BRIAN BANKS’ MOTHER Talks About The Movie And The Fight To Save Her Son
The true story of Brian Banks, an All-American high school football player who spent a decade behind bars wrongly convicted of rape and eventually exonerated, opened at theaters last month, and is quickly becoming a recommended feel-good film for late-summer moviegoers. Banks and his mother, Leomia Myers, shared their insights.
“As African-American parents and a mother, we’re always told to keep your child involved in something. All their lives they were involved in sports, church, sports, school…summer school,” Myers said. “And, I did that, and he had never been in trouble. So, I did all the right things, and then this happened. And, I was ill-prepared for it. I did not know what to do.” “I did not know, as a mother, to say to Brian when the police arrested him, ‘Just wait…don’t say anything, don’t say anything to anybody,’” she stated. “But I also told him to always tell the truth and that’s exactly what he did. He told the truth to the police officer, and they in turn told him, ‘Oh, just tell us the truth and you will go home’ which was farthest from the truth.”
The trial revealed a broken justice system.
“What I knew to do was I loved my son, and I was willing to do anything to help him,” she asserted. “Whatever it took, I was going to help him because I knew he was innocent…and he should not be going through what he was going through. It’s a painful experience, and I wouldn’t want anyone else to go through it.”
