The Holdout

by Graham Moore

There wasn’t a cause in this world so pure that someone couldn’t figure out how to make it profitable.

Time, Maya thought, had the strangest technique for smoothing old rivalries. Rather than gestating apologies, the years fomented a false nostalgia. It made them wistful for what had likely been the most miserable time of their lives.

If you want to get someone to confess, don’t ask them about whether or not they committed the crime. Treat their guilt as a foregone conclusion; as if the pressing issue is what’s to be done about it.

When was the last time that Jae had seen a movie where the hero was a businessman? Where the guy who built something from nothing wasn’t a criminal poisoning the groundwater, but dredging wells in a once-arid stretch of desert? How come Hollywood never made those movies? He was pretty sure he knew why. Because the Hollywood liberals, up on those hidden cliffs above Beverly Hills, felt so ashamed about the poor people nearby that they locked themselves away in their mansions and made movies that glorified the very victimhood that they couldn’t stand to be near.

Every day in this city, someone murdered. Every hour someone raped. Every minute someone stole.

this need for vindication had become the mire of their whole petty country. Every day, they woke up fervently hoping for the headline that would prove, definitively, that their guys were the virtuous ones and the other guys were the absolute worst. But news of that certainty would forever elude them. Every new revelation that seemed to damn the people with whom they disagreed would be followed by a new rationalization. For every failed prediction, there would come a mitigating circumstance. They would double down on their most weakly held convictions because the alternative felt unbearable, and the bums across the aisle would follow suit. She wanted to say that the only thing worse than being wrong was having a bottomless need to prove that you never were.

I was one of those two initial guilty votes. Which meant that I had spent two days convincing a group of strangers to send a man whom none of us had ever met to jail for the rest of his life. It’s been nearly thirteen years. And I still think about what I did every day. I remain confident that our verdict was right. I sure hope that it was right. But every now and then, late at night as I lay in bed struggling to sleep, I can’t help but become overwhelmed with terror: What if we were wrong? In these past thirteen years, I finally finished that novel I’d been writing. It became a bestseller. I wrote two more. I wrote the screenplay for a film and won an Academy Award. I married a terrific woman, got a wonderful dog, had a delightful son. In every way that matters, my life has worked out pretty well. And yet right now, as I’m writing this, there is a man sitting in jail because of me. Because I voted to send him there. The Holdout is my attempt to come to terms with what happened thirteen years ago. It is, I need to emphasize, fiction.