Todd Chrisley is speaking out after he and his wife, Julie, were pardoned by President Trump and released from federal prison
At a press conference in Nashville Friday, Chrisley thanked his daughter, God, Trump and members of his administration.
“Whether you believe it or not — because I was you at some point — even though this pardon has happened, I still was convicted of something that I did not do,” Chrisley said in the remarks at the Kimpton Aertson Hotel in Nashville. “It could be you. It could be you, it could be any of you. And somewhere in this room, someone has had a family member that has been affected by the system.”
He added, “I understand the shame that’s around it, but I refuse to feed into that because shame is like a cancer that just spreads and I have no shame.”
While Chrisley’s wife Julie wasn’t at the Friday press conference, she was seen the day before leaving a butcher shop in Nashville.
Chrisley said Julie was at home with their adopted daughter, Chloe, who “will not let her go.”
Reflecting on learning of the pardon, Chrisley said he felt “numb” when he found out.
“I had a staff member that came to me and said ‘you’ve just been pardoned.’ And I just looked at him. He then recalled talking to his daughter on the phone, who told him, ‘It’s true. It’s true.’”
“And then after about 10 minutes, all I could think about was the guys that I was leaving behind because I had made such wonderful relationships with those men,” he said recalling how his fellow inmates lined up to say goodbye as he was leaving federal prison on Wednesday.
“They were saying ‘Don’t leave. Don’t forget us. Don’t forget us.’ And my commitment is to them that I will never forget them,” he recalled.
Chrisley vowed to keep fighting for the incarcerated men at the Federal Prison Camp in Pensacola and “continue to expose the injustices that go on there and throughout the [U.S. Department of Justice] and throughout the Bureau of Prisons.”
After returning home, Chrisley recalled still being stunned that he was truly free from behind bars.
“I woke up the first morning and I was looking around. I’m like, ‘This is really real. I’m home,’” Chrisley said. “So I was grateful for our family to be all back in the same room, to be together, to share a meal together, to pray together and to know that we’re still in the fight together.
But they also teased their upcoming reality show with Lifetime, which was announced last week and will be “pulling back the curtain” on the family’s “unprecedented access to their lives in a deeply personal and dramatic new series.”
“We’re blessed to have our family back, and we’re blessed to be coming back to television, because we do have a much bigger story to tell now than we ever have,” Chrisley said.
Savannah said the show “had been filming and we had just wrapped filming for all intents and purposes. And then we get the call that they had been pardoned. So we picked right back up and we’re excited because I think this new show is going to give, first off, it’s going to give people a look into the trial and things that we went through and we’re going to set the record straight, put some documents out there.”
The show, Chrisley said, resumed “filming literally the night that we got home.”
Cameras captured Chrisley and his wife reuniting at home.
“You will see the first time he and Mom see each other for the first time,” Savannah said.
The reality stars, best known for their USA Network show Chrisley Knows Best, were each serving years-long prison sentences after being convicted of federal bank fraud and tax evasion charges.
After Margo Martin, the president’s special assistant and communications adviser, released a video of Trump on a phone call with Todd and Julie’s children, Savannah and Grayson Chrisley, on Tuesday, Harrison Fields, the principal deputy press secretary and special assistant to the president, confirmed Trump’s plan to pardon the couple in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter.
“The president is always pleased to give well-deserving Americans a second chance, especially those who have been unfairly targeted and overly prosecuted by an unjust justice system,” Fields’s statement read. “President Trump called Savannah and her brother from the Oval Office to personally inform them that he would be pardoning their parents, Todd and Julie Chrisley, whose sentences were far too harsh.”
In June 2022, Todd and Julie were found guilty on federal charges including bank fraud and tax evasion.
That same year, Todd was sentenced to 12 years behind bars plus 16 months of probation, while Julie Chrisley got seven years in prison and 16 months of probation.
The pardons were officially signed on Wednesday and the Chrisleys left their respective prisons in Pensacola and, Florida and Lexington, Kentucky.
Savannah Chrisley, who has been a vocal Trump supporter and advocate for her parents’ release, spoke to reporters outside of the Pensacola facility as she waited for her father. She wore a hot-pink Make America Great Again hat and “Women for Trump: jacket.
“My parents have not spoken to each other, heard each others’ voices or seen each other in the past two-and-a-half years,” she said on Wednesday, according to the Associated Press. “We just want to get home. We want to be reunited,”
Savannah told reporters that her brother, Grayson, was meeting her mother in Kentucky.
“We’re going to celebrate anniversaries, birthdays, Christmases, all the things,” Savannah Chrisley said Wednesday, “because we’re going to make up for the lost time.”
Watch the full press conference below.
