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What Set Me Free (The Story That Inspired the Major Motion Picture Brian Banks): A True Story of Wrongful Conviction, a Dream Deferred, and a Man Redeemed Paperback – July 2, 2019
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Discover the unforgettable and inspiring true story of a young man who was wrongfully convicted as a teenager and imprisoned for more than five years, only to emerge with his spirit unbroken and determined to achieve his dream of playing in the NFL.
At age sixteen, Brian Banks was a nationally recruited All-American Football player, ranked eleventh in the nation as a linebacker. Before his seventeenth birthday, he was in jail, awaiting trial for a heinous crime he did not commit.
Although Brian was innocent, his attorney advised him that as a young black man accused of rape, he stood no chance of winning his case at trial. Especially since he would be tried as an adult. Facing a possible sentence of forty-one years to life, Brian agreed to take a plea deal—and a judge sentenced him to six years in prison.
At first, Brian was filled with fear, rage, and anger as he reflected on the direction his life had turned and the unjust system that had imprisoned him. Brian was surrounded by darkness, until he had epiphany that would change his life forever. From that moment on, he made the choice to shed the bitterness and anger he felt, and focus only on the things he had the power to control. He approached his remaining years in prison with a newfound resolve, studying spirituality, improving his social and writing skills, and taking giant leaps on his journey toward enlightenment.
When Brian emerged from prison with five years of parole still in front of him, he was determined to rebuild his life and finally prove his innocence. Three months before his parole was set to expire, armed with a shocking recantation from his accuser and the help of the California Innocence Project, the truth about his unjust incarceration came out and he was exonerated. Finally free, Brian sought to recapture a dream once stripped away: to play for the NFL. And at age twenty-eight, he made that dream come true.
Perfect for fans of Just Mercy, I Beat the Odds, and Infinite Hope, this powerful memoir is a deep dive into the injustices of the American justice system, a soul-stirring celebration of the resilience of the human spirit, and an inspiring call to hold fast to our dreams.
- Print length320 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateJuly 2, 2019
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.8 x 8.38 inches
- ISBN-101982121319
- ISBN-13978-1982121310
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About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Freedom.
I was just beginning to taste it.
In that summer of 2002, I was sixteen years old—and I was finally about to start driving.
I’d taken the driver’s education course at my high school, and I’d just passed the test to get my learner’s permit. I wanted it so bad that I kept checking the mailbox every day after school, just waiting for that permit to arrive so I could start driving for real.
It was more than that, though.
I was in summer school, like I was pretty much every summer, working hard to get my grades up so I would be ready to rise up and meet the possibilities that were right in front of me. I hadn’t even started my senior year and I had already made an early commitment to the University of Southern California. USC! My dream school. My dream football team. Hell, I could hardly imagine something as big as playing for USC when I was a kid, but I’d worked hard and played my best and now here I was, ranked eleventh in the nation as a linebacker, getting personal calls from USC head coach Pete Carroll, and all kinds of attention from local media along the way. All I had to do was keep playing hard and keep my grades up and I’d be off to college. Me! And who knows what could happen from there! If I kept playing like I was playing, everybody told me I’d for sure be a top draft pick out of USC. I’d make it to the NFL. Make some money. Lift my mom and my brother and sister and our whole family up to a whole new life!
I still had a long way to go. I knew that. I knew that. But I couldn’t help but feel as if everything was finally going right—and I wanted to celebrate.
July Fourth was coming up. I knew we had the day off from school, and I mentioned to my mom that I wished I could throw a party.
“Well, as long as you promise to be responsible, I don’t see why not,” my mom said.
“Are you serious right now?” I asked her. I could hardly believe those words came out of my mother’s mouth.
“Yeah, why not? Just a few friends, though.”
“Most definitely. But like, you’re not gonna be here. You said you were going out of town that day. I mean, I was thinking of inviting some girls, too—”
“Brian,” my mom said, looking me right in the eyes, “I trust you.”
Whoa. That was something. My mom had never let me or my little brother have girls over to the house, especially if she wasn’t going to be there. It’s not that she didn’t trust us; it was just that she’s way too much of an old-school Southern Baptist to let anyone think there might be any kind of impropriety going on in her home. The only partying we did at home was for birthdays and Christmas—family parties—and she went all out for those. I remember she’d decorate the whole house, and our uncles and aunties would all show up carrying presents and all kinds of food, and my uncle Stanley would man the barbecue. The family parties my mom threw were always over-the-top. And I swear every year she told us she couldn’t afford the presents we wanted. We knew she meant it, too, so we never got our hopes up, but somehow she managed to surprise us with exactly the gifts we wanted when the big day came. I still don’t know how she did that on a schoolteacher’s salary, but she did. She even did it before she started teaching, when us kids were real little and she’d just gotten divorced from our dad, and laid off from her job, and she was putting herself through school trying to get her degree so she could get a job teaching in the first place. Even then she did it. Every time.
I love my mom. Everybody loves my mom. But the overprotective thing could be frustrating sometimes. I know she did it for our own good. I knew it even then. I understood where she was coming from because I saw what happened to some of our neighbors and friends. I heard stories. I read the news.
Raising kids in a city like Long Beach, California, was challenging. There was temptation all over the place, and the dark side of the city was like a magnet that sometimes sucked kids in and trapped them. A lot of kids went in the wrong direction, got stuck right where they were and never saw anything beyond the city. My mom wasn’t having that. She wanted more for her kids. She wanted us to get an education. To go places. She drilled it into our heads nonstop that we could accomplish whatever we wanted if we stayed on the right track. If we worked hard. And it looked like she was going to see her dreams for our possible futures come true.
Heading into that Fourth of July, all I saw was possibility.
I’m pretty sure I know why my mom said “yes” to me throwing a party at that exact moment in time: It was her way of easing up on me. Of letting me know that she realized how hard I’d worked.
Life hadn’t gone easy on us those past few years. Just three years before this, my mom’s partner of six years, my stepdad, passed away. It left us all reeling. This man, this good man, this kind man who always treated Mom right and who was always so good to us kids, a strong man who’d fought in the Korean War and who taught us kids tai chi—lung cancer took him in a matter of months. He was a lot older than my mom, but he was the most solid father figure my brother and sister and I ever knew. It was shocking. He died right there in the comfortable little home our family had made on the corner of Twenty-Eighth and Magnolia, in one of the safest neighborhoods in Long Beach, and we just couldn’t stay there anymore after that. So my mom moved us outside the city, to a townhouse on a quiet cul-de-sac—and without saying a word about it, she asked me to grow up. Fast.
I was six foot one. She needed me to take on the role of protector to her and my older sister. That was clear. She also needed me to be responsible, to be the man of the house. I’d done it. And she had already rewarded me for that with a gift that absolutely blew me away. Now that I was almost old enough to drive, my mom went out and bought me a car—a 1995 Honda Civic, all white with a black stripe down the side—so I’d be able to drive my brother and myself to school now that we lived farther out. I could hardly believe it. But there it was, parked at the curb, waiting for me as I anxiously waited for that learner’s permit to come in the mail.
The school we went to, Long Beach Polytechnic High School, is a school like no other. It’s a public school with private-school level expectations. It ranks as one of the top high schools anywhere, by all sorts of measures. But its biggest achievement, the thing it’s really known for, is producing more NFL players than any other high school in the country. More than sixty NFL players have come out of Poly through the years, and I was slated to be one more. So the pressure to perform at that school was intense.
Long Beach Poly is also world renowned in baseball, basketball, and track and field. In 2005, Sports Illustrated named it the “Sports School of the Century,” out of all the schools in the whole country. But what’s amazing is our school wasn’t all about sports. It was all about everything. Even our music program was top-notch, producing more than one Grammy Award–winning artist.
I guess another way to put it is to say our school was mixed. Not just mixed race, but mixed interests. To give a little perspective, rappers Snoop Dogg and Nate Dogg both went to Long Beach Poly, but so did actress Cameron Diaz. So did a guy named Keith Kellogg Jr., a decorated army general who’s serving as security advisor to the vice president of the United States as I write this book. There were all sorts of different groups and factions, like there are in any high school, I suppose, but no matter what group we were talking about, I got along with all of them.
That was a good thing, because it’s a big school—4,400 students—and it’s positioned smack in the middle of the ’hood. Our beautiful, fenced-in, multi-building campus was around the corner from car washes and liquor stores, adjacent to some of the most ghetto apartment buildings in the whole city, and near parks where gangs met up.
But the gangs in Long Beach weren’t exactly what people think of when they think of gangs in some other cities. They weren’t about destroying the city and terrorizing the community. In Long Beach, there are no Bloods. Only Crips. It’s an all-Crips city. And while some of the individual gangs would sometimes go to war with each other, there weren’t the sort of Bloods-versus-Crips gang wars like you’d see in other places. There were fights between the Hispanic gangs and the black gangs, and those could get ugly sometimes. But when I was growing up, most gangs were just a part of the culture here, a part of the city, a part of feeling like you belonged—whether you belonged to a gang or not.
Some of my friends’ dads were in gangs. Even some moms were in gangs. It was no big thing. This was especially true in the 1990s. My first Pop Warner football coach was a respected OG (that’s “original gangsta,” for those who don’t know), and my mom wasn’t scared at all to put me in a car with him and send me off to football practice. It was like “Take care of Brian now. We’ll see you later!” And off we went.
The Crips presence even affects our language in the way we call each other “cuz.” As in, “What up, cuz?” “How you doin’, cuz?” If you’re from Long Beach, even if you’re a white kid, that’s pretty much how you say hello.
Gangbangers and those who weren’t gangbangers hung out. We were friends. We were classmates. We all interacted together at school—and sometimes at parties, too.
That Fourth of July, my mom left town just like she’d planned, and I kept the party small just like I’d promised. It was ten, maybe twelve kids total. Some of my teammates. A couple of girls I knew. A couple of girls I didn’t know, whom my teammates invited. I manned the barbecue myself, and we turned up the music, and we danced. The community we were in had a shared pool, and late that afternoon we all went and jumped in it. We weren’t supposed to have that many guests in the pool and we got a little too noisy before somebody finally kicked us out. I hoped that incident wouldn’t get back to my mom, but we were having fun, and I didn’t want the fun to stop. So instead of letting things get too rowdy at my mom’s place, we all piled into a couple of cars, like teenagers do, and we drove back to Long Beach to a party at my friend’s place.
This friend of mine was a gang member, and his party was huge. We could make as much noise as we wanted there.
After hanging for a while at that homey’s party, full of mostly black teens nodding heads to blaring hip-hop, my friends and I piled into a couple of cars again and drove over to one of my white friends’ parties. Now that was a whole different scene. It was a full-on frat party. We actually had fraternities at my high school. And this party was like what people describe parties looking like at colleges up in the Northeast or something—a bunch of guys, a bunch of girls, a couple of kegs of beer, all dancing around and hanging out with alternative rock and progressive jam-band music on the stereo. Some of these guys listened to far-out bands like Portishead, and I dug that sound as much as any hip-hop I’d ever heard.
Like I said, I got along with everybody. We had a great time at that party, too. But it was a school night, and we were definitely getting tired. So two of my best friends and I headed back to my mom’s house, where we found my little brother messing around with some fireworks. He’s just two years behind me. He was an amazing basketball player and apparently he needed to let off some steam that holiday, too: he’d gone and emptied the explosives from a whole bunch of smaller fireworks into big soda bottles, and then tied them all together in a crazy-looking contraption. I think he was waiting for me to get there and supervise before he dared to light the thing off.
After all, a big brother was the closest thing he had to a father figure in our home at that point.
So we took it out to the middle of the cul-de-sac and all gathered around as he lit the wick. Then we looked at each other—and ran. We jumped behind my little Honda parked at the curb and poked our heads up just enough to see it, watching that wick burn, waiting to see what would happen.
Then all of a sudden: Boom!
That contraption didn’t shoot up in the air or pop all sorts of colors. It just plain exploded. Like a bomb. It set off car alarms for blocks. It was crazy! And it was probably a really stupid thing to do. But we were kids, man. Just kids. And kids sometimes do really stupid things.
Realizing there could be consequences for what we’d just done, we all ran inside as fast as we could and hid in the dark from the curious neighbors as they all turned their lights on and stepped out to see what had happened.
Lucky for us, no one got hurt—and no one came knocking.
The four of us stayed up real late, talking and laughing until we all fell asleep on the living room floor.
Yeah.
That was a good day.
A memorable day.
A momentous day full of friends, and family, and fun.
Freedom.
On that Independence Day of 2002, I could taste it.
Product details
- Publisher : Atria (July 2, 2019)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 320 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1982121319
- ISBN-13 : 978-1982121310
- Item Weight : 8.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.38 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #840,619 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,637 in Football (Books)
- #7,055 in Sociology Reference
- #24,542 in Memoirs (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Mark Dagostino is a multiple New York Times Bestselling co-author, and a former Senior Writer at People Magazine.
For more, be sure to visit Mark's website, www.markdagostino.com; and Mark's Author Page on Facebook (search @MarkDagostino.Author)
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Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the book easy to read and inspiring. They describe the story as great, eye-opening, and defining perseverance, humility, and forgiveness.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers find the book easy to read and engaging. They describe it as an amazing story about a great man.
"...I loved this book. One of the best books I have read!" Read more
"...This is an excellent book and I will recommend it to all of my friends." Read more
"...It undercut my confidence in the judicial system. Great read, though. Hard to put down." Read more
"...And then I immediately watched the movie which was also good. The book was better though, as is usually the case." Read more
Customers find the story inspiring and eye-opening. They appreciate how the author explains perseverance, humility, and forgiveness.
"What an amazing story! What he went through and how he handled it could only happen by the power and grace of God...." Read more
"...Brian defines perseverance, humility and forgiveness." Read more
"Unbelievable story .. I am sad that it's true and really happened to s real person. It undercut my confidence in the judicial system...." Read more
"...Brian's story is simultaneously an inspiring tale of overcoming adversity and a harrowing tale of the failures of the criminal justice system...." Read more
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on August 14, 2019What an amazing story! What he went through and how he handled it could only happen by the power and grace of God. The writing was wonderful and powerful. I loved this book. One of the best books I have read!
- Reviewed in the United States on July 11, 2020There were times when I had to put it down so I could regroup. This is an excellent book and I will recommend it to all of my friends.
- Reviewed in the United States on December 29, 2022If you haven’t watched the Brian Banks movie and read this book, I highly recommend both. Brian defines perseverance, humility and forgiveness.
- Reviewed in the United States on March 6, 2021What Set Me Free was a very well written book, but it was also a very hard book for me to get through. What Brian Banks went through with the so-called justice system for ten years will make you angry while you were reading this book.
Some ignorant and vindictive neighborhood teenage girl decided on an early July 2002 day to have a consensual tryst with a Long Beach Poly High School linebacker. That little tryst ended up wiping away everything that linebacker ever worked for up until his junior year when this vindictive female later went to the cops and said he raped her.
What Set Me Free was about much more than that 2002 tryst in some building at Poly High. No, this book was also about redemption; keeping your sanity in juvenile hall and then jail; about a justice system in Los Angeles County that failed Banks; and it was about a man who was resilient amid all that he was going through from 2002 to 2007 while incarcerated.
Banks wrote this book in a style where he REALLY wanted you to feel every single ounce of pain he suffered while being incarcerated. It's like as you read this book you always wondered, when is things going to get better for him? Or why is an innocent man being punished like this?
Pros of this book: Like I said before, this book was well written. Banks wasn't interested in telling you what he went through from 2002 to 2013 (the main years of this book's plot). No, he wanted you to feel what he went through in that 12-year period which included: being in jail; his name being entered into the sex offender's database and how much it hurt him to do that; the day some cops came over to his girlfriend's house and ransacked her apartment over some stupid rule about registering as a sex offender in different cities; his tryouts with the NFL; and more.
Cons of this book: It would have nice if there were pictures in this book of Banks growing up, of his mother, of the day he was let out of jail, of the the day he got exonerated, some pictures of the people who helped him get out of jail, and etc. This was a bleak book, but it's bleakness could have been lifted a little bit with some pictures though.
In conclusion, I enjoyed this book, but I wish it was never written in the first place. Banks should have never spent a second in juvenile hall or jail. He should have played his last year at Poly (2002 season). Graduated with his class at the 2003 graduation ceremony. He should have then went to USC to play football. He should gave obtained his degree in the Class of 2007 or 2008. Played in the NFL or with one of the other pro football leagues that existed back in the late 2000s and early 2010s. And finally, he should be living his life in the present WITHOUT a prison record.
- Reviewed in the United States on August 17, 2019Unbelievable story .. I am sad that it's true and really happened to s real person. It undercut my confidence in the judicial system. Great read, though. Hard to put down.
- Reviewed in the United States on July 22, 2019I read it straight through and couldn't put it down. Brian's story is simultaneously an inspiring tale of overcoming adversity and a harrowing tale of the failures of the criminal justice system. Read it! JD
- Reviewed in the United States on August 29, 2020This movie moved me to tears it inpisred so much I brought book as a gift for my daughter. She couldn't put it down. God always in our midst, working on our behalf.
- Reviewed in the United States on June 26, 2020I couldn’t put it down! Gut wrenching but amazing. And then I immediately watched the movie which was also good. The book was better though, as is usually the case.
Top reviews from other countries
- KarenReviewed in Canada on April 26, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars A must read!
If you like biographies, you'll love this book. A tell tale of perserverence to challenge the judicial system and overcome life's challenges
- DrewYettiReviewed in the United Kingdom on January 3, 2020
5.0 out of 5 stars A remarkable and inspiring story!
Reading this book made me angry and upset! I am shocked and appalled not to mention furious on how flawed and corrupt the justice system really is as the ones who are in charge only care about their careers and their egos without knowing or caring the feelings and wellbeing of an innocent person that is being falsely accused and wrongly convicted. Stories like this one is an example on why it's dangerous to "believe all women" without evidence and this is exactly what happened to Brian Banks. But what inspires me more is how Brian Banks did not give into despair and insanity when facing adversity and managed to remain positive and persevered, which to me is a strength of character. To me, Brian Banks serves as an example and as a role model to everyone that despite all the misfortunes and hardships that anyone can go through in life, it's still not too late from anyone to chase their dreams and build a new life.
- murrayReviewed in the United Kingdom on October 18, 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars A good read
A book that kept me wanting to read. I also then saw the film. I felt the book was better as it was told from Brian’s point of view. It is shocking how many times someone could get caught up in a system but also horrendous that actually this whole journey commenced on a pack of lies. There should be accountability for this and not just paying some money back. A strong child and man.
- Ron VauseReviewed in Canada on October 18, 2019
5.0 out of 5 stars Great read
Great story
Terrific read
- Emma JaneReviewed in the United Kingdom on June 6, 2020
5.0 out of 5 stars A must read
Watched this on Netflix and had to read the book.
Couldn’t put it down .
So sad and such a amazing man to have survived and got through what he did .