General

Jill Kelley continues quest to clear name in Washington Post

Jill Kelley, the woman whose complaint about threatening emails inadvertently revealed an affair that forced former CIA director David Petraeus to resign, is continuing a media blitz in an attempt to clear her name after the bizarre November scandal that put her into the spotlight.

On Wednesday, Kelley and her husband, Tampa, Florida-area surgeon Scott Kelley, published an opinion article in The Washington Post.

“Ours is a story of how the simple act of quietly appealing to legal authorities for advice on how to stop anonymous, harassing e-mails can result in a victim being re-victimized,” the Kelleys write.

The opinion goes on to say that the Kelley family experienced a “breach of civil liberties” when their names were leaked to the press by authorities.

The opinion article comes one day after Kelley gave her first in-person interview to Howard Kurtz at The Daily Beast. In that interview, Kelley raised some of the same points she did in The Washington Post article, including the fact that she never knew Paula Boadwell — the writer and former military officer who sent the emails and who, it turned out, was having an affair with Petraeus.

The new open-with-the-media attitude after three months of silence seems to be the result of the Kelley family hiring a new communications spokesperson, Gene Grabowski, who has given the family the green-light to speak up.

As the Kelleys try to clear their names, Gen. John Allen, the former commander of the Afghanistan war, has also been cleared of any wrongdoing in the Petraeus scandal. During the investigation into the emails sent to Kelley, further emails showed potentially inappropriate conversations between Kelley and Allen that occurred when the general was stationed in Kabul. According to a Washington Post story posted on Tuesday, the Pentagon inspector general has officially cleared Allen, finding that he has not violated any protocol.

“He was completely exonerated,” a source told The Washington Post.

Allen had been nominated to be NATO commander in Europe, but that nomination had been put on hold while the investigation into his conduct was completed.

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