Check out this bitter sweet story of a former California high school football star named Brian Banks, who was wrongly convicted of raping and kidnapping a young woman 10 years ago, but has now been exonerated.
Banks spent five years in prison after pleading no contest to forcible rape. A judge threw out the conviction on Thursday.
Wanetta Gibson was a 15-year-old high school sophomore when she accused Banks of raping her at Long Beach Poly High School. She received a $1.5 million payment from a civil suit brought by her mother against Long Beach schools.
In a strange turn of events, Gibson, friended Banks on Facebook when he got out of prison.
During an initial meeting with him, she said she had lied; there had been no kidnap and no rape and she offered to help him clear his record, court records state.
But she refused to repeat the story to prosecutors because she feared she would have to return payout from the civil suit.
During a second meeting that was secretly videotaped, she told Banks, “‘I will go through with helping you, but it’s like at the same time all that money they gave us, I mean gave me, I don’t want to have to pay it back,'” according to Freddie Parish, a defense investigator who was at the meeting.
Watch the video below:
Photo/Video Credit: MSNBC
