Starting Over After Infamy

GREG KELLEY WAS 19 WHEN HE WAS FOUND GUILTY OF BEING A PEDOPHILE. FIVE YEARS LATER-HIS HIGH SCHOOL SWEETHEART BY HIS SIDE-HE WAS DECLARED INNOCENT. THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED NEXT

- By DANIELLE BACHER

Called to Act Kelley spent about six years trapped in the criminal justice system. Now an advocate for others like him, he says, "Somebody gets falsely accused every day, and it haunts me."

Eleven years ago 19-year-old Greg Kelley sat wrapped in a suicide-prevention smock inside the void of the Williamson County Jail, so unlike his life until then in the blue-skied Austin suburb where he made a name for himself as a high school football star.

After he was convicted in 2014 as a child predator despite his pleas of innocence, his world shrank to a 6x8-ft. concrete cell where he spent 23 hours a day, with just one break to breathe fresh air and no visitors. Recalling his life's lowest moment in a recent interview, Kelley, now exonerated, grows contemplative as the sun sets at the sprawling Texas farmhouse where he started over with his wife and daughter. Fighting for his freedom, he says quietly, "was the biggest fight of my life."

Path to Freedom In 2017 a judge concluded that the investigation into Kelley's case had been deeply flawed and his rights violated-and that the verdict against him should be overturned because "no reasonable juror" could have convicted. He was officially exonerated in November 2019, crying as he learned the news.