Bridget Anne Kelly.Photo: Kena Betancur/Getty Images
Bridget Anne Kelly, a central figure in New Jersey’s infamous2013 “Bridgegate” saga, tells PEOPLE she’s looking to make a comeback — if the voters will take her.
“I’m trying to get back into the world that abandoned me,” Kelly, 48, says about her recent decision to run as a Republican in this year’s election for Bergen County Clerk in New Jersey.
Kelly’s campaign makes her just the latest in the country’s centuries-long tradition of fallen political figures attempting to return to prominence.
The case against Kelly traces back to the closure of two busy lanes in the town of Fort Lee for a reputed “traffic study” that caused a massive five-day jam around the George Washington Bridge into New York City.
“I’m sure that we’re going to see my email again,” she tells PEOPLE now, recognizing the scandal will likely follow her throughout her race, just as it has the past seven years.
“I’m happy to talk about it,” Kelly says, before pivoting. “That’s obviously what my opponent’s going to campaign on, which everyone’s tired of hearing about. But I digress.”
Bridget Anne Kelly.Kena Betancur/Getty Images
Bridget Anne Kelly.Julio Cortez/AP/Shutterstock
Kelly, who has learned about revenge, says the move was “petty and juvenile.”
She says she’s an open book about the scandal as well as the “very dark place” in which she found herself since it happened.
An open book, perhaps, but she’s eager for a blank page. The topic is “stale now,” she says. “People are tired of it.”
Ideally, Kelly would like to move on from Bridgegate — just like she says “the boys of Bridgegate” were able to do, referring to the men around Christie embroiled along with her in the scandal.
Christie himself, Kelly notes, landed a “lucrative” job as a political analyst with ABC News after finishing his two terms as governor and is nowreportedly considering a run for presidentin 2024 after a failed 2016 bid.
From left, front: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Bridget Kelly in 2013.Tim Larsen/Office of the Governor Of N.J. via Getty
In a speech outside the Supreme Court after its ruling last May, Kelly, a mom of four, called Christie “a bully” and she still questions the investigation into the ordeal — suggesting Christie pinned the whole thing on her.
Christiefired Kellyduring a live news conference in 2014.
“It was ludicrous,” she says, saying he made a “malicious effort to cast me as an emotional female.”
Kelly has had some defenders, including state Sen. Loretta Weinberg, who had said: “Nobody else except the woman in this drama was treated in that manner.”
“I’m still hurt,” Kelly says now of Christie’s turn on her. “I don’t understand it. I was loyal.”
(A spokesperson for him did not respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment about Kelly’s feelings toward him or his potential return to politics.)
What Kelly calls her seven-year “nightmare” started to subside on June 28, 2019, when the Supreme Court decided to take up her lawyers' appeal of her 2016 conviction.
Prior to that, she had her belongings packed up in a box — anticipating jail time.
Her ex-husband, Joseph, was ready to move back into their home, where two of her four kids still live. At times, Kelly found herself sulking in her pajamas on the living room floor.
She journaled consistently throughout the investigation and her legal fallout — something she’ll “maybe one day” pitch to publishers.
“The evidence the jury heard no doubt shows wrongdoing — deception, corruption, abuse of power,” Justice Elena Kaganwrotefor the court. But, they ruled, “federal fraud statutes at issue do not criminalize all such conduct.”
“It was surreal, because we got this good news and [at the same time] there was some really big major problems in our country, that being COVID,” Kelly says now. “I don’t want to say that it was overshadowed, but it was. I totally respect that. But at the same time, it was like, for me, such an exhale.”
She says she cried when her 21-year-old son, Connor, called with the ruling, and she spent most of that day answering calls and texts.
“It wouldn’t be a funny joke,” she adds, her tone shifting serious.
Free from the anxiety of impending imprisonment, Kelly says she considered a career change after her unemployment amid the investigation and prosecution. But she worried she was never far enough away from her own name.
“Bridget Kelly sending out a resume is a little tricky, being that all you do is Google me and lots of stories come up,” she says.
Kelly hit “roadblocks” finding a job because of Bridgegate, she says, and would tense up when she saw an application with the question: “Have you ever been convicted of a crime?”
Her tone veers comic again, then relieved: “Well, I could write: ‘Nine, actually. Nine crimes.’ But now that that’s not the case — thank God.”
Kelly says there was a sense of exhalation — of a calling — when she got a phone call from a local Republican organizer who wanted her to run for the clerk’s office in the same county where she grew up.
It will be far from easy: The area leans heavily Democratic, the incumbent Democrat is running and Kelly is entering the race with an “elephant in the room” even if it’s no longer sitting on her chest.
“So many people have said to me, ‘Why would you do this?’ " she tells PEOPLE. “And my answer now is, ‘Why can’t I?’ So many of the people that were named and involved in Bridgegate have gone on with their lives.”
Kelly describes this act of penance: After she began her campaign, “one of the first places I went to was the Fort Lee Republican Club” in an attempt to apologize and let voters “get to know Bridget Kelly.”
She says she doesn’t have her eye on higher office at the moment, merely to win the county clerk’s race come November and then serve out a five-year term.
A careerist “behind-the-scenes” government employee who worked as a state legislative aide before joining Christie’s office, Kelly says her approach now is “to serve the people, not ourselves” — an important lesson, whenever it’s learned.
“I think people have lost faith in government,” Kelly says. “And I just always love to be a troubleshooter.”
source: people.com
