Portrait
Chelsea Manning
Born
17 December 1987Crescent, Oklahoma, USA
Whistleblower and activistUnited States

Chelsea Manning

Her disclosure of classified material and her fight for recognition as a trans woman brought military secrecy and individual rights into public debate.

Chelsea Manning was born in Crescent, Oklahoma, in 1987. She grew up in Oklahoma and Wales and joined the US Army in 2007. As an intelligence analyst in Iraq, she gained access to classified military and diplomatic records.

In 2010 she passed a large collection of documents to WikiLeaks, including Iraq and Afghanistan war reports, diplomatic cables and video of a US helicopter attack in Baghdad. The disclosures intensified arguments about civilian deaths, government accountability and the limits of secrecy.

A military court sentenced Manning to 35 years in prison in 2013. The day after sentencing, she publicly announced that she was a woman named Chelsea. While imprisoned, she pursued access to gender-affirming treatment through legal challenges.

President Barack Obama commuted her sentence in January 2017, and she was released that May. She was detained again in 2019 and 2020 for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks. Her memoir “README.txt” appeared in 2022. Manning’s record remains contested, but the debate is more precise when her original disclosures, later detention and struggle for healthcare are considered as distinct events.

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