PEOPLE
Teen Football Star Was Wrongly Convicted as a Pedophile. His High School Sweetheart Didn't Give Up on Him (Exclusive)
By Danielle Bacher Updated on December 5, 2025 11:21AM EST
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.”
For years it seemed he wouldn’t win. After his junior year of high school in 2013, Kelley, a standout safety for the Leander High School Lions, secured a football scholarship to the University of Texas at San Antonio.
But the summer before his senior year, he was swept up in a shocking criminal case in Cedar Park: At 18, he was charged with the super-aggravated sexual assault of two 4-year-old boys at an in-home daycare run by the mother of his friend and fellow football player Johnathan McCarty.
Kelley previously stayed with their family while his own parents faced severe health challenges: Mom Rosa was being treated for a brain tumor and his father, Douglas, had been incapacitated by a stroke.
When Kelley was able to call then-girlfriend Gaebri, a member of their school’s dance team, about his arrest, she was in the grocery store and “blacked out,” she recalls.
“I didn’t even comprehend what was happening,” she says. “And I thought it would clear up so fast.”
The case was widely covered in Texas — first because of the nature of the allegations and, later, as Kelley worked to prove his innocence.
In July 2014, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison without parole even though one of the two children recanted.
Sitting in the county jail days later, Kelley felt hopeless. But it wasn’t long, he says, before a “flame” to fight lit inside him.
His family hired attorney Keith Hampton, who has a history of fighting wrongful convictions. “We needed a badass," Kelley says.
By August 2014, Hampton filed for a new trial and, in the next three years, worked to uncover extensive errors in the investigation and prosecution, including how authorities failed to question other people around the children at the time and how Kelley’s original lawyer had a conflict of interest because of her friendship with the McCarty family.
In 2017, District Court Judge Donna King 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.
Magistrate Judge Susan Hightower acknowledged in court filings that “much of the post-conviction evidence” suggests Johnathan McCarty, Kelley’s teammate, who bears a resemblance to him, was the actual abuser, though no one else was ever charged. (An attorney for McCarty did not respond to PEOPLE's request for comment.)
Kelley was released on $50,000 bond in August 2017 after a new district attorney, Shawn Dick, reopened the case.
Two years later an appellate court overturned Kelley’s conviction, declaring that “the system failed him,” and the district court officially proclaimed his innocence soon after — to applause in the courtroom and tears from Kelley, with Gaebri still by his side.
“I fell in love with him while he was incarcerated. We broke up for seven days, and it didn’t feel right," she says.
"I never quit ... and I won the lottery of justice, Kelley tells PEOPLE.
Five years ago, he filed a civil suit against the city of Cedar Park and two police officials and then won a $500,000 settlement.
State law also entitled him to approximately $258,000 as well as a monthly payment of around $1,200. The settlement money allowed him to buy a three-acre property for his mom, who had once sold her own home to cover his legal bills. (His dad died in 2019.)
For Kelley, it felt like the first real acknowledgment of a life wrongfully derailed, even as he admits, “I have trauma. ... It haunts me. I still struggle. I am not healed.”
He won’t step into a public bathroom if an unattended child is inside, terrified of another moment of misperception that could shatter everything.
Gaebri understands her husband’s fears but says, “In some ways, I am very grateful for everything, because it did make us stronger. I don’t know if we would be together if all that didn’t happen.”
The couple married in January 2020. He proposed after his release in December 2017 with a ring that cost every dollar he’d saved.
At the end of their wedding, where they were surrounded by some 300 friends and family, they shared a dance alone.
“We made it,” he told her.
The same year, he fulfilled his long-delayed dream of playing college football on scholarship at Eastern Michigan University. He returned to Texas before graduating and became a speaker and advocate (and, briefly, a boot model).
He founded the Vindication Foundation, which fights for those falsely accused and wrongfully convicted like himself, and was featured in a Showtime documentary, Outcry, as he started to rebuild.
Now he makes axe-throwing equipment, having learned woodworking behind bars, while Gaebri teaches dance at a family-owned studio. In 2024 they welcomed daughter Summer Rae.
"I really, really wanted a girl," says Gaebri, smiling.
“Being a father is what I’ve always wanted,” adds Kelley, who hopes to give his daughter siblings in the future.
When Kelley isn’t competing in ultramarathons to raise money for his foundation, he’s at home close to his mom in Liberty Hill, north of Austin, where life is often slow and sweet: The family gathers for lunch each day and frequently hikes together.
The evening of the couple's PEOPLE interview in Texas, as the sky blushed pink and settled into dusk, Kelley felt a peace that he once wondered if he’d ever find again.
Inside the hallway of their home, he cracked open a small brown treasure chest that holds the letters that carried him and his wife through.
With Gaebri tucked by his side, her hand resting over his, he lifted one of the letters out, carefully.
His voice caught as he read from one of the them, written from behind bars — a reminder of the unexpected joy he found in the depths of despair.
“My love, I hope you know that words can’t explain the deep love I have fallen into," Kelley read: "You are where I draw so much of my strength from. Our love is an everlasting fairy tale.”
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