In the fall of 2021, Holden Hughes sat on a couch in the corner of his football coach’s living room, sweating with anxiety. It was the beginning of his freshman year at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, and he was surrounded by a dozen or so new teammates. They’d gathered to watch each other’s high school football reels.
His coach connected a computer to the television, and typed each guy’s name into Google, one by one.
“H-U-G-H-E-S . . . ”
Holden’s heart pounded with each letter the coach punched into the keyboard. All he could think about was whether or not this would be the moment his new teammates would find out about his past.
But when the coach pressed “enter,” all that popped up on the screen were some old football videos. Nothing about an upcoming trial. Nothing about a picture of him that had gone viral in 2020, upending the lives of his entire family.
He let out a sigh of relief—the biggest one of his life so far, he told me. He didn’t have to explain himself. At least not yet.
Throughout college, Hughes carefully guarded his secret—at first never mentioning it, then sharing it with a trusted few, then opening up a little more. Now, having just graduated, he’s ready to tell his story in public for the first time in The Free Press.
That story starts with a photograph, casually snapped in 2017—when he was just 14—and promptly forgotten about.
