This program me contains some strong language and scenes which some viewers may find upsetting
Do you want to tell me about where we are?
Er... I mean we're in Bushwick. Bushwick in Brooklyn.
So, this is where you sometimes deejay?
Yeah. So we'll be speaking in here. Yeah.
We're using the space because there's not
a lot of room, like, where I live. Where you live?
I'm sorry that I missed Night Of 1,000 Britneys.
Actually, that's coming up.
Do you think the real Britney will be there? Probably not.
But does it matter... 1,000s... ..if it's in your heart?
Are you a Britney fan? I like Britney. Yeah.
Who else do you like? You got Cardi B, You've got Charli XCX.
Charlie XCX is from London, I think.
Yeah, I believe so. # After the after party... #
Exactly. Do you know that one? Yeah.
# We're gonna keep it going... # I played that before.
You left me hanging there. I thought you might join in.
I felt very alone. You're going to be very alone!
Chelsea Manning is arguably the most famous military
whistleblower in American history.
We're quite close, aren't we? Are you OK?
I'm just conscious that if you should feel that you want to... Optics. ..put your knees forward...
An intelligence analyst turned activist, who served seven
years for her leaks of classified information,
she'd agreed to a rare in-depth interview.
Thank you for doing this.
Doing what? This interview. Oh, yeah. It was on the calendar, so...
It's on the calendar because you agreed to do it.
Yeah.
I've got a high tolerance for awkwardness,
but yours is off the charts. Explain.
Well, you seemed to be more comfortable sitting in silence.
You're even better at it than I am.
I've done it for a long, long, long time.
Way longer than you can imagine, Louis.
What do you mean? Like, I'm older than you.
I've had way more practice than you.
I was in solitary confinement, and that's all that was,
me sitting there in silence.
I can just sit in silence for hours and hours and hours.
Across the river from Brooklyn, in Manhattan, Chelsea was
showing me her favourite city, using her favourite mode of transport.
So... Just like your foot on the gas.
It's pressure sensitive. Yeah.
RINGS BELL
That's it. Getting a workout.
Chelsea's lived in New York since 2020,
working in data security, doing talks and deejaying,
rebuilding a life that for years was in turmoil in the wake of her leaks.
How are you feeling, in general?
Oh, this is a great year so far. Is it? Yeah.
This is the first year where I feel like we're actually back to
normal from the sort of chaos. Mm.
The war in Iraq had been in its seventh year when Chelsea,
an intelligence analyst going by her birth name Bradley,
was arrested for espionage and detained after sending a vast
trove of documents to the website WikiLeaks.
It is shameful that it was ever released to WikiLeaks.
It is even more shameful that it's then been public...
...published for all the world to see.
It is probably the single greatest act and most terrible
act of espionage against the United States in our history.
Published by WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, it revealed
the inside story of military misdeeds and political corruption.
Chelsea was sentenced to 35 years in prison, transitioning behind bars.
No justice, no peace!
Manning is a hero of our generation.
After widespread protests, her sentence was commuted.
Chelsea Manning, welcome to Democracy Now. Thanks for having me.
A hero to some, to others a traitor...
I think if you give up secrets that impact our military
when they're operating in a war zone, you have to be punished.
...Chelsea remains controversial.
I was hoping to understand the meaning
and true cost of her decisions.
You've got coffee in there.
I do have coffee in here.
Now, I'm jealous.
Yeah, this is my coffee. How does it taste?
How does it taste? Amazing!
Brewed to perfection by an expert.
You were twice passed over to be assistant manager of a Starbucks.
I was. It's been a while.
And it struck me that if only you'd got the job,
your whole future might have been different.
Maybe. I don't know.
Why were you passed over?
I guess just, uh...
I mean, I was 18 years old, so I imagine...
They thought you were too raw. Maybe. You didn't burn the beans?
No, I didn't.
I didn't burn the beans.
Are we rolling, by the way? Everything's good?
Alpha, take one.
I'm conscious that, you know,
in getting to know you a little bit, you present as someone robust
with integrity, someone who's not afraid of speaking her mind. Right.
And that behind that, there is also a degree of vulnerability.
Is that fair? I mean, I've seen you in interviews,
seem to be ticking along and then you'll be overtaken by emotion.
Yeah. Yeah, it happens from time to time.
Is that something we need to keep an eye on as we talk?
No, I...
I think...
I think it's good. I think it's good.
I think it's good to be able to, you know, let yourself go
and let that tenderness that's inside of you out.
OK. If we sort of zoom out
and start digging into your story. At the point when you enlisted,
right, 2007, was it? 2007, yeah. October.
You were living with your aunt in Maryland.
And at that time you were identifying as, I guess,
as a gay man. Is that fair to say? Yeah.
That was what I knew, so like, figured out about myself, yeah.
One of the quotes you've given is that in enlisting in the Army,
you thought it might deal with some of your agenda.
Sure. I had known... You might "man up" was the quote. Exactly.
That was what my father was telling me.
He was insisting on me manning up.
I think you were aware that you were trans, or might be trans.
A little bit, yeah. And that... I hadn't seen a... I hadn't really talked to a therapist about it.
I was scared that my family would reject me.
The war had been going on in Iraq for four years and I think it's
safe to say, non-controversially, that it had been a total disaster.
As an intelligent person, did it not seem to you that this is a bankrupt
enterprise, like, you know, the idea of foisting democracy on llraq...
No. ..that this is hopeless?
In a sense, that's what kind of attracted me to it.
At 19, 20 years... No, everyone was telling me,
yeah, this is what you should do.
So I viewed this as like, yes, absolutely, doing something
to defend my country, defend my community, protect...
You know, protect my fellow citizens was very important to me.
I suppose we should paint the picture a bit.
2007708, there's a training process.
You are going through the drills... Yeah.
...and you're being prepped to become an intelligence analyst.
And then come 2009, you're deployed, right, to Iraq to a base called...
Hammer. They call it Hammer.
I mean, this is where the kind of the rubber hits the road, I suppose,
in the sense that your work involved
analysing huge amounts of data, right?
Essentially, my job, it's what we would call now data science.
So, my job is to collect gigantic amounts of information.
Videos, combat reports... Yeah.
And sort it, design and develop these models, right?
In order for troops and the higher- ups to get kind of as accurate
as possible assessment of how people are going to behave, how the
insurgency will unfold, and sort of where risks are and whatnot?
Yeah. It's sort of like hitting the enhance button on a photograph
and then it gets sharper and sharper and sharper.
And so that was essentially our role was to
have as sharp a picture of what is going to happen
and how we can adjust operations and change that picture.
You, at your little computer station in your ply board box,
you know, east of Baghdad,
you have all this vast array of information at your fingertips. Yeah, defence-related.
How are you finding the experience of being there, on a human level?
The experience of this job? Yeah.
I didn't think about it much for a bit.
You were kind of knuckling down and doing the work?
Were you beginning to think this isn't a good fit for me, were you beginning to think...?
No, I thought, I'm perfect for this.
Mm-hm. I am the best at this.
When I'm doing this stuff and I get really into it,
I start to see the math problems right in front of me, like
I thought of myself as trying to solve the war in Iraq through math.
What do you mean by that?
How do I alter the model to have the most optimal outcome?
And as I'm going through this work, it dawns on me that this
model in my head, that this
sea of information that I'm working with, is tied to real people.
And the more emotionally affected that I felt by everything,
the more work I would do. I couldn't stop thinking about it.
I couldn't stop doing the stuff.
The work was not just staying in the office,
it was coming with me to the dining facility and to my...
Into my dreams.
It was creeping into every aspect of my psyche and in my life.
I started to come to the realisation that this is a human problem
and not a statistical one.
One piece of material Chelsea saw was a video, later titled
Collateral Murder.
It showed an air to ground attack from two US Apache helicopters
in an area of East Baghdad where there had been fighting.
GUNFIRE
Among those killed were a Reuters photographer
and his driver after their camera was mistaken for a rocket launcher.
A passing van stopped to help.
It, too, was shot up and two small children inside injured,
before US ground troops arrived on the scene.
For many, the video encapsulated the true horror of the war.
You've said that it was maybe playing openly around the base.
Yeah, I saw somebody else watching it
and saw it in passing or whatever.
It was a level of callousness I hadn't seen.
I think that it's sort of a microcosm of the entirety
of the conflict because I got the sense the guys on the ground,
they saw what happened, they figured out what happened and they're
like, "Oh, my God, we got to get these kids to the hospital.”
You mean the US soldiers on the ground? Yeah, and also, there's the good Samaritans.
You see the best and the worst of humanity in a single, like, 30-minute window.
What's maybe even more striking is that it all takes place
within the rules of engagement. Right? It was investigated.
Eh... I never got the sense that there WERE any rules, sometimes.
Everything was just so messy and flexible and morally ambiguous.
You know, what it says on paper versus what
happens on the ground in reality, or so, are different.
And so who's in charge of who?
It just, it's all so grey.
And, you know, that's sort of the...
That's sort of the mentality that we had on the ground, I feel like,
was like sure, the rules say that, but here's the reality.
And like, that was like the constant thing was like, well,
our papers say this is the procedure
and this is the regulation.
And it'd be like, well, we're in the field...
You know, we're doing field expedient versions of that.
And that was when I felt so helpless
and I felt I'm inside of the problem.
Your critics would characterise the situation as you were going
through kind of a breakdown,
you were going through a difficult time with your then boyfriend,
right? Yeah. You were working nights,
which I think is not good for mental health in general.
You'd punched one of your superior officers at one point. Yes.
Well, she was not a superior. That was the whole argument,
was that she was in no position to try to tell me what to do.
Um... But... Then you'd been found, like, curled in a foetal position,
on another occasion. Yeah, because she kept bullying me.
But I just want to... You know, just to fast forward a little bit,
what ends up happening is the biggest data leak in military
history, 750,000... Records. Records.
When you start downloading material, are you thinking,
this is a life-changing moment?
I did have this sense of people need to know.
Mm-hm. In order to just change the situation? Yeah.
It almost felt anti-democratic to have nobody have
access to the on-the-ground reality, or picture, when it's so important.
Like, I viewed it as my duty.
After reaching out to the New York Times and The Washington Post,
Chelsea ended up sending the material to Wikileaks.
Some months later, the documents were published.
The story was almost too big to be easily comprehensible.
Files from Iraq detailed torture by the coalition-backed regime.
Afghan war logs revealed hundreds of undisclosed cases of civilians
killed by UK and US troops...
...while classified diplomatic cables
revealed the US State Department spying on its allies.
I am not going to get into commenting on classified material.
I have said what I'm going to say on that topic.
In the meantime, Chelsea had been arrested
and taken to military jail in the US,
where she was kept in solitary, allegedly for her own protection.
At trial in 2013, she was sentenced to 35 years.
Do you think you should not have been punished?
I knew I was going to get in trouble.
I knew that I was going outside bounds. But, you know,
I was the first person to go to prison for an unauthorised
disclosure to the media, so I had no precedent to work off of.
Do you think you still carry some of the scars of your incarceration?
Sure. I have some scars.
Sure. I was hurt by this process.
While incarcerated there were two, I think, suicide attempts.
The attempt in 2016 was the most serious.
Right. After the Pulse shooting.
Pulse nightclub.
A shooter went in and killed over 50 gay and lesbian and trans people.
Yeah. Friends of mine from that community were there that night.
You know, I had to track them down.
And, you know, there was uncertainty.
And some of them knew people who were casualties.
I was so affected by it and I was so hurt by it that I had a really
rough time the weeks after that happened, and it sent me spiralling.
The sort of fight to get surgery was starting to come up
and to see the Obama administration, like, essentially taking
this tragedy thar had happened and using it and saying...
And, you know, putting up rainbow flags and trans flags
everywhere and, you know, saying that, you know, they're doing good.
And then I'm... And then I'm in there struggling.
And for them to do that at the same time and then have this fight
and the sense that if this progressive administration is
fighting me on this, like, how am I ever going to get through this?
And I just gave up.
Let's be clear.
Chelsea Manning has served
a tough prison sentence.
In January 2017, in one of his last acts in office,
President Obama commuted Chelsea's sentence,
ordering her released for the seven years she'd served.
The decision wasn't popular in all quarters.
Private Manning was a traitor in 2013
and Private Manning as a traitor in 2017.
Emerging from prison famous, she began a new life campaigning
and doing work in the tech sector.
Hi, Chelsea. Good to see you again. Bring it in. All right.
Two of those in her circle are her management team, Ashna and Dipesh.
Nice to meet you. Ashna. How you doing? I'm Dipesh.
Dipesh. Nice to meet you guys. Nice to meet you as well. We're in New York City. Yeah.
Does life get any better?
Er... It can! LAUGHTER
We'd arranged to spend a day experiencing
some of the pleasures of the city.
HORN BLARES
That was... That was quite dangerous.
Are you OK? Yeah, I mean, I'm fine, but...
It's pretty normal. He's a federal employee.
I don't think about it. I just live. It's New York.
Our first stop, an al fresco lunch in Manhattan's Union Square,
...just three miles from the site of the attack on 9/11 that
provided the original pretext for the war in Iraq.
You and Ashna and Dipesh, you're friends, right,
in addition to working together? We're colleagues. Colleagues.
Primarily, I'd put us in that category.
How do you define what you see Chelsea's mission as,
or you as a team, what your mission is?
There's Chelsea herself, who has become
a representative of a certain kind of necessary political
transparency and I see the company's evolution as taking a lot of
those political values and putting them toward changing the landscape.
Absolutely. I mean to take it back a little bit, I'm from New York.
I was in high school when 9/11 happened. Right?
And one of the things that was really horrifying was
everything that was happening in the name of patriotism.
When I was younger, it was like, oh, we're immigrants.
Like, they gave us a chance here. Great.
But after that, considering what happened to people who
look like my family and my community, that changed a lot.
And then when I heard Chelsea's story, initially,
I was pretty struck because I was like,
oh, this is actually pretty profound actual patriotism.
Someone who is doing something that's at great
risk of their self-care, to hold her people and nation accountable to
a higher standard that the country purports are its founding values.
A little later, we headed back to Brooklyn to visit a couple of thrift shops.
I really like these.
No way.
These are ridiculous.
CHUCKLES
Her pantsuits were red? Red or navy.
Red or navy. OK.
Anything that you like?
I was just observing the Clinton-esque pantsuit.
Right. Hillary or Bill?
CHUCKLES
Do you ever run into any kind of harassment,
or people who say, "You're a traitor to this country"?
Typically, I get people, they just want to take selfies with me.
There's like a lot of the like, "You mean a lot to me.
"You're inspirational. You're an idol."
Is it more to do with the leaking and whistle blowing, or is it
more to do with being someone who's been outspoken about her trans-ness?
I don't know what it is. I don't understand it.
I feel kind of like this sort of unfair high expectation
that's put on me. I just like... I've never figured anything out.
I essentially was just launched out into the world at 29 years old.
And I don't know who I am.
I can relate with younger folks, I feel.
Me too.
I'm young at heart.
You're young at heart? I sincerely doubt that!
Rawr!
Are you going to take me to the burns unit? No.
I need attention for my burns.
I'm sorry. I apologise. I have no filter.
See you tomorrow. Yes. See you tomorrow.
Bye. Bye.
And with that, she was gone.
And with that, she was gone!
As Chelsea has picked her life back up,
the reverberations of her actions have continued.
We're in a situation where our technology means
we don't know who our sources are.
We verify documents. We don't verify sources.
While Chelsea awaited trial, her publisher, Julian Assange,
took refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London after being
accused of sexual assault.
The United States must pledge,
before the world, that it will not pursue journalists for shining
a light on the secret crimes of the powerful.
That case was later dropped.
Seven years on, in 2019, Assange was removed and detained at
Belmarsh Prison on espionage charges connected with Chelsea's case.
I was curious to know Chelsea's thoughts.
Do you have any relationship with Julian Assange? No.
You never met him, correct? No. He's in jail now, right?
He's in Belmarsh. Mm. His case is very much live.
It seems ever more likely that he may get extradited to the US
to face a possible... Do you know how long, like 50 years, is it?
I don't. A long prison sentence.
His position is that he's a publisher
and journalist, who was publishing material,
just as the New York Times or The Guardian... Sure. ..might publish something.
The US government position is that
because he allegedly helped you
with some technical stuff...
Alleged technical help...to me?
That's the... That's the case. I don't think... I don't think I need that.
That makes him a kind of co-conspirator in espionage.
Again, I only mention this because this is a live issue... Right. ..and people will associate you.
I think it's probably worth saying, for WikiLeaks, the material that
you released was far and away the biggest...
The biggest event for them.
That it kind of put them on the map with a vast amount of data
and since then, they haven't had anything like the impact.
So you're inextricably connected, in that sense, in the public mind.
Well, look, I went looking for a publisher, and I'm not...
I don't really care about the... Who publishes what.
I care about the fact that it's available, that it was available.
Do you take a position? Again... Because, you know, one of the frustrating things that I have
is I'm often asked questions that have nothing to do with me
and I don't know about another person's case.
Oh, yeah, I know. And I'm trying... I don't expect you to and I'm trying to...
Can I ask one last question on this?
Just because it's in the news, because it's a live case?
Do you support Julian Assange?
Look, I don't know enough about the situation and I...
I do... Look, I'm constantly dogged with all of these questions about what
happened in 2010 and what happened in 2013.
There's a court martial record.
We went through this process over a decade ago.
I refer you to that.
Yeah, I know. I hope I didn't cause any of fence. And I'm not...
I can see it's like... It's, yeah. What is it?
I get a little irritated because it becomes...
Because these events that happened in 2010 become about some
other person that I have no, that I've never met, that I have no...
I'm constantly being asked questions about some other person.
And I... It's like, what about me?
Like, I... I feel like I am forgotten about.
And I'm always the side... I'm always the side character in my own life. And I'm tired of that.
I'm constantly being asked about other people. You know, somebody else does something similar
and I'm constantly asked questions. I am the side character in my own life. And it's exhausting.
Can we take a break?
I need coffee.
I'm hot mic'ed. We're hot mic'ed, just a heads up.
Along with Assange, the other figure often mentioned in the same
breath as Chelsea is her fellow whistleblower, Edward Snowden...
...the former government contractor,
In 2013, Snowden revealed that the US was routinely stockpiling
data from the emails and phone calls of private citizens
in a vast facility in Utah.
I'm glad for the decisions that I made.
And I'm thankful to all of you who are supporting me
and believe in the same.
Increasingly alarmed about the power of data collection,
Chelsea also took up the cause of digital privacy
and freedom from surveillance by governments and corporations.
We as developers are complicit in the software that we write,
and, I would argue, how it gets used and how it gets misused.
Technologists no longer can just say,
"We bring you tools - here they are,
"now society figure out how to use them.”
But she's also said she's conflicted about her new public role
and that at times she feels her fame is disproportionate.
In Madrid, she'd been invited to address a conference about women
and leadership.
She'd asked me along.
Can we come in? No.
I'm kidding. This is a Spanish hotel, I guess.
A Spanish hotel room.
It's not the most glitzy or glamorous, but it's what we got.
Plenty of room. Sure. Bigger than mine. Yeah.
Have you got your keys? Thank you. Yes, I've got my keys.
Do you feel prepped, as far as your talk? Yeah.
You're on top of the brief? Oh, yeah, definitely.
It's good to see you.
APPLAUSE
Thank you. Great to be here.
This is my first time in Madrid. Great.
Chelsea delivered a message, mainly on the dangers of tech...
I do have concerns about extraneous data that is being collected about us.
It's not the data that we're sharing about ourselves,
it's the things that we don't even realise we're leaking.
...side-stepping questions about her views on other,
more personal social issues.
You have become a very prominent advocate for LGBT rights...
Somehow, you know. It's not something that I really talk about all that much, so...
But you admit that you often have to deal with a little bit of imposter
syndrome, which is something that we all have to deal with... Absolutely, I definitely live with that.
Here she is. Great.
Fantastic. Fantastic, super, super.
Great. We love it. Thank you. We love it. Thank you. Muchas gracias.
Post conference, Chelsea headed back to the hotel.
She'd been keen to get in some gaming time.
Am I all right to make myself comfortable here? Sure. Go for it.
This is a more authentic Chelsea experience here.
I shoot arrows and the arrows go and hit the lightning.
I died, obviously, because I got attacked.
Have you killed this monster before? I have.
So, how come you're doing it again?
Because I wanted to do the play throughs a bit differently.
Right. So... I love that attention to detail.
I felt I was seeing Chelsea in her most natural mode...
...absorbed in the data problem-solving exercise
that is The Legend Of Zelda.
Does it matter if you die, you're going to have to go back somewhere? I have a save. You hit a save point.
But I'm like not in the zone at all either.
No one's judging you. Yeah.
Chelsea's love of tech
and virtuality started early as a child in Crescent, Oklahoma, where
she grew up middle class, a gifted student and confirmed computer nerd.
Born to parents who didn't get along, sibling to a much
older sister, isolated on the edge of a small town.
Your parents had met in Wales, right?
Your dad was in the military? Was he in the... He was in the Navy. In the Navy. Yeah.
He's Brian. She's Sue? Susan. Susan.
And then she came back to Oklahoma to live with him.
You were in Crescent, Oklahoma... For most of my childhood.
Early childhood. Which is seems to be tiny, like a couple of thousand people maximum. Right?
Less than.
And then we live on this like, you know, kind of secluded ranch.
On the outskirts of town? Yeah. Your mum was drinking a lot. Can I say that? Yes.
My mother was diagnosed, even, with alcoholism.
It got to a point where by the time I was eight or nine,
my mother would, while getting me ready for school,
she was already putting vodka in her, in her breakfast drinks.
And I did deal with my father being very abusive.
Verbally or physically?
Mostly physically. To whom? To everyone in my family, really.
I wanted my father to tell me that he loved me, that I was a good kid.
That he was proud of me. That's all I wanted.
And I still wanted that. Yeah.
Do you still want that now?
I... I don't care.
I've...
I've let go of that.
My father will never do that.
I don't know where he is.
Is he not back in Oklahoma?
I don't know.
I don't know where he is.
One of the things that came up at trial was, I think
it was your lawyer said that you have Asperger's?
No, I do not.
I met the criteria for it on paper.
And so it was more of an argument for mitigation at trial.
Like, every time that I would see a psychiatrist in the military,
I would get a different... I was getting different diagnoses.
And the argument that the last several therapists have had
is that many of these were undiagnosed complex PTSD.
Many of the symptoms that I had had to do with sort of traumas
that been built up. In childhood, or in prison, in the army?
Yeah, all of it.
As recently as 2018, on the campaign trail,
when you were running for Senate...
I ran for Senate in the state of Maryland.
You got 6%.
Yeah, well, that was after my campaign, sort of...
You sort of slightly bailed on it. Yeah.
But there was a moment where you tweeted
a picture of yourself on a window ledge? Yeah.
I was in Milan.
Mm-hm. I was in this five-star hotel.
I had just done a speaking event.
And I took a long, hot bath,
and I was in this, like, luxurious space
and with all these nice things,
and I've never felt more empty than I felt in that moment.
I was dealing with a lot of people who thought, "I supported you
"because you were against this system and, you know, out to...
"But it seems more like you're just another one of them,
"a suit, somebody who has sold out.”
And I had some close friends of mine tweet about me,
"I don't know why I supported Chelsea's release,”
and that made me...
That hurt me.
And I saw a couple more of those on Twitter.
And I'm in this place in Milan.
And I tried calling my friends and, um...
And I tried calling my family and I tried calling anybody, like,
I just... And nobody would answer, nobody would pick up the phone.
And I couldn't... I didn't feel like I had a community any more.
It makes no sense from the outside, I'm sure.
But I've essentially taken all of the goodwill that I've
developed over the last decade of my life and thrown it away to
pursue... To pursue some dream of, you know, trying to do
something in my community and in my... And in the world.
And I went on the ledge
and I don't remember exactly how it went down, but I...
I got a call from a good friend of mine,
who is trained in suicide prevention... Mm-hm.
...and...
...she told me this joke. It was like a two-part joke.
So she's like doing the thing and she's like, withholding the punch line. And I...
And she's just like, "I'm not going to tell you the punch line
"until you get down."
I'm like, "OK, I'll get down."
Yeah. I...
Do you want to take a break? Yeah.
Yeah. I want to take a break. Clean up.
I lost myself for bit.
He just asked questions that nobody's ever bothered to ask.
Chelsea's healing is very much still a work in progress.
In 2019, she went back to prison
when she defied what she viewed as illegitimate attempt to make
her testify in Julian Assange's court case.
In having been so long incarcerated, she's spoken
often about the difficulty adjusting to aspects of everyday life.
I was curious about this more personal side.
OK.
We continue? Yes, sorry.
Nothing to apologise for.
Can we talk about relationships?
Um...
Prior... I mean, like old relationships?
Or new?
Um... I mean, I would prefer just the past stuff.
Are you in a relationship?
Um...
I'd rather not say. Mm-hm.
I mean, I don't think it's anybody's business.
I would rather my private life and my relationships
be private until...
Until I feel comfortable. Yeah.
But, yeah.
Right. You put me right back in my box. Yep.
It's nobody's business.
Except for whoever I'm... I'm not or I am dating at any given time.
Nevertheless, you are a public figure, right?
I am.
And I don't say that you have to play the game,
or whatever the relevant cliche is,
but what I sense is that you're not wholly avoiding it.
You have a... You do work as a speaker, as an advocate.
Yeah, I'm trying to... You're a role model. I'm trying to cool down the speculation in my life,
like the 2010 stuff, the 2013 stuff, the constants...
Like, I'm trying to move on.
I'm trying to establish myself as an academic,
as...a writer.
I read something you said where you talked about feeling that you
find it a Little maybe disturbing, the idea of being a role model
and a spokesperson... A little bit.
And I get that a lot. Why would you find that troubling?
I find it troubling
because I'm woefully unequipped to be a role model for anyone.
In what way?
I don't have any superpowers, or skills beyond like, do...
You know, like, figure out some math problems and, you know,
looking sharp and showing up on time.
You know, I can talk about Al. I can talk about technology.
I have no particular...skill
when it comes to interpersonal relationships.
And I'm not a movie star.
I don't... I can't act. I'm not a painter.
What accomplishments do I actually have on paper?
Well, your supporters would say that by doing what you did,
you helped end the war in Iraq, among many other things. OK.
I wish it wasn't like... I wish I wasn't a fluke.
Because that's how I feel often.
I am just somebody who figured out what was going on.
And then once I... Once I thought about it, I'm like, "Ah,
"now I can't un-think it."
And that just makes me a fluke.
Like a statistical fluke.
What you call a fluke, you could also call being the right
person in the right place at the right time.
Maybe.
But I think fundamentally, if you graph it out,
it's just a statistical anomaly.
We are now more than 13 years on from Chelsea's leaks.
Sectarian violence and corruption are still rife in Iraq.
The war is widely acknowledged to have been a catastrophe.
The collection of data by governments
and corporations has also continued apace, the little we know
about their practices being revealed by a handful of whistleblowers.
Facebook's products harm children, stoke division
and weaken our democracy.
The company's leadership knows how to make Facebook
and Instagram safer, but won't make the necessary changes
because they have put their astronomical profits before people.
Along with the vast and terrifying power of technology,
and its ability to control lives,
has come a need for transparency that is greater than ever.
The night of our interview,
I joined Chelsea for her DJ set at The $3 Bill.
Seeing her in a place where she was totally accepted,
I reflected on Chelsea's bravery,
mixed in with a kind of naivety,
her frailties overlapping and maybe inseparable from her gifts.
Final thoughts?
On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your experience?
How do I rate my experience? Seven.
So boring.
I knew you were going to say seven before you even said it.
Yeah? Right? Yeah. Because it's... That was the experience we had, it was a seven.
What would have made it an eight or nine?
An eight or nine would have been if it was...
If we went to the beach, or if we went on a roller coaster.
That would have made it...
That would have made it even better.
And a ten?
And a ten? If we went skydiving.
I don't believe any documentary team's ever taken you to the
beach or a roller coaster.
I don't think they have either. But that would make it a ten.
Thank you so much. Thank you so much.
It's been a real pleasure and a privilege, Chelsea. Thank you for trusting us with your story.
Of course. Louis, a pleasure. Likewise. Thank you for having us. Yeah. Get home safely.