I think I’ve heard of you. I’ve heard of you, man.”

  Finally. I was glad someone seemed to recognize something about me, to recognize that I wasn’t their typical inmate. “Well, look, I can tell you’re real scared, but if what you’re telling me happened the way you say it happened, you’ll get out of here just fine. They’ll figure it out. I’m sure once you’re in front of the judge and everything, it’ll be fine.”

  His words put me at ease for a minute. This was a guy on the inside. A part of the system. A guy who saw stuff, and knew stuff. And if he thought I’d be fine, that I just had to be patient, then I was definitely going to take his words to heart.

  They eventually confirmed that I was sixteen and they got ready to house me, but because I had a “sex offense,” they said they had to house me by myself. I was kind of glad about that. I was scared of getting put in a cell with some hardened-criminal kid. But once they brought me down to this tiny concrete cell, I realized what “by myself” really meant.