“Mr. Christie,’’ she added, “you are a bully and the days of you calling me a liar and destroying my life are over.”
Mr. Christie on Wednesday revisited the argument he has made about his role in the scandal.
“As I have said before, I had no knowledge of this scheme prior to or during these lane realignments, and had no role in authorizing them,” he said in a statement. “No credible evidence was ever presented to contradict that fact. Anything said to the contrary is simply untrue.”
In an interview before her sentencing, Ms. Kelly said the last time she spoke to Mr. Christie was in early January 2014, the evening before her infamous email was revealed. The governor sat in her office for an hour and a half, talking about nothing in particular, before she had to leave to pick up her children.
She said that she still felt betrayed by the governor.
“I don’t understand why he laid this on me,” she said. “I just, I don’t understand it. I was a loyal soldier in the sense that I got to work every day, commuted farther than anyone in that office. I don’t know. I’m so, I’m hurt, I’m angry and I’m just I’m still just so curious as to why.”
Ms. Kelly spent nearly 20 years working for an assemblyman before joining Mr. Christie’s 2009 campaign in a field office in Bergen County and working the phone banks, often with her four children in tow.
After Mr. Christie’s victory, Ms. Kelly quickly ascended the ranks of his administration to deputy chief of staff.
“This wasn’t some part-time job that I got because I was a campaign worker,” she said in an interview. “I worked in state government for almost 20 years. So those 20 years were basically taken from me by the governor. Relationships I built over the course of time, who my children grew to know, because this is what I did for a living, all those disappeared.”