Chelsea Manning Posts First Photo As A Woman After Prison Release

Chelsea Manning, formerly Bradley Manning, posted her first photo of herself as a woman, after being released from military prison.

CHELSEA MANNING POSTS FIRST PHOTO AS A WOMAN

Manning was released on Wednesday after serving seven years at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. She had been convicted under the Espionage and Computer Fraud and Abuse Acts for her involvement in the releasing of roughly 750,000 documents to WikiLeaks. She was originally sentenced to serve 35 years in prison. President Barack Obama commuted Manning’s sentence to time served just three days before leaving office.

In her letter to Obama, she wrote about being held in solitary confinement for much of her time in prison. “The Army kept me in solitary confinement for nearly a year before formal charges were brought against me. It was a humiliating and degrading experience — one that altered my mind, body and spirit,” she said. “I have since been placed in solitary confinement as a disciplinary measure for an attempted suicide despite a growing effort — led by the President of the United States — to stop the use of solitary confinement for any purpose.”

Days after her sentencing, Manning came out as transgender and, at first, the military would not provide any treatment. After getting the ACLU involved, “we negotiated with the military and Chelsea was provided with cosmetics, grooming items available to other women in custody and hormone therapy,” according to her lawyer Chase Strangio.

Manning has been updating her followers on Twitter about her release date, and today she posted a photo of herself to her social media accounts, the first of her as a woman. “Okay, so here I am everyone!! =P” she captioned the picture, with the hashtag #helloworld.

Okay, so here I am everyone!! ? . CC-BY-SA! . #HelloWorld

A post shared by Chelsea E. Manning (@xychelsea87) on May 18, 2017 at 9:55am PDT

In addition, film director Tim Travers Hawkins announced a new documentary about Manning’s story, entitled XY Chelsea. “I knew when I began making this film it was likely that I would never be able to film Chelsea directly,” Hawkins told ABC. “Chelsea herself said to me that she was ‘a documentary-makers worst nightmare’. But I felt the fact that Chelsea was invisible to us made it even more important to get her voice and her story out into the world.”