Facts about Jill Kelley

Jill Kelley is 49 years old
Born: January 1, 1975
Birthplace: Beirut, Lebanon
Best known as: The Tampa socialite at the center of the David Petraeus scandal of 2012

     

Jill Kelley Biography

Name at birth: Gilberte Khawam

Jill Kelley is the Florida socialite whose report to the FBI about email threats started a chain of events that led to the resignation of CIA director David Petraeus.

Jill Kelley was born to “a Lebanese family that emigrated to Philadelphia in the mid-1970s,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Jill and her twin sister, Natalie, were the youngest of four children. Jill married cancer surgeon Dr. Scott T. Kelley and the couple moved to Tampa, Florida in the early 2000s when he became a specialist at the city’s Moffitt Cancer Center.

Jill Kelley became “a fixture on Tampa’s social circuit,” as CBS News called her. She acted as an unpaid “social liason” for officers from MacDill Air Force Base near Tampa, and she and her husband held parties for military leaders (including Gen. Petraeus and his wife, Holly) at their mansion.

In 2012, Jill Kelley reported to a friend who worked for the FBI that she had been receiving anonymous threats by email. The FBI investigated and discovered that the sender was Paula Broadwell, a former Army officer who had written a 2012 biography of Petraeus titled All In: The Education of General David Petraeus. (Broadwell apparently regarded Kelley as a romantic rival for Petreaus and sent the emails to warn her off.)

Further investigation by the FBI showed that Petraeus and Broadwell had been romantically involved. Petraeus resigned from his CIA job on November 8, 2012, citing his extramarital affair as the reason. Soon afterwards, military officials announced that still more investigation had uncovered up to 30,000 pages of ‘potentially inappropriate’ e-mails between Jill Kelley and General John R. Allen, the man who had replaced Gen. Petraeus as the U.S. commander in Afghanistan in 2011.

Kelley quickly hired prominent defense attorney Abbe Lowell and also Judy Smith, a public relations agent who in the past had represented Monica Lewinsky and Kobe Bryant. As the situation grew more complex, newspapers took to calling Jill Kelley “the other other woman.” In the end, investigations did not turn up legal wrongdoing on Kelley’s part, and she was not charged with any crime.

Extra credit

Jill Kelley and her husband have three daughters: one, Natalie Grace, was born in 2004. The others were born circa 2003 and 2006; Who2 has not been able to determine their names… Dr. Scott Kelley left Moffitt Cancer Center in 2008, according to the Tampa Bay Times, and joined the Watson Clinic in nearby Lakeland… Jill Kelley and her twin sister, Natalie, taped an appearance for Food Network show called “Food Fight” in 2003… Jill Kelley was born on June 3, 1975, according to Wikipedia. Who2 hasn’t been able to determine if she was born in America or in her family’s native country of Lebanon.