Finally free.
Greg Kelley's story is a complicated one, but that's not going to stop him from telling it.
"At 18 years old, there was one part of that year where I was a high school kid who just wanted to make good grades, wanted to go play college football, wanted to get out of Leander, Texas and go make something of himself," Kelley, the subject of the Showtime docu-series Outcry, said on Just the Sip. "And then within one week, I am a labeled child molester."
It was 2013 when Kelley was accused of molesting a 4-year-old boy, and 2014 when he was ultimately convicted of super-aggravated assault on a child and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
However, as Kelley explained on the latest episode of E! host Justin Sylvester's podcast, he was innocent.
Unfortunately, he still spent three years in jail and, even when he was released on bond in 2017 pending a new investigation into the case, his conviction wasn't overturned until November 2019.
"I don't got any hate in my heart," Kelley expressed. "At the end of the day, my goal now is to make sure this doesn't happen again. It's not about me."
He also wants justice for the child at the center of the case, telling Sylvester he's "so, so driven to hold these people that did me wrong accountable."
"Because I received some sort of justice," he added. "But do you know who still remains failed? It's the victim."
The alleged sexual assault was said to have taken place at an in-home daycare run by Shama McCarty, the mother of Kelley's former friend Johnathan McCarty.
"She was like a mother figure to me, just opening up her house when both my mom and my dad, my junior year, both got diagnosed with some medical problems where they couldn't actually take care of me," Kelley explained, noting that both his parents were eventually hospitalized and that he lived with the McCarty family "for several months" his junior year.
Johnathan McCarty himself was named a suspect when the sexual assault case was reopened in 2017, Williamson County District Attorney Shawn Dick confirmed to the American-Statesman at the time.
"I wanted him to look me in the face and tell me that he did not do this," Kelley told Sylvester. "And he declined my sit down with me."
In 2019, in an unrelated case, Johnathan was sentenced to four years in prison after pleading guilty to unlawful restraint and drug charges. A girl had accused him of drugging and assaulting her at a frat party in 2015, when she was 15 and he was 18.
As for Kelley, he's currently working with the hopes of earning enough money to pay his mother back for his legal fees: "You know what my mom did that a lot of people don't realize? My mom sold her house that we grew up in for $50,000 cash—fast cash…so that hurts. All I want to do is get my mom that money back."
Kelley also recently married his high-school girlfriend, Gaebri Anderson, who stuck by his side throughout the entire ordeal.
"Without Gaebri, man, I probably would still be sitting in jail as an innocent man with a whole bunch of hate in his heart, little hope, completely dead but still alive at the same time," Kelley said. "With her love that she showed to me throughout the whole process, it kept that fire in my soul alive. It kept that emotion that you don't get in prison, which is love."
Now, as Kelley put it, "I'm free and I'm gonna be as free as I possibly can be."
Listen to the complete Just the Sip episode here.