Courtney Williams held Top Secret clearance at Fort Bragg for six years. Federal prosecutors say she gave classified special-operations tactics to a journalist. She says she was exposing sexual harassment inside one of the most secretive units in the US military.
Federal prosecutors in North Carolina have charged Courtney Williams, a 40-year-old Army veteran and former civilian employee at Fort Bragg, with violating the Espionage Act after she allegedly handed classified national defence information to a journalist. Williams was arrested by the FBI on Tuesday and indicted by a federal grand jury on Wednesday. From 2010 to 2016, she worked as an operational support specialist embedded with a Special Military Unit at Fort Bragg — a euphemism widely understood to refer to Delta Force, the Army's elite counterterrorism unit. She held a Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information clearance and had daily access to the most closely guarded operational details in the US military, including the tactics, techniques and procedures that special operators use in the field.
Between 2022 and 2025, Williams logged more than ten hours of phone calls and exchanged over 180 text messages with journalist Seth Harp, who used the information in his 2025 book about Fort Bragg and a related article in a national magazine. Prosecutors have what appears to be an unusually strong case: in messages to her own mother obtained by investigators, Williams wrote that she "might get arrested for disclosing classified information" and then cited the specific section of the Espionage Act she believed she was breaking. The admission suggests she understood the legal consequences and chose to proceed anyway — a fact that will make any defence based on ignorance of the law almost impossible to sustain in court.
But the case is far from straightforward. Harp has publicly called Williams a "brave whistleblower," insisting that her disclosures were primarily about the sexual harassment and gender discrimination she endured during eight years working alongside Delta Force operators. The book details a hostile work environment that Williams allegedly suffered inside one of the most secretive and male-dominated corners of the American military — an environment where internal reporting channels are notoriously ineffective and where the culture of secrecy makes external accountability nearly impossible. Civil liberties organisations argue that prosecuting someone under the Espionage Act for exposing workplace abuse sends a devastating message to anyone considering blowing the whistle on misconduct inside classified programmes. Prosecutors counter that whatever Williams's motivations, the classified operational details she shared could endanger the lives of service members currently deployed — and that there are legal channels for reporting abuse that do not involve handing national secrets to a journalist writing a book.