#Maya moore return to wnba series#

“There’s so many things going on in today’s attention economy, that I’m like, I’m not wasting any time stealing the thoughtfulness that Jonathan deserves on his fight for freedom,” Moore says. She did not want anyone questioning her intentions. Moore wanted media and fans to focus on the merits of the case, such as the fingerprint report that was never shared with Irons’ defense team at the original trial, indicating that there were additional people at the crime scene-and that Irons was not one of them. But she made no mention of the romance blooming between them. In 2017, Moore talked about Irons’ case publicly, in an interview for the Players’ Tribune. That’s not something a brother says to a sister.” But as Moore recounts in the book, during a 2013 phone conversation, Irons “teased me with a joke that made my heart jump in my chest. READ MORE: Maya Moore’s Fight For Justice Off The Courtįor the first six years of their relationship, Moore and Irons developed a sibling-like friendship. Or look at the room, and remind myself continually, this is over. There were times when I was writing and editing, I had to reach out and feel Maya. I’m not going to get that substance back. The reality is, I have a crater in my life that has been blown wide open. “When we first started, I had to break and pause and schedule a session with my counselor.

“It was extremely hard,” Irons tells TIME. He said, I’m going to go back to these hard places, because people need to know the truth in order to prevent things like this from happening again.”įor Irons, now 42, chronicling injustice proved painful at times. “He can just crawl in a hole and not talk to anybody, and everybody would understand. “We knew this story is too profound to keep to ourselves, which would have been easily justified, in the sense that Jonathan has been through enough,” Moore tells TIME during a joint interview with Irons from a New York City hotel room. On Monday, Moore, 33, officially announced her retirement from the WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx, the team with which she won four titles. The couple married nine days after his release in July 2020 their first child, Jonathan Hughston Irons Jr., was born in February of last year. She stepped away from basketball in 2019, in large part to focus on and call attention to his case. Moore bankrolled a team of lawyers that would ultimately helped set Irons free.

#Maya moore return to wnba series#

The duo clicked, and after a series of messages-many reprinted in the book-and conversations, they began to develop an intimate bond. When Moore met him, she was about to begin her college basketball career at the University of Connecticut. Despite a lack of physical evidence linking him to the crime, Irons was convicted by an all-white jury in 1998 and was given a 50-year sentence. Irons was 16 when he was arrested in 1996 for a nonfatal shooting. He was released from the hole, and continued exchanging letters and other correspondence with Moore, whom he had first met in 2007 at the Jefferson City Correctional Center in Missouri, through her godparents, who had taken an interest in his case. He woke up vowing to fight on, and things soon turned his way. “I couldn’t take the pain anymore,” he writes. “The air reeked of body odor and urine and fecal matter.” A defeated Irons contemplated suicide. “You never got used to the hole,” Irons writes in Love and Justice, a new memoir he co-wrote with Moore, who played an instrumental role in getting his conviction on burglary and assault charges overturned after he spent some 23 years in prison.