In June 2018, US Air Force veteran Reality Winner was given the longest prison sentence ever imposed on a whistleblower for leaking classified documents to the press: five years and three months.
The classified document she was charged with leaking — to news website The Intercept — was a five-page intelligence report that proved Russian hackers had interfered in the 2016 presidential election.
A year earlier, then aged 25, Winner was interrogated about the leak by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) at her home in Georgia, in the south-east of the United States. Investigators had traced the leak back to her work as a translator for the National Security Agency.
Winner had printed the document, folded it in half and stashed it in her stockings to smuggle it out of her office, then popped it into an envelope without a return address and dropped it into a mailbox in a shopping centre parking lot.
"I wasn't trying to be a [Edward] Snowden or anything," she told investigators.
As Winner explained in a recent documentary: "I just wanted to settle a national debate and quietly accept the consequences."
When Winner was eventually interrogated, it wasn't like you see in movies. It was strange, including chit chat about everything from CrossFit to Winner's dog.
The transcript of that interrogation was turned into the play Is This a Room by American playwright and director Tina Satter in 2019, and in 2023 was made into the movie, Reality...
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