Chelsea Elizabeth Manning was born on Bradley Edward Manning, December 17,1987 and is an American activist and whistleblower.
138 Facts About Chelsea Manning
2.
Chelsea Manning is a former United States Army soldier who was convicted by court-martial in July 2013 of violations of the Espionage Act and other offenses, after disclosing to WikiLeaks nearly 750,000 classified, or unclassified but sensitive, military and diplomatic documents.
3.
Chelsea Manning was imprisoned from 2010 until 2017 when her sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama.
4.
Chelsea Manning was charged with 22 offenses, including aiding the enemy, which was the most serious charge and could have resulted in a death sentence.
5.
Chelsea Manning pleaded guilty in February 2013 to 10 of the charges.
6.
Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years at the maximum-security US Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth.
7.
In 2018, Chelsea Manning challenged incumbent Senator Ben Cardin for the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate election in her home state of Maryland.
8.
From March 8,2019, to March 12,2020, Chelsea Manning was jailed for contempt and fined $256,000 for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
9.
The court heard that Chelsea Manning was fed only milk and baby food until the age of two.
10.
Chelsea Manning's father took a job as an information technology manager for a rental car agency, The Hertz Corporation, which required travel.
11.
The family lived several miles out of town, and Chelsea Manning's mother was unable to drive.
12.
Chelsea Manning spent her days drinking, while Manning was left largely to herself playing with Lego toys or on the computer.
13.
Chelsea Manning learned how to use PowerPoint, won the grand prize three years in a row at the local science fair, and in sixth grade, took top prize at a statewide quiz bowl.
14.
Susan's instability continued, and in 1998 she attempted suicide; Chelsea Manning's sister drove their mother to the hospital, with the 11-year-old Chelsea Manning sitting in the back of the car trying to make sure their mother was still breathing.
15.
Chelsea Manning's father remarried in 2000, the same year as his divorce.
16.
The only American, and viewed as effeminate, Chelsea Manning became the target of bullying at school.
17.
Chelsea Manning had come out to a few friends as gay back in Oklahoma, but was not open about it at school in Wales.
18.
Chelsea Manning moved in with her father, then living in Oklahoma City with his second wife and her child.
19.
Chelsea Manning landed employment as a developer for the software company Zoto.
20.
Chelsea Manning's boss told The Washington Post that on a few occasions Manning had "just locked up" and would simply sit and stare, and in the end, communication became too difficult.
21.
Chelsea Manning drove to Tulsa in a pickup truck her father had given her, at first slept in it, then moved in with a friend from school.
22.
Chelsea Manning moved on to Chicago before running out of money and again having nowhere to stay.
23.
Chelsea Manning's mother arranged for Brian's sister, Debra, a lawyer in Potomac, Maryland, to take Manning in.
24.
Chelsea Manning had a boyfriend, took several low-paid jobs, and spent a semester studying history and English at Montgomery College but left after failing an exam.
25.
Chelsea Manning's father spent weeks in late 2007 asking her to consider joining the Army.
26.
Chelsea Manning told her Army supervisor later that she had hoped joining such a masculine environment would resolve her gender dysphoria.
27.
Chelsea Manning began basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, on October 2,2007.
28.
Chelsea Manning wrote that she soon realized she was neither physically nor mentally prepared for it.
29.
Chelsea Manning was allegedly being bullied, and in the opinion of another soldier, was having a breakdown.
30.
Nicks writes that Chelsea Manning was reprimanded while at Fort Huachuca for posting three video messages to friends on YouTube, in which she described the inside of the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility where she worked.
31.
Chelsea Manning visited Boston University's "hackerspace" workshop, known as "Builds", and met its founder, David House, the MIT researcher who was later allowed to visit her in jail.
32.
In November 2009, Chelsea Manning wrote to a gender counselor in the United States, said she felt female and discussed having surgery.
33.
The counselor told Steve Fishman of New York magazine in 2011 that it was clear Chelsea Manning was in crisis, partly because of her gender concerns, but because she was opposed to the kind of war in which she found herself involved.
34.
Chelsea Manning's working conditions included 14- to 15-hour night shifts in a tightly packed, dimly lit room.
35.
On December 20,2009, during a counseling session with two colleagues to discuss her poor time-keeping, Chelsea Manning was told she would lose her one day off a week for persistent lateness.
36.
Chelsea Manning responded by overturning a table, damaging a computer that was sitting on it.
37.
Chelsea Manning said her first contact with WikiLeaks took place in January 2010, when she began to interact with them on IRC and Jabber.
38.
Chelsea Manning had first noticed them toward the end of November 2009, when they posted 570,000 pager messages from the September 11 attacks.
39.
On January 5,2010, Chelsea Manning downloaded the 400,000 documents that became known as the Iraq War logs.
40.
Chelsea Manning saved the material on CD-RW and smuggled it through security by labeling the CD-RW media "Lady Gaga" and storing it in a Gaga CD case.
41.
Chelsea Manning was lipsyncing to Lady Gaga music, to make it appear that she was using the classified computer's CD player to listen to music.
42.
In 2021, Chelsea Manning said that while home on leave in 2010, she had reached out to her then-Congressman, Chris Van Hollen, but got no response.
43.
Chelsea Manning contacted The Washington Post and The New York Times to ask whether they were interested in the material; the Post reporter did not sound interested, and the Times did not return the call.
44.
Chelsea Manning told the court that, during her interaction with WikiLeaks on IRC and Jabber, she developed a friendship with someone there, believed to be Julian Assange, which she said made her feel she could be herself.
45.
Chelsea Manning wrote in a statement that the more she had tried to fit in at work, the more alienated she became from everyone around her.
46.
Chelsea Manning attached a photograph of herself dressed as a woman and with the filename breanna.
47.
Chelsea Manning's supervisor removed the bolt from her weapon, making it unable to fire, and she was sent to work in the supply office, although at this point her security clearance remained in place.
48.
The New York Times wrote in December 2010 that the US government was trying to discover whether Assange had been a passive recipient of material from Chelsea Manning, or had encouraged or helped her to extract the files; if the latter, Assange could be charged with conspiracy.
49.
Chelsea Manning told Lamo in May 2010 that she had developed a working relationship with Assange, communicating directly with him using an encrypted Internet conferencing service, but knew little about him.
50.
Nicks writes that it seemed as though Chelsea Manning wanted to be caught.
51.
Chelsea Manning was responsible for the "Cablegate" leak of 251,287 State Department cables, written by 271 American embassies and consulates in 180 countries, dated December 1966 to February 2010.
52.
Chelsea Manning was accused of being the source of the Guantanamo Bay files leak, obtained by WikiLeaks in 2010 and published by The New York Times and The Guardian in April 2011.
53.
Chelsea Manning said she gave WikiLeaks a video, in late March 2010, of the Granai airstrike in Afghanistan.
54.
On May 20,2010, Chelsea Manning contacted Adrian Lamo, a former "grey hat" hacker convicted in 2004 of having accessed The New York Times computer network two years earlier without permission.
55.
Chelsea Manning said he was unable to decrypt them but replied anyway and invited the emailer to chat on AOL IM.
56.
Chelsea Manning introduced herself as an Army intelligence analyst, and within 17 minutes, without waiting for a reply, alluded to the leaks.
57.
Chelsea Manning added "the one below that is mine too"; the section below in the same article referred to the leak of the Baghdad airstrike video.
58.
Chelsea Manning said she felt isolated and fragile, and was reaching out to someone she hoped might understand.
59.
Chelsea Manning told Lamo she had recognized that the messages came from an NSA database and that seeing them had made her feel comfortable about stepping forward.
60.
Chelsea Manning said the incident that had affected her the most was when 15 detainees had been arrested by the Iraqi Federal Police for printing anti-Iraqi literature.
61.
Chelsea Manning was asked by the Army to find out who the "bad guys" were, and discovered that the detainees had followed what Manning said was a corruption trail within the Iraqi cabinet.
62.
Chelsea Manning reported this to her commanding officer, but said "he didn't want to hear any of it"; she said the officer told her to help the Iraqi police find more detainees.
63.
Shortly after the first chat with Chelsea Manning, Lamo discussed the information with Chet Uber of the volunteer group Project Vigilant, which researches cybercrime, and with Timothy Webster, a friend who had worked in Army counterintelligence.
64.
Chelsea Manning's friend informed the Army's Criminal Investigation Command, and Lamo was contacted by CID agents shortly thereafter.
65.
Chelsea Manning told them he believed Manning was endangering lives.
66.
Chelsea Manning was largely ostracized by the hacker community afterwards.
67.
Chelsea Manning met with the FBI again that day, at which point they told him Manning had been arrested in Iraq the day before.
68.
Chelsea Manning was arrested by the Army's Criminal Investigation Command, on May 27,2010, and transferred four days later to Camp Arifjan in Kuwait.
69.
Chelsea Manning was charged with several offenses in July, replaced by 22 charges in March 2011, including violations of Articles 92 and 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and of the Espionage Act.
70.
Chelsea Manning was moved from Kuwait to the Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, on July 29,2010, and classified as a maximum custody detainee with Prevention of Injury status.
71.
Chelsea Manning was required to remain visible at all times, including at night, which entailed no access to sheets, no pillow except one built into her mattress, and a blanket designed not to be shredded.
72.
Chelsea Manning's lawyer said the guards behaved professionally and had not tried to harass or embarrass Manning.
73.
Chelsea Manning was allowed to walk for up to one hour a day, meals were taken in the cell, and she was shackled during visits.
74.
On January 18,2011, after Chelsea Manning had an altercation with the guards, the commander of Quantico classified her as a suicide risk.
75.
Chelsea Manning's lawyer said Manning joked to the guards that, if she wanted to harm herself, she could do so with her underwear or her flip-flops.
76.
The comment resulted in Chelsea Manning's being ordered to strip naked in her cell that night and sleep without clothing.
77.
Juan E Mendez, United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture, told The Guardian that the US government's treatment of Manning was "cruel, inhuman and degrading".
78.
An Article 32 hearing, presided over by Lieutenant Colonel Paul Almanza, was convened on December 16,2011, at Fort Meade, Maryland; the hearing resulted in Almanza's recommending that Chelsea Manning be referred to a general court-martial.
79.
Chelsea Manning was arraigned on February 23,2012, and declined to enter a plea.
80.
Chelsea Manning's lawyers argued that the government had overstated the harm the release of the documents had caused and had overcharged Chelsea Manning to force her to give evidence against Assange.
81.
The judge, Army Colonel Denise Lind, ruled in January 2013 that any sentence would be reduced by 112 days because of the treatment Chelsea Manning received at Quantico.
82.
Chelsea Manning said that, in leaking the material, Manning had been "acting out [a] grandiose ideation".
83.
Well, Pfc Chelsea Manning was under the impression that his leaked information was going to really change how the world views the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and future wars, actually.
84.
The government asked for 60 years as a deterrent to others, while Chelsea Manning's lawyer asked for no more than 25 years.
85.
Chelsea Manning was given credit for 1,293 days of pretrial confinement, including 112 days for her treatment at Quantico, and would have been eligible for parole after serving one-third of the sentence.
86.
Chelsea Manning was confined at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
87.
The petition contended that Chelsea Manning's disclosures did not cause any "real damage", and that the documents in question did not merit protection as they were not sensitive.
88.
The request included a supporting letter from Amnesty International which said that Chelsea Manning's leaks had exposed violations of human rights.
89.
In November 2016, Chelsea Manning made a formal petition to President Obama to reduce her 35-year sentence to the six years of time she had already served.
90.
In January 2017, a Justice Department source said that Chelsea Manning was on President Obama's short list for a possible commutation.
91.
On January 26,2017, in her first column for The Guardian since the commutation, Chelsea Manning lamented that President Obama's political opponents consistently refused to compromise, resulting in "very few permanent accomplishments" during his time in office.
92.
Chelsea Manning was released from Fort Leavenworth's detention center at approximately 2 am Central Time on May 17,2017.
93.
In February 2019, Chelsea Manning received a subpoena to testify in a US government case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the existence of which had been accidentally revealed in November 2018, which was proceeding under prosecutors in Virginia.
94.
On March 8,2019, Chelsea Manning was found in contempt of court and jailed in the women's wing of a detention center in Alexandria, Virginia, with the judge conditioning her release on her testifying or the grand jury concluding its work.
95.
Chelsea Manning was initially held in administrative segregation for 28 days until she was placed in the general population on April 5,2019.
96.
Chelsea Manning's supporters described her period in administrative segregation as "effective solitary confinement" as it involved "up to 22 hours each day spent in isolation".
97.
Chelsea Manning again refused to testify, stating that she "believe[d] this grand jury seeks to undermine the integrity of public discourse with the aim of punishing those who expose any serious, ongoing, and systemic abuses of power by this government".
98.
On December 30,2019, United Nations special rapporteur Nils Melzer released a letter dated November 1,2019 in which he accused the US government of torturing Chelsea Manning, called for her immediate release, and called for her court fines to be canceled or reimbursed.
99.
On March 11,2020, Chelsea Manning attempted suicide two days before she was scheduled to appear before a judge on a motion to terminate sanctions.
100.
Alexandria Sheriff Dana Lawhorne reported that Chelsea Manning was safe and her lawyers said she was recovering in a hospital.
101.
Since Chelsea Manning's testimony was no longer needed, the judge found that detention no longer served any coercive purpose, and ordered her released.
102.
Chelsea Manning denied a request by Manning's lawyers to vacate her accrued fines of $256,000, which he ordered due and payable immediately.
103.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald argued that Chelsea Manning was the most important whistleblower since Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971.
104.
In 2011, Chelsea Manning was awarded a "Whistleblowerpreis" by the German Section of the International Association of Lawyers against Nuclear Arms and the Federation of German Scientists.
105.
In 2015, Paper magazine commissioned artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg to create 2D DNA phenotype portraits of Chelsea Manning using DNA collected from cheek swabs and hair clippings sent to the artist from the incarcerated soldier.
106.
In September 2017, Chelsea Manning accepted the EFF Pioneer Award in recognition of her actions as a whistleblower and for her work as an advocate for government transparency and transgender rights.
107.
In December, Foreign Policy honored Chelsea Manning as one of its forty-eight 2017 Global Thinkers "for forcing the United States to question who is a traitor and who is a hero".
108.
Chelsea Manning sought hormone therapy and the right to live as a woman while confined, consistent with her gender dysphoria, which had been confirmed by two Army medical specialists.
109.
Chelsea Manning sued to be allowed to grow her hair longer and use cosmetics, and to receive hormone treatments "to express her female gender".
110.
In January 2017, Chelsea Manning wrote to The New York Times that although months had passed, she had still not seen a surgeon.
111.
Chelsea Manning subsequently stated via her verified Twitter account that her healthcare from the military had stopped on May 16,2017, and that she had secured a private health plan.
112.
Chelsea Manning said her gender transition while in prison had cost "only $600 over 2 years", explaining that the Department of Defense "got meds at a markdown".
113.
On October 20,2018, Chelsea Manning tweeted a photograph of herself in a hospital bed reportedly recovering from gender reassignment surgery.
114.
In March 2015, Bloomberg News reported that Chelsea Manning could be visited by only those she had named before her imprisonment, and not by journalists.
115.
Chelsea Manning was not allowed to browse the web, but could consult print news and have access to new gender theory texts.
116.
Chelsea Manning denied being harassed by other inmates and claimed some had become confidantes.
117.
In February 2015, Katharine Viner, editor-in-chief of Guardian US, announced that Chelsea Manning had joined The Guardian as a contributing opinion writer on war, gender, and freedom of information.
118.
On July 5,2016, Chelsea Manning was taken to a hospital after a suicide attempt.
119.
On July 28,2016, the ACLU announced that Chelsea Manning was under investigation and facing several possible charges related to her suicide attempt.
120.
Chelsea Manning was not allowed to have legal representation at the disciplinary hearing for these charges.
121.
Chelsea Manning used a selfie from 2008 to accompany the article.
122.
In November 2016, Chelsea Manning disclosed that she made a second suicide attempt on October 4,2016, on the first night of her solitary confinement.
123.
On September 9,2016, Chelsea Manning began a hunger strike to protest what she described as her being bullied by prison authorities and the US government.
124.
On September 13,2017, Chelsea Manning was named a visiting fellow at Harvard University.
125.
On September 15,2017, Douglas Elmendorf, dean of the Kennedy School, announced that Chelsea Manning had been invited to spend only a single day at the school and that her title of visiting fellow did not convey a special honor.
126.
However, I now think that designating Chelsea Manning as a Visiting Fellow was a mistake, for which I accept responsibility.
127.
On September 22,2017, Chelsea Manning was denied entry to Canada from the United States because of her criminal record.
128.
Chelsea Manning said she would retain a Canadian lawyer to challenge the inadmissibility finding before a Canadian tribunal.
129.
On January 11,2018, Chelsea Manning filed with the Federal Election Commission to run for the US Senate in Maryland.
130.
On January 18, Chelsea Manning filed with the Maryland State Board of Elections to challenge the state's senior senator, two-term incumbent Ben Cardin, as a Democrat in the June 26,2018, primary election.
131.
On June 26,2018, Chelsea Manning finished second among eight Democrats vying for their party's US Senate nomination in Maryland's primary election.
132.
Shortly after the polls closed, Chelsea Manning posted a statement on her campaign website.
133.
On January 20,2018, Chelsea Manning attended "A Night for Freedom" hosted by far-right social media personality Mike Cernovich at the nightclub FREQ in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan.
134.
Chelsea Manning repeated her intentions to gain information about the alt-right, but apologised to her supporters who felt betrayed.
135.
Chelsea Manning arranging Manning's speaking tour said it would appeal the decision, taken under s501 of the Migration Act, which authorizes a minister to refuse a visa on character grounds.
136.
The Department of Home Affairs specified that Chelsea Manning did not pass the character test because of her "substantial criminal record".
137.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern defended the New Zealand Government's decision to allow Chelsea Manning entry, stating that "we are a nation that allows free speech".
138.
Chelsea Manning said it would be primarily a personal narrative that would not relitigate the facts of her case.