I Am Not Your Enemy

NEW YORK TIMES EDITOR'S CHOICE

As heard on FRESH AIR and THIS AMERICAN LIFE

"A hero for these times...Read her story and let it move you, infuriate you, and inspire you." — Chelsea Handler

"A unique and urgent story of what happened to a young woman who spoke out against the power of the state." — Piper Kerman, author of Orange Is the New Black

"This personable and wide-ranging memoir lets [Winner] define herself on her own terms, offering an expressive, irreverent tour of America from the halls of power to cramped prison cells." — New York Times

The memoir of a patriot.

Reality Winner was a twenty-five-year-old translator for the NSA when she read a classified document revealing what she assumed would make headlines during a time of unprecedented leaking: After blatant lies by the Trump administration and public silence by the NSA, there had in fact been foreign interference in the 2016 US election. In a breach of NSA protocol, she impulsively printed it, smuggled it out of the building, and mailed it to The Intercept, which published it and then promptly informed the NSA. For her crime, she received the longest prison sentence ever imposed on a government-affiliated employee convicted of a single count of leaking classified information and spent more than four years in federal prison.

Now, for the first time, Winner tells her own story: her unusual childhood in South Texas, with a brilliant but unstable father whose obsession with politics, ancient history, philosophy, and religion sparked her own interests in ancient civilizations and the study of foreign languages, including Latin, Arabic, Farsi, Dari, and Pashto; her patriotism, after 9/11, which led her to enlist in the Air Force and join the NSA, where the work she did in the hope of protecting American security was part of the US campaign in Afghanistan; and, most movingly, her life in the American prison system and how it nearly broke her.

I Am Not Your Enemy is Winner's bold, brave examination of the moral choices that compel us to act, as well as an account of the risks one young woman took to protect her country and the price she paid for it. It is also a powerful argument for standing up for what you believe in during uncertain times — an inspiring message as relevant now as it was when she made her fateful decision.