Greg Kelley’s life has not been simple. As a teenager, his high school football hero status and promising future quickly evaporated when he was falsely accused of being a child molester.
After he was convicted, a crowd of supporters surrounded him but a cloud of uncertainty about his future continued to follow as shown in a new docuseries about the flawed case against him — and his eventual freedom.
In 2012, Kelley had moved into his friend Johnathan McCarty’s home — which also served as an in-home daycare facility — when his own parents fell ill. At the time, he was a popular football star for Leander High School in Cedar Park who received a scholarship in June of 2013 to play football at University of Texas at San Antonio. He was just a junior at that point.
But, when one of the children at the McCarty daycare accused Kelley of molestation, his college football dreams — as well as his entire life — fell apart.
That summer, a 4-year-old boy who attended the McCarty daycare accused Kelley of molesting him. A second boy also came forward but later recanted his accusation against Kelley. Jake Brydon, who led the movement to get Kelley exonerated, told Oxygen.com that the prosecutor's office offered Kelley 10 years of probation with no jail time but he refused to take the deal, proclaiming innocence.
“If you’re that sure he did it you’ll give him no jail time, but if he is that adamant about not pleading guilty, you’ll give him a 25 year sentence?" Brydon said.
Kelley fought the charges but was convicted in 2014 of two counts of super aggravated sexual assault and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
As Showtime’s new docuseries “Outcry” shows, many in the community had their doubts about Kelley’s guilt despite his conviction. Kelley's then-girlfriend and current wife Gaebri Anderson Kelley noted that McCarty was the first person to come to mind when she heard about the accusations. Kelley's other defenders pointed out that both the high schooler's original lawyer and the prosecution made missteps by not looking at all the evidence — including neglecting to interview McCarty, who happened to look just like Kelley.
As "Outcry" points out, McCarty's initial lawyer was close friends with the McCarty family and she declined to look at him as a potential subject. Furthermore, an investigator used questionable tactics to interview the children. In the docuseries, child testimony expert Dr. Kamala London points out that investigators' interviewing techniques were flawed: the kids were asked leading questions. Kelley’s supporters rallied to show their support of the convicted teen, and to point out the apparent holes in the case.
And after Shawn Dick took office in 2016 and became the Williamson County district attorney, even the prosecutor's office sided with Kelley and his supporters. Dick stated publicly in 2017 that his office had failed Kelley, The Austin American-Statesman reported that year.
Kelley's case "clearly was the perfect storm of all aspects of the criminal justice system failing," Dick told Oxygen.com. He contended the police did a "truly deficient" job, claimed that Kelley's initial defense attorney "had a conflict of interest," argued that the prosecution "had blinders on," and said the jurors didn't all go with their gut.
Dick said he would not have even tried Kelley if he was in office at the time, noting that there was not enough evidence to prosecute in his view. He told Oxygen.com that the prosecutors' office didn't get "any legal blame in any of this," which he said was unfair. "They just excluded any other possible theories about what else could have happened," Dick said of his predecessors.
"Trying to go recreate a case involving small children years later, memories fade, change and it’s just almost impossible to go back and actually do justice in that case," he continued, explaining how a flawed prosecution can rob victims of true justice.