WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy by Leigh David

Author:Leigh, David [Leigh, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography
ISBN: 9781610390613
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 10394938
Publisher: Guardian Books
Published: 2011-02-08T00:00:00+00:00

Police: How do you react to that?

Assange: It’s not true.

He agreed that something had been said at the time, the police account notes. “Sonja looked at the sheet and saw that it was wet and said, ‘Look at that,’ and Julian answered, ‘It must be you’ … Julian just thought she was pointing to it as an indication of how loving the sex had been although she spoke as if it came from him … Then they didn’t discuss it any more.” He accepted there was no more intercourse all week after that event “but there were other sexual acts”.

He told the interrogators that Braun only challenged him at the very end of the week he spent at her flat: “She accused me of various things… many of which were false … That I took the condom off during sex. It was the first I had heard of it.” Her friend Klara (not her real name) had also been in contact and Assange had been arranging to meet her on the following day to discuss what he had heard were “incredible lies” being told about him. He did not consider that Braun was planning to make any formal complaint and was “really surprised” to find she had been to a hospital and there was talk of DNA and the police. “I expected the whole thing to be over until I heard the news from Expressen.”

That might have been the end of the story. But the two aggrieved women appointed a high-profile lawyer on their own behalf, Claes Borgström, former Swedish equal opportunities ombudsman and prominent Social Democrat politician. He got both cases reopened, as law allowed, by appealing to a chief prosecutor (överåklagare), the sex crimes specialist Marianne Ny. He told a news agency the women didn’t even know it was possible to appeal a prosecutor’s decision until he so advised them. “I had read the police reports. I had seen my clients and heard their stories,” Borgström said. “In my opinion, it was rape and attempted rape or sexual molestation.” He added: “We have better knowledge than other countries in the field of gender equality … That also means women don’t accept certain things in the same way they do in other countries.”

Not surprisingly, Assange was much dismayed. Facing a further interrogation about his unhappy one-night stand with the second woman, Katrin Weiss, he decided to leave town. He told friends he feared being arrested and paraded in front of a media circus. Subsequently, he circulated the idea that the resultant demand for his extradition was the result of covert pressure from the US government, who wanted to get their hands on him for the WikiLeaks exploits. No concrete evidence has yet surfaced to support this theory, although the US has threatened repeatedly that it will seek to bring its own indictment against Assange for information crimes. The claim certainly muddied the WikiLeaks waters, as conspiracy theories began to rage up and down the internet.

That summer, contemplating the imbroglio in Sweden from afar, the Guardian’s reporters in London were also dismayed.

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