Cheryl Benard

Benard's Austrian bank account was frozen in February 2014. This happened as part of an investigation into allegations of money laundering by Benard's husband, former U.S. official Zalmay Khalizad. Benard was subsequently cleared by the Austrian court and the freezing of her accounts was found to have been illegal. Prior to the announcement of the court decision, information about the investigation was leaked to the press, allegedly the result of court documents having been disposed of unshredded in the general trash and found by scavenging bloggers.

She is a feminist writer. She and Edit Schlaffer contributed the piece "Benevolent despotism versus the contemporary feminist movement" to the 1984 anthology Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women's Movement Anthology, edited by Robin Morgan. Benard's most recent book, Eurojihad – Patterns of Islamist Radicalization and Terrorism in Europe, with Angel Rabasa, was published by Cambridge University Press in November 2014.

Cheryl Benard (born in 1953) is an academic scholar, writer, political scientist and novelist. She is the wife of Zalmay Khalilzad, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Afghanistan and Iraq. She and Khalilzad have two sons, Alexander Benard and Maximilian Benard.