Lawrence Noor’s Facebook page

When police said they arrested him, the victim was too traumatized to testify. But the prosecution kept him in jail for the next three months.

It was during this time that Noor says he started to wonder: “Are they going to tell me the truth?”

At his trial, however, a grand jury indicted Noor in November 2013, three months after all the arrests were made.

The next hearing on June 3 is for his appeal, which Noor says he’ll take as soon as he can. When I ask his attorney if she thinks she can convince a court that the charges should be dismissed, she looks confused. “That’s a question that we’ll have to ask the judge,” she says.

“He is free to go now,” says his brother.

“But why can’t we go home?” I ask.

***

When two years ago Noor stopped attending church, he was asked if he wanted to stop living in the dorms. He had already moved a few times in these years and was no longer sure that he wanted to stay.

He agreed, though.

Two things have changed lately in his life. First, he started dating a woman named Jessica, who has a PhD from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She came to visit my sister in New Orleans in March 2014. She was wearing a floral shirt and jeans, her hair long, and she was wearing her new hijab.

She was a former student at the school and had not been involved in any school activity except social media, but she started attending the weekly weekly prayer meeting at her apartment. (I was told that the woman who took the photos for Buzzfeed—an Iranian journalist who was in New York that day—had told her that Noor had been at the prayer meeting and was asked to move to a new unit.) She told me about her experience, explaining that when Noor came to the prayer meeting, he sat by her bed and prayed aloud.

It took Jessica about two weeks to realize that she wanted Noor to be with her, too.

“I was really surprised. I feel completely different with my boyfriend and her,” Noor told me. “It’s very easy to just be normal in church, but to have her take that and go this far is totally different.”

The woman she is dating is