Chelsea Manning has spoken candidly about keeping her personal life private, as she avoided answering any questions about her rumoured relationship with Grimes.
The 34-year-old former whistleblower, who was previously imprisoned for passing classified information to WikiLeaks, was asked if the dating rumours about her and the 34-year-old musician were true during a recent interview with The Daily Beast.
In response, Manning said that she was not going to discuss her “dating life” or the “speculation” around it, before acknowledging how she prefers to “keep [her] private life private”.
“I’m not gonna get into my dating life,” she explained. “There’s been a lot of speculation and a lot of news stories. I have not changed my perspective on this: I don’t like speculation about my private life. I prefer to keep my private life private. I don’t want to create a precedent either.”
She also said that because she doesn’t want people to think she’s “open” to discussing her private life, she won’t “confirm or deny” any rumours being spread about her.
“Another concern that I have is I don’t want to confirm or deny anything in my private life because I don’t want to make it seem like I’m open to having people digging into my personal life, real or imagined,” she explained. “I see a lot of people struggling with this, and I don’t want to get sucked into celebrity-culture stuff.”
However, Manning did address where her hometown is, detailing how she resides in New York when she’s not travelling.
“The one thing I will say is that I live entirely in New York,” she added. “I don’t know where this idea came about that I would live remotely close to Texas. I travel a lot, but I’m based in New York.”
Last March, Page Six reported that, following her second split with Elon Musk, Grimes had begun dating Manning. The musician and Tesla founder share two children,X Æ A-Xii, two, and Exa Dark Sideræl, six months, together.
“They’re getting serious. They U-Hauled it,” a source told the publication about Manning and Grimes. “They’ve been living together in Austin.”
The pair were spotted interacting on Twitter that same month, as Grimes tweeted that she had been “postponing” her appearance on a YouTuber’s twitch stream, “like ten times,” because she “kept not being in LA”. In response, Manning tweeted: “vouch”.
Although neither Grimes and Manning have confirmed their relationship, The Daily Beast discussed how Elon Musk had tweeted transphobic memes at the time, when rumours first circulated about his ex’s new partner.
According to the publication Musk’s memes “seemed like subtweets about Manning,” as she is a transgender woman. In response, the security consultant expressed how the business magnate’s tweets, at the time, “definitely seemed transphobic”.
“My response was a meme back,” she explained. “The one thing I will say is: he around that time definitely seemed transphobic, and rumour or speculation aside, that’s off-limits. I’m going to respond to it. Any transphobia in a transphobic environment is not OK.”
Last April, Musk had shared a tweet that said: “If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying! And authenticate all real humans.”
Manning’s meme, in response to Musk, featured a cartoon girl, with pink hair, holding her hand up and frowning, as the text next to the photo reads: “A billionaire occupying your mind rent free”.
In the second part of the meme, that same girl could be seen smiling and wearing a shirt with the transgender flag on it, as the text reads: “Occupying a billionaire’s mind rent free”.
