At 19, Greg Kelley was found guilty of child sex abuse — then exonerated five years later. Earning his freedom, he says, “was the biggest fight of my life”
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, Texas, suburb of Leander where he made a name for himself as a high school football star.
After being convicted in 2014 as a child predator despite his pleas of innocence, his world shrank to a 6-by-8-ft. concrete cell where he spent 23 hours a day, with just one break to breathe fresh air and no visitors — some days feeling as if his whole world was slipping away for good.
Recalling his life’s lowest moment in an interview in this week's issue of PEOPLE, Kelley, now 30 and exonerated, grows contemplative as the sun sets at the sprawling farmhouse where he started over with wife Gaebri Anderson, also 30, and 17-month-old daughter Summer Rae.
Fighting for his freedom, he says quietly, “was the biggest fight of my life.”