Chelsea Manning

Brian had joined the United States Navy in 1974, at age 19, and served five years as an intelligence analyst.

He met Susan while stationed in Wales at RAF Brawdy.

Manning has an older sister.

The couple returned to the U.S. in 1979, settling first in California.

After moving near Crescent, Oklahoma, they bought a house with five acres of land, where they kept pigs and chickens.

Manning's sister told the court-martial that both their parents were alcoholics, and that their mother drank continually while pregnant with Chelsea.

Captain David Moulton, a Navy psychiatrist, told the court that Manning's facial features showed signs of fetal alcohol syndrome.

The sister became Manning's principal caregiver, waking at night to prepare the baby's bottle.

The court heard that Manning was fed only milk and baby food until the age of two.

As an adult she reached 5 ft and weighed around 105 lb.

Manning's father took a job as an information technology (IT) manager for a rental car agency, The Hertz Corporation, which required travel.

The family lived several miles out of town, and Manning's mother was unable to drive.

She spent her days drinking, while Manning was left largely to herself playing with Lego toys or on the computer.

Brian stocked up on food before his trips and left signed checks that the sister mailed to pay the bills.

A neighbor said that whenever Manning's elementary school went on field trips, she would give her own son extra food or money so he could make sure Manning had something to eat.

Friends and neighbors considered the Mannings a troubled family.

As a child, Manning was opinionated about the intersection of religion and politics.

For example, she invariably remained silent during the part of the Pledge of Allegiance that makes reference to God.

Chelsea Elizabeth Manning (born Bradley Edward Manning, December 17, 1987) is an American activist and whistleblower.

Born in 1987 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Manning is the second child of Susan Fox, who is Welsh, and Brian Manning, an American.

The material included videos of the July 12, 2007, Baghdad airstrike and the 2009 Granai airstrike in Afghanistan; 251,287 U.S. diplomatic cables; and 482,832 Army reports that came to be known as the "Iraq War Logs" and "Afghan War Diary".

Assigned in 2009 to an Army unit in Iraq as an intelligence analyst, Manning had access to classified databases.

She was imprisoned from 2010 until 2017 when her sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama.

In early 2010, she leaked classified information to WikiLeaks and confided this to Adrian Lamo, an online acquaintance.

Lamo indirectly informed the Army's Criminal Investigation Command, and Manning was arrested in May 2010.

The material was published by WikiLeaks and its media partners between April 2010 and April 2011.

Manning was charged with 22 offenses, including aiding the enemy, which was the most serious charge and could have resulted in a death sentence.

She was held at the Marine Corps Brig, Quantico in Virginia, from July 2010 to April 2011, under Prevention of Injury status—which entailed de facto solitary confinement and other restrictions that caused domestic and international concern —before being transferred to the Joint Regional Correctional Facility at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where she could interact with other detainees.

In a 2011 interview, Manning's father said, "People need to understand that he's a young man that had a happy life growing up."

He also said that Manning excelled at the saxophone, science, and computers, and created a website at the age of 10.

She 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.

A trans woman, Manning said in 2013 that she had a female gender identity since childhood and wanted to be known as Chelsea Manning.

In February 2013 she pleaded guilty to 10 of the charges.

The trial on the remaining charges began on June 3, 2013, and on July 30, she was convicted of 17 of the original charges and amended versions of four others, but acquitted of aiding the enemy.

She was sentenced to 35 years at the maximum-security U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth.

On January 17, 2017, Obama commuted Manning's sentence to nearly seven years of confinement dating from her arrest in May 2010.

After release, Manning makes her living through speaking engagements.

In 2018, Manning challenged incumbent Senator Ben Cardin for the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate election in her home state of Maryland.

She received 6.1% of the vote; Cardin won renomination with 79.2%.

From March 8, 2019, to March 12, 2020 (except for a week from May 9 to 16), Manning was jailed for contempt and fined $256,000 for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.