Chelsea Manning Appears In Swimsuit, Talks Running For Office, In "Vogue" Interview
Chelsea Manning stepd in front of the camera for celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz in the September issue of Vogue.
Manning is in a red swimsuit on the beach, showing off a haircut she debuted after being released from military prison in May.
In the profile, she talks about her future, including plans to write a memoir—“I’m trying to tell the story as if it was happening now and you’re with me”—and the possibility of her running for office.
“I’m certainly not going to say no, and I’m certainly not going to say yes," Manning teases. "My goal is to use these next six months to figure out where I want to go." For now, she says, she's preparing to move back to Maryland and start a new life.
The profile also reveals that XY Chelsea, a documentary about Manning, is being filmed by director Tim Travers Hawkins. Hawkins had originally planned to just use Manning's prison diaries "to shape a documentary with an invisible hero," but her release enabled Hawkins to actually interview her directly.
“It was a radical shift in the way the film existed,” he tells Vogue.
Chelsea Manning was convicted in 2013 of disclosing more than 700,000 confidential military documents to WikiLeaks, and served seven years in military prison, where she was denied resources to help her transition and attempted suicide several times.
President Obama commuted the majority of her sentence in January and she was released from prison May 17. On Instagram, Manning shared the first photo of herself as a free woman, takenn the day after she was released from Fort Leavenworth.
The image was accompanied with a simple message: “Okay, so here I am everyone!”
