In January of this year, WNBA star Maya Moore Irons announced she would be formally retiring from basketball. She left the sport, following an extended break that began in 2019, as one of its most decorated players. In 2017, Moore Irons helped the Minnesota Lynx, her team since 2011, win its fourth WNBA title in seven years, and she counts two Olympic gold medals, six All-Star selections, and a string of MVP titles among her achievements. The star had been widely expected to return to the game, and her permanent departure came as a shock.
But off the court, the wrongful imprisonment of a man named Jonathan Irons had long hung over Moore Irons’s head like a dark cloud. In 1997, at the age of 16, Irons was arrested for a burglary and assault he didn’t commit, for which he would receive a sentence of 50 years. She met him at Missouri’s Jefferson City Correctional Center in 2007, the summer before she was about to start college at the University of Connecticut, through a family member who led the prison’s church choir, of which Irons was a member. Both devout Christians, the two connected over their faith. After getting the approval of Moore Irons’s mother, they began to correspond via letters and phone calls, developing a friendship that, after six years, ultimately turned romantic.
In 2016, Moore Irons began using her platform to advocate for racial justice and legal reform, which led to her stepping back from basketball in 2019 to launch a sweeping campaign drawing attention to Irons’s case. Her efforts tipped the scale: His convictions were overturned in March of 2020, 23 years after his initial arrest. Nine days following his release that July, Irons and Moore Irons were married, and soon after, they welcomed their son, Jonathan Hughston Irons Jr., who is now one.
Now Moore Irons, 33, is continuing her work in criminal-justice reform through her social-action campaign, Win With Justice, while Irons, 43, who is still acclimating to life as a free man, is focused on helping others navigate the carceral system. In January, the two released a joint memoir called Love & Justice detailing their unlikely story of devotion and triumph.
Here, they discuss beating every odd together and becoming the ultimate team.
MAYA MOORE IRONS: It’s crazy to think back to the first time we met. It was after my senior year of high school. We had an awesome conversation. I think we both were just trying to get to know each other. After that, you asked me if you could continue to keep in touch with me through letters and phone calls, and I said yes. We had a genuine friendship develop over the course of about six years before we realized, okay, we really care about each other. Now what do we do? That’s the heart of our relationship; we’re great friends and love each other very much.
JONATHAN IRONS: You beat me in a game of checkers that first meeting, and you wouldn’t play me again after that. I’m still resentful. I was like, I’m going to hold on at least till I talk her into giving me another checkers game. For me, you were consistent, and you made time to talk to me and showed that you saw me as a person. When you are under that popping fire and somebody tells you that they love you and they see you and that you matter, that fire loses some of the impact that it would have had on you.
MMI: I feel like I had the privilege of getting to know one of the most inspiring people living right now. Yeah, I’m talking about you. Now so many more people get to see a glimpse of who you are through our book. I can’t imagine what it’s doing for your heart, but it does so much for my heart to see someone who was treated so poorly now being seen. You’ve had a hard life. And yet, when I met you, you were trying to live not only for yourself, but then you had the audacity to help other people when you had every reason to throw a pity party. You were translating math books into braille for blind inmates. You were helping people write their own appeals.
JI: Well, it is true that the best way to be empowered if you are going through adversity is to take your mind off yourself and help others. I started to see how everybody else in prison was struggling. And then I started to learn the law because of wanting to know what was going on with my fight. I was starting to show people like, hey, come follow me. This is the way to go. You can’t do it? I’ll help you. In the meantime, you were dominating everything—school and sports.
MMI: I was young and didn’t necessarily understand the fullness of your world. But the older I got, the more clarity I had about the absurd juxtaposition of our places. The same characteristics that were getting me to where I was going were the same characteristics that were allowing you to eventually get to where you were going. Whenever I thought something was hard, I would remember you and be like, I can do this. I was having doors opened for me, and you were having doors constantly closing. But one of the most profound aspects of our juxtaposition raised the question of what does it mean to be human? You see me on this pedestal being praised as a superhuman in a lot of ways, and then you’re in the pit being treated subhuman in so many ways. But the treasure of this story is that I’m not a superhero and you’re not subhuman. We’re equally human and valued.
JI: Wow! Go there, Maya.
MMI: When I got into advocacy work in 2016, there were a lot of hard things happening that summer with Black and brown bodies being killed in front of the world. As a team, the Lynx wore shirts in support of Black Lives Matter reading “Change starts with us” to a press conference before a game. I started to understand that my voice as a public figure could be used to shine a light on that cause and also on your story. … My agent helped me get connected with experts who’ve been in the criminal-justice space for decades. I read books like The New Jim Crow [by Michelle Alexander] and resource materials provided by Bryan Stevenson through his Equal Justice Initiative. I got to talk to some progressive prosecutors who were working through more of a restorative-justice lens. When you’re educated and you have more of a perspective, you have the ability to impact humanity better. When I started speaking about your case publicly, people saw me go through one of the most painful things I’ll ever go through on camera, which was watching the evidence for your innocence be presented with clarity and yet still you were locked away. But we had a good judge at the end of the day who had to do the right thing.
JI: Now we’re a team, and we’re doing the fight together with Win With Justice. Hey, the enemy is in trouble, I’ll tell you right now.
MMI: My journey toward retirement and our new phase together was a figure-it-out-as-you-go journey. Every year, I would address my relationship with basketball, and I finally felt like this was the time to focus on the closure of that dynamic part of my life. With Win With Justice, we help people be better voters when it comes to electing local and state prosecutors. I knew nothing about prosecutors until I started to get educated back in 2016. I was living my life hooping, winning gold medals, but I didn’t know nothing about being a citizen. Maybe a lot of people can relate to going to vote for the president but not knowing who is who in local elections.
JI: We are encouraging people to get into this fight with us, get into this way of life with us. I’m an adviser for a superior-court judge.
I work with other organizations in a consulting role, and I even do some grassroots work for some guys I know who are in prison. I’m also a professional dog trainer. I actually learned how to train dogs in prison through a program they brought in. Dogs have so many healing properties and are empathetic. When I help people make that connection and bridge that gap, it’s such a good thing.
Love and Justice: A Story of Triumph on Two Different Courts
Love and Justice: A Story of Triumph on Two Different Courts
MMI: There’s a role for everyone to play. We’re just trying to give people tools to figure out what role they can play in their community. Not everybody can do everything, but everybody can do something. We wrote Love & Justice because the stories we need the most are about how to find life in dark places. You’ve spoken about how the pain of putting yourself back into those moments to retell your stories was worth it because it had the potential to change lives.
JI: Yeah. I am hoping that this is one of those stories that encourage prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, police officers, regular people on the street, voters, everybody to have a conversation—like hey, oh, wait a minute. We need to pay more attention to the criminal-justice system. We need to pay more attention to people who are getting out of prison because we want to set them up for success and not failure. It was also important to just talk about what happened to me. I know from experience, man, it’s better to talk about the things that burden your heart so they lose power each time. Writing this book together, it was like we were reliving all those intense love-filled moments through a fire hose. It brought us that much closer.
MMI: But just because you are home doesn’t mean it’s been easy. We are still having to deal with the consequences of what happens to people when they are wrongfully and systematically dehumanized for decades. The amount of work that you had to do to get yourself in a healthy place speaks to your courage and diligence and desire to live. But that’s just who you are. You fight to live and
help people around you live.
Ariana Marsh is Harper Bazaar’s senior features editor. Working across print and digital, she covers the arts, culture, fashion, literature, and entertainment—and a bit of everything in between.
