"If nominated I will not run. If elected I will not serve," Kerrigan says. "I want to be a video jockey on MTV." She says her immediate plans are to attend law school at the University of Virginia, where she has already gained acceptance.

A True Southerner?

Although much of her stated rationale for hanging the Confederate flag is based on the idea of defending the Southern ideal, some who remember her from her younger years say they don't recall anything particularly "Southern" about her at all.

In an interview, Kerrigan refused to say exactly where she was born. The most specific thing she would say is, "I was born in the South. I was born a rebel." She says she has lived in Mobile, Alabama; Great Falls, Virginia; and Arizona.

While Kerrigan speaks with a Southern accent, and maintains she's always had it, some say they don't really remember her displaying that trait when when she lived in Virginia. Geoff S. Keenan, who attended Langley High School with Kerrigan and who lives across the street from her house in Great Falls, Virginia, says he's "pretty sure" she didn't have the accent in high school.

A high school friend who spoke on the condition of anonymity says the town Kerrigan lived in is by no means part of the deep South, but is merely "a very wealthy Washington suburb."

The friend says Kerrigan's recent attempt to portray herself as a defender of the South comes as news to him. "If Bridget was to try to show that she represents a Southern belle, I couldn't be more surprised," he says.

Of Kerrigan's flag-hanging activities, the friend says, "it totally surprises me that she would be doing something like that." The friend also says he does not remember her having a Southern accent.

Besides possibly changing her accent, Kerrigan has also changed her name. She says her parents intended her to have the name "Bridget," but overlooked an error on her birth certificate, which spelled the name "Brigid."

Kerrigan says she discovered the error at age 16, when she went to get her driver's license. She kept her legal documents under the name "Brigdet," but used the name "Brigid" until she got to Harvard. She says she made the switch to avoid "a logistical and clerical nightmare."

Keenan mentions that he does not recall Kerrigan taking part in any unusual political activity in her high school years. And in fact, in an interview, Kerrigan did not suggest in any way that politics was a large part of her life during that time.

One of her main passions during high school, she says, was riding horses. Another highlight was traveling to Ireland in a special program that concentrated on Irish history and literature, she says.

She was a National Merit Scholarship Finalist, she says, and was accepted by the University of Virginia under their Early Decision plan. She didn't consider applying to Harvard, she says, because everything she wanted was available in Virginia.

But her life took a dramatic turn, she says, in the summer before she was supposed to leave for Charlottesville and the campus planned by Thomas Jefferson. An automobile accident in July 1987 left her comatose for a week, and it took her nearly a year to recuperate fully.

According to a contemporaneous article in the Washington Post, the accident killed 17-year-old Amy Edgerton, a friend and passenger in a black Toyota truck driven by Kerrigan. In the article, Capt. Ronald Miner, Fairfax county police traffic division commander, speculated that alcohol was a factor in the accident.