Chelsea Elizabeth Manning was born in 1987 as Bradley Edward Manning.
But what she is best known for, is when she became an activist and a whistleblower, providing WikiLeaks with unclassified, but sensitive data about the U.S. military and diplomatic documents.
It all began in 2007, when she joined the Army, in the hopes to gain a college education, and perhaps to study for a PhD in physics. She also told her superior that she hoped that by joining the Army, the masculine environment would resolve her gender identity disorder.
But since she was not prepared physically nor mentally, she was bullied.
Because the decision to discharge her was revoked, she started basic training again in January 2008. She managed to graduate successfully, and later moved to Arizona, working as intelligence analyst.
It was during this time, that Manning received a TS/SCI security clearance (Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information). This allows her to have access to some classified information and the government papers as well as documents.
It was on January 2010, that Manning made her first contact with WikiLeaks.
Manning reached the international non-profit organization that publishes news leaks and classified media provided by anonymous sources, through IRC and Jabber.
At first, it was Manning who commented that WikiLeaks' 25 November 2009 post about the 570,000 messages were from an NSA database. Among the released messages, include communications between Pentagon officials and New York City Police Department.
On January 5, 2010, Manning downloaded 400,000 documents that were later known as the 'Iraq War Logs'. Then on January 8, she downloaded another 91,000 documents from the Afghanistan database, known later as part of the Afghan War Logs. She saved and burned the data to a CD-RW, and smuggled it out of the office by labeling the disk with a written "Lady Gaga."
After arriving home, she copied the entire disk into her laptop's hard drive . She then copied the files to an SD card for better mobility.
Realizing that what she did is a criminal act, Manning disguised herself as a woman, by wearing a wig and a makeup.
At first, she contacted both The Washington Post and The New York Times, asking them if there were interested in the material. But since none of them showed interest, she gave it to WikiLeaks.
She sent all the data she stored in the SD card to WikiLeaks through the Tor network.
A month later, she sent WikiLeaks a diplomatic cable, dated January 13, 2010, from the U.S. Embassy in Reykjavík, Iceland.
During this time, Manning believed that she developed a personal connection with someone at WikiLeaks, believed to be WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
While she kept most of her secrets herself, she confided what she did to Adrian Lamo, her friend, a former grey hat hacker.
Manning told Lamo what she had signed up to YouTube and Twitter with the name Breanna in order to give her a female identity on the internet.
"I wouldn't mind going to prison for the rest of my life [for leaking information], or being executed so much, if it wasn't for the possibility of having pictures of me [...] plastered all over the world press [...] as [a] boy [...] the CPU is not made for this motherboard".
It was Lamo who indirectly informed the Army's Criminal Investigation Command.
Manning was then arrested in 2010.
In all, the materials she leaked include videos of the July 12, 2007, Baghdad airstrike and the 2009 Granai airstrike in Afghanistan; 251,287 U.S. diplomatic cables; and 482,832 of the Army's Iraq War Logs.
She 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 then convicted of 17 of the original charges and amended versions of four others, but was acquitted of aiding the enemy.
While she was supposed to serve 35 years at the maximum-security U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, on January 17, 2017, President Barack Obama commuted Manning's sentence to nearly seven years of confinement dating from her arrest on May 27, 2010.
On October 20, 2018, Manning tweeted a selfie, showing herself in a hospital, reportedly recovering from gender reassignment surgery.
Manning was fined $256,000, and again in jail for about a year for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
On March 2022, it was reported that Manning and musician Grimes is in a relationship.
The alleged relationship between the two started spreading soon after Grimes breaks up with billionaire Elon Musk.