On April 5 at 4 p.m., Reality Winner was hustling: She’d just learned she was needed to find additional last-minute female competitors for a Crossfit competition in Corpus Christi—a hassle for the 33-year-old who was already busy with other duties that day, including cleaning out dog kennels as one of the many requirements for her veterinary technology program at Texas A&M-Kingsville.
Winner told the organizers that her two-person team would compete against anyone, even men, in contests designed to test people’s limitations, including lifting gigantic barbells and running and swimming races. In the end, her team tied for second place.
Crossfit has become a way for Winner to blow off steam after returning to Kingsville, where she launched an eclectic but quiet new life after first earning international publicity—and then becoming a convicted felon—for leaking classified information about attacks on U.S. elections. In 2018, Winner, a decorated U.S. Air Force veteran and a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, accepted a plea deal and was sentenced to five years and three months, America’s longest prison sentence ever for the crime of leaking a secret document to journalists.
In 2017, Winner was working for the NSA when she spotted a classified document that revealed that there had been a coordinated attempt by Russians to hack a voting software company in the 2016 elections. The document showed that hackers used the information they obtained to conduct spear-phishing attacks against more than 100 election officials nationwide.
Winner anonymously mailed that information to The Intercept, but the leak was quickly traced to her. During her trial, prosecutors attempted to prove that Winner was a dangerous rogue at risk of being recruited by foreign adversaries if ever released on bail. They questioned everything from her gun collection to her diary entries.
When Winner was released early in June 2021, she chose to return to Kingsville—the town that she’d once hoped to leave forever. Winner grew up there with interests in both shooting guns and practicing yoga. Early in life, she became fascinated with Arabic and international relations, which made her an attractive Air Force recruit and earned her medals for her military service after she used those skills to help identify enemy targets. Later, they landed her a job at the NSA.
Since her release from prison, Winner has been featured in two movies, including Winner, a black comedy directed by Susanna Fogel, which premiered in 2024 at the Sundance Film Festival. She recently wrote a memoir, I Am Not Your Enemy—which she has learned was cleared for publication by the NSA without redactions. It will be published in September.
TO: I read your column in The Wrap, “Democracy is a Verb.” When you look at what the Trump administration has done so far, what do you want people to glean from that phrase?
Democracy is a verb, and a part of that verb was the election of 2024. And what I can say is that so many people [voted] against their self interest and in favor of white supremacy directly when they voted for Trump. I do believe that he won the election—he got those votes, but democracy is a verb regardless of who you voted for.
And it sure as fuck doesn’t look like Trump is our President right now. It does feel like we are being ruled by a foreign oligarch. I was not ready for an Elon Musk presidency, and I think that it should be common ground between the left and right, because even Republican constituents are uncomfortable and veterans are angry, and I just don’t know what it’s going to take to get all of us out in the streets together. You didn’t have people on social security being called the parasite class [before Trump]. It’s really gone off the rails. … I don’t know what more it’s going to take to get our Republican brothers and sisters to understand that this isn’t even what they wanted.
Now that you’re going to school and working, do you see yourself avoiding politics? Or do you want to get more involved?
When I was a 25-year-old veteran who was working a federal contract, the act [of whistleblowing] was inherently political. It was a felony, and I’m not a politician. I don’t lie to myself about what I can offer to the rest of the country as far as my ideas or what we should do moving forward. However, part of my decision to go to school for veterinary technology and to stay as a coach in my community is about small local politics and getting involved in the things that I directly see that impact me.
Trump did pardon a lot of people who were involved in the January 6 insurrection. Where do you think that places our society’s relative value of their experiences versus your experiences? Because I know that people pushed for you to be pardoned.
I stand a snowball’s chance in hell of a pardon. And this last push, I can tell you that nobody was less involved than I was. I had shut down because I want to rebuild my life as a convicted felon, because I want to show how difficult it is. I’m starting Veterinary Technology school, but I’m not eligible for [licensure in] this career.
Do you feel like there is a sense of urgency now that there is a second Trump administration? Is there room for more whistleblowing and more truth telling?
People are absolutely terrified because there is no safety net. If you do something dumb, like what I did, nobody’s going to help you out. And you know what—[if I was working] for the government right now, and I was given one of those letters of, “You’re going to get fired or you can resign,” I would have walked out with some documents that day.
I don’t understand why people are so beaten down to the point where, if they believe in this democracy, they’re not willing to risk it all. They didn’t kill me. They didn’t kill Chelsea Manning. And even the person who is most in danger, Edward Snowden, survives in Russia. They haven’t killed us. So I don’t understand why there is no sense of urgency. Why aren’t we seeing these whistleblowers?
I live in a red state. Everybody knows I live in Texas. I love Texas. I’m constantly emailing Senator John Cornyn. I’m getting responses, but what can I do? I wasn’t allowed to vote in 2024, I was still on probation. I don’t have millions of dollars to run for Congress. That’s another part of that system where you have to have a certain amount of generational wealth to even run for anything in this country.
What’s it been like to see your life portrayed in movies? Do you feel it creates a distortion of who you are as a person?
It gives me hope for my own personal future. One of the things about my criminal case and the proceedings that were happening in the courtroom was that the prosecution was allowed to widely mischaracterize me and make off-the-wall statements about who I was as a person, and when my own attorneys would try to counter those arguments, they were interrupted by the judge.
And so when these movies are being made and these producers are coming to my home and meeting my family and meeting me, their whole thing is, how do we get as close to you as the production of a feature film can allow? How do we get as much of this narrative into 90 minutes as possible? For me, it gave me hope that people in this country can see that and not just the horribly inaccurate headlines that the prosecution put out about me in 2017, and it gives me a path forward.
Even people who don’t agree with what I did can empathize with the fact that nobody should just be steamrolled by the Department of Justice like this.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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