Fort Meade, MD – Bradley Manning plans to live as a woman named Chelsea and wants to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible, the soldier said Thursday, a day after being sentenced to 35 years in prison for sending classified material to WikiLeaks.
Manning announced the decision in a written statement provided to NBC’s “Today” show, asking supporters to refer to him by his new name and the feminine pronoun. The statement was signed “Chelsea E. Manning.”
“As I transition into this next phase of my life, I want everyone to know the real me. I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female. Given the way that I feel, and have felt since childhood, I want to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible,” the statement read.
Manning’s defense attorney David Coombs told “Today” in an interview that he is hoping officials at the military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kan., will accommodate Manning’s request for hormone therapy.
“If Fort Leavenworth does not, then I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure they are forced to do so,” Coombs said.
In a statement, the Army said it “does not provide hormone therapy or sex-reassignment surgery for gender identity disorder.”
Coombs did not respond to phone and email messages from The Associated Press on Thursday.
Manning’s struggle with gender identity disorder — the sense of being a woman trapped in a man’s body – was key to the defense.
Attorneys had presented evidence of Manning’s struggle with gender identity, including a photo of the soldier in a blond wig and lipstick sent to a therapist.
Meanwhile, the fight to free Manning has taken a new turn, with Coombs and supporters saying they will ask the Army for leniency – and the White House for a pardon.
Even Manning’s supporters have pivoted. During the sentencing hearing Wednesday, they wore T-shirts reading, “truth,” as they had for the entire court-martial. Hours later, they had changed into shirts saying, “President Obama: Pardon Bradley Manning.”
“The time to end Brad’s suffering is now,” Coombs said, after Manning’s sentence was handed down. “The time for our president to focus on protecting whistleblowers instead of punishing them is now.”
Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison. The sentence was the stiffest punishment ever handed out in the U.S. for leaking information to the media. With good behavior and credit for the more than three years he has been held, Manning could be out in as little as seven years, Coombs said.
The sentencing fired up the long-running debate over whether Manning was a whistleblower or a traitor for giving more than 700,000 classified military and diplomatic documents, plus battlefield footage, to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. By volume alone, it was the biggest leak of classified material in U.S. history, bigger even than the Pentagon Papers a generation ago.
Manning was to return to the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Coombs said, adding that he didn’t know precisely when the soldier would leave Maryland. Coombs said he will file a request early next week that Obama pardon Manning or commute his sentence to time served.
The White House said the request would be considered “like any other application.” However, a pardon seems unlikely.
