In the Netflix film “No Limit,” viewers are told that what they’re about to see was “inspired by real events.” For many, those “real events” were clearly the complicated lives of the elite freedivers Audrey Mestre and Francisco Ferreras; the film even portrays a drowning nearly identical to the circumstances around Mestre’s 2002 death. Ferreras certainly believed it was based on them, because he sued Netflix for defamation, claiming the film falsely implies that he murdered Mestre, his wife. (Ferreras has never been charged with a crime in connection with Mestre’s death.) That Ferreras would one day see himself depicted in a Netflix movie is not terribly surprising. By his own (generous) count, during the peak of his career, Ferreras set more than 20 freediving world records, and he treated virtually every dive as an occasion to burnish his legend, chatting up journalists and appearing on camera whenever possible. Libel-in-fiction lawsuits are hard to win, but Ferreras’s case against Netflix appeared strong. Yet he had his own storytelling problems to contend with. Trailed for more than 20 years by questions about what exactly he did or didn’t do during Mestre’s last dive, Ferreras had provided answers that could seem evasive and self-serving. His lawsuit would hinge less on its legal merit than on his willingness to acknowledge certain painful gaps between his preferred narrative of his life and its observable facts. Ferreras often found this impossible. FEATURES THIS WEEK’S COVER
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FROM THE ARCHIVES Second ChancesBack in 2018, Reginald Dwayne Betts, who wrote a story for the magazine this week about his attempt to come to grips with his gun charge as a teenager, described his efforts to become an attorney as an ex-convict: Prison has always been the distance between the world and me, but that distance didn’t matter until I realized it also became the distance between me and my sons. Terese and I had never discussed when we might tell them — yet we expected to dictate that when. But we hadn’t. Everything Micah had known about me had collapsed into a word: jail. I didn’t know if I was O.K. but was certain that he couldn’t be. Micah, this is what happened. And I explained, though not everything. Instead of a pistol and a man being told to “get the [expletive] out” of the car and then prison and the rest, it was just: I stole a car and went to jail. He asked me how long. When I told him eight years, I could see in his eyes that he was struggling with what it meant for me to have been in prison longer than he’d been alive. Eight years. “But don’t bad people go to jail, Daddy?” Micah’s voice sounded like the air whistling out of a balloon. I was a first-year law student, explaining how prison, how crime, was never just about being bad. I also recognized that conversations about criminal-justice reform and the new Jim Crow were convenient ways to avoid admitting I’d pulled a gun on a man without a good reason. I wondered if there was room for me to escape being characterized as bad by the 6-year-old boy who first made me feel free. COMMENT OF THE WEEK Like Tactical Pants? Try a Purse!From Fidomom on this week’s On Language column on “tactical” gear: My husband insists the pants he wears all the time are certainly not cargo pants, but are “tactical pants.” I find that amusing, so I just call them “purse pants” because he carries all his stuff in the pockets like I carry mine in my purse. That’s all for this week. Email us at magazine@nytimes.com with your thoughts, questions and feedback. Stay in touch: Like this email? Forward it to a friend and help us grow. Loved a story? Hated it? Write us a letter at magazine@nytimes.com. Did a friend forward this to you? Sign up here to get the magazine newsletter.
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