In the piece I wrote called The Bottom Line I put the question, did either of the girls who said Assange had raped them sleep with him after the offense?
I fished about a bit, and the answer, it seems, is yes.
Their initials, I am told, are AA and SW.
AA, the ‘sex by surprise’ one, after being so surprised slept naked with him for the rest of the week, insisted he stay there in her flat though other friends were offering to lodge and feed him, threw a party for him, volunteered to be his assistant on a permanent basis, and didn’t go to the police until she was rung by SW.
‘You would be hard pressed to find a woman,’ my informant, female, wrote last night, ‘who would not have the man out of the house at first opportunity if he had done what she alleges he had done to her. And would certainly not be volunteering to be around him in a professional context or on an ongoing basis.’
With SW, the ‘minor rape allegation’, he had sex, using condoms, on and off during the evening, between sleep and wakefulness. Then there was a final interaction without a condom. She said she was ‘half asleep’ (the prosecutor, contradicting SW’s own testimony, said she was fully asleep), but he said she ‘reacted in a way that suggested she was awake and she certainly consented to sex without a condom at some point thereafter (didn’t raise a complaint)’, according to his testimony and also, bafflingly, hers.
He left, and she asked him to call her. She became upset, and then ‘frantic’ when he didn’t return her calls and in this mood rang AA. They compared notes, aware now that he had not told each of them of his contacts with the other. SW got through to Assange and asked him to do a venereal-diseases test, and he agreed to do that on the Saturday. In the meantime they had gone to the police on the Friday, and, my informant says, ‘he wakes up to tabloid headlines of double rape allegations. SW said she felt “railroaded” by police.’
There were also lots of text-messages, I am told, about ‘money and revenge.’
I’ll bet there were.
What is awful about all this is not the obviously spontaneous lies of the silly women he lucklessly and tactlessly dealt with but the likelihood that if he had turned up in Sweden a year ago, or eighteen months ago, he would have almost certainly have got off, on the basis of the evidence we see here, of raped girls behaving as if they still liked him afterwards, for days and days of affectionate dealing on end. But no fair trial of him now is possible. And the Americans have had the time since then to amass their forty thousand pages of evidence that he is/was a spy, deserving of torture and eight hundred years in a very small cell without clothes among bright lights and very loud music freezing and frying by turns.
The girls seem more innocent, and more entrapped by circumstance than I had previously thought. SW has vanished, AA went to Israel but is back now in Stockholm and going to a cocktail party of significant political people next week.
The difficulty now of course is that the Swedes would rather extradite him than try him.
Which means they will, if they get their hands on him. The Americans will want them to. Not before the election of course, for he is a modern Ellsberg to many Americans, but after. Under President Romney perhaps, on the insistence of the Tea Party.
And it may take twenty years, the whole process, and he will die in American custody, treated like poor, mad, romantic, baffled Bradley Manning, for the rest of his life.
Name:
No doubt if this is relevant it will be taken into account during the trial – a trial that will properly be held in a Swedish court.
Meanwhile women are advised to watch this blog carefully for post-rape etiquette hints.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18577345
“Mrs Assange said she understood Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa had made sympathetic noises and would not be “bullied” but she had heard the US was threatening to withdraw billions of dollars in aid from Ecuador if it granted asylum.”
Heard from whom? This is gross paranoia and delusion. Assange is worth billions of dollars.
“The case against him in Sweden coincided with the release of these documents and has no basis in fact, if you look at the evidence and the way the Swedish prosecution has run the case.”
Bob, you made a good case to me that people like Chamberlain or Thomson, who unfailingly continue to assert their innocence, come hell or high water, very often turn out to be innocent.
Compare his mother’s statement above, which is an echo of Assange himself.
Assange doesn’t assert his innocence. He talks about the way the Swedish prosecution has run its case, and about the US, and how the girls were probably a bit jealous, and about becoming a senator, and running away to Ecuador to start a chat show, and how private secrets are different to public secrets, and what he thinks other people will say about him…
Assange does everything but assert his innocence of the allegations that find him in this mess.
Why then are you doing it for him?
Sounds to me then that he should have gone back to Sweden a year ago and his barrister could have supplied all this evidence and he would have walked free. Clearly, if what you say is correct, he would not only have been declared not guilty but the Swedish legal authorities would have carried him around on their shoulders to the applause of the crowd.
Why then did he do a runner and spend the last year trying to avoid his inevitable vindication?
Please provide a reason.
He knew the Swedes could deliver him up to the Americans, and he feared they might. And a one-in-ten chance of torture, like Manning’s, in a very small cell for sixty years, or even fifteen, wasn’t worth taking.
The same Sweden where he was waiting for the outcome of his application for a residence permit when the alleged incidents took place. Those Swedes are not only evil collaborators they are dumb evil collaborators. All they needed to do was to grant him the residence permit and hand him over to the Americans at leisure, and instead they refuse residency and charge him with a criminal offence.
Yup.
That explains why the US decided to drop the Swedes and get the Brits to shoot Assange when he leaves the Ecuadorian Embassy. The only loose end here is why they waited for him to enter the Embassy. Dumb and Dumber, eh?
Well, you’ll have him done in regardless of innocence by hook or by crook, won’t you?
What’s your problem?
How rude. What’s yours?
Kindly refrain from pretending your fantasies are anything to do with me. I am referring in this case to having Assange “done in”.
“A German film-maker wants to turn the WikiLeaks founder’s life into a romantic comedy and has been working with a British screenwriter on a script.”
http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/movies/julian-assanges-love-life-to-be-turned-into-a-rom-com/story-e6frfmvr-1226408899186
Surely if the film’s producers had any sense they should contact Bob to help with the dramatic fiction!
If so, they would apply to Film Australia for a grant. Too easy.
Should they make the film, or not?
A romantic comedy? Of course not!
Whyever not? Have you seen Veep? In The Loop? The Thick Of It? Love, Actually? Casablanca?
Are you mad?
Or is there some other explanation?
Whyever not? Have you seen Veep? In The Loop? The Thick Of It? Love, Actually? Casablanca?
Are you mad?
Or is there some otxxxher explanation
Bob, I hope you’re not prone to waking Anne with a good dose of ‘sex by surprise’ after one too many Mateus on those cold Palm Beach nights?
Only once, in 1967, not in Palm Beach but Cremorne Point. It was legal then, as it is now, in civilised countries, including, I imagine, Sweden, if, as in the Assange case, consensual sex occurs before and after the alleged ‘surprise’. When you are a couple.
Why do you ask?
What do you mean by ‘good dose’?
Explain yourself.
One wonders why the Swedes refuse to let Assange answer questions by Skype, or video conference, or email, or telephone, or post, or carrier pigeon, or smoke signal….
Their refusal in this would play on my nerve/s.
And then what? Arrest him and take him into virtual custody? Arrest his avatar, perhaps?
No. After they interview him by Skype, then would be the time to apply for extradition if they felt there was a case to be answered. It would at least seem more reasonable.
If not try him by Skype as well. Or in absentia if necessary. If they can make it stick then better if he’s made to serve Swedish time in Ecuador or maybe Australia just so long as the Yanks don’t get their paws on him.
Frankly I think he’s 99% probably innocent of anything I’d consider punishable by gaol time, but realising that from a legal standpoint something of a catch 22 situation emerges I’d kind of like to see the Swedes take their best shot without subjecting him to the risk of persecution by the US. Just to see whether they’d play out the farce or not.
Sorry, just got to this. What he said etc.,.
The denial and antagonism toward Assange continues to baffle.
Its almost like we’re having to watch a rerun of Hicks and Habib; can somebody help me to understand what is driving this viciousness?
America; again.
Like H and H he showed that America is incompetent, and they don’t like that. Hicks and Habib were innocent of any crime, and known to be so, and punished anyway *because* they were innocent.
Assange, also innocent, showed how incompetent they were in keeping secrets.
And they hated that.
And his punishment continues.
I wouldnt call it ‘viciousness’ even though the battle does seem vicious on a number of sides. However, some of us who are not consumed by the only thing it takes to support Assange – virulent anti-Americanism – are repelled by his obvious unwillingness to face accusers for sexual assault charges, who are turned off by the usual Australian “nobody’s courts are worth defending other than ours” etc.
Also by his hypocrisy, the holier-than-thou seeker for freedom of information who goes onto the online Pravda “Russia Today” and interviews terrorists or claims to want to be in Ecuador which has no free press and will shortly only have government mouthpieces.
These are some of the reasons why I am sick of Assange.
I don’t mind RT, and never thought of it as a propaganda machine for a Soviet organ MR. When I would flick through the channels while overseas, CNN,BBC, Al Jazeera, CNBC etc, I never really saw much difference in overall content or presentation.
I like RT for their Financial/Business shows and their take on the current Economic Depression by giving voice to alternative views, watch Max Keiser and Stacey Herbert, and fail to be informed or entertained.
I have never felt that Assange projects a “holier than thou” attitude. It is usually used as a disparaging remark of those in power, that choose or are forced to wallow and work in the dirt, (to me that is the inverted Holier than Thou attitude). But when a good part of the world has an opinion over your very existence, any utterance he makes is going to look self-serving, egotistical, evasive, preachy, whining (some of the adjectives I have read and heard in the recent past). I think, he thinks he is in the fight for his life, and I would hope before he closes his eyes at night and first thing after he opens them in the morning, that his last and first thoughts are with Bradley Manning.
Assange is a desperate man and that calls for desperate measures, Ecuador.
Picasso comes to mind staying in Paris untouched during the German occupation in WWII.
That said I have seen some evidence of misguided left wing crusading for persons of dubious character go terribly wrong, check out Jack Unterweger.
I have not the slightest objection to Russia Today either. Nor do I object to Media Matters and certainly don’t object to Andrew Breitbart. I love the chance for any view to be aired/watched/spoken.
But I am not doing the dying swan act or claiming to be the “openness” holy man either.
Encouraging to see an article in the Guardian ( for some posters here, a Brit newspaper that actually tries to tell the truth, unlike the stuff they’d mainly read if they can read).
This concerns a petition up that includes signatories like Daniel Ellsberg, Naomi Wolf, Sibel Edmonds, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore and a raft of professors, commending that Ecuador grant Assange asylum.
The Guardian was owned by a trust, The Scott Trust, which aimed to ensure the paper’s editorial independence in perpetuity. This has come under some pressure lately, with reduced profitability.
I was tempted to suggest something similar for Australia, but the bankrolling would need to be impressive.
BTW, did anyone see Clive Palmer interviewed by Leigh Sales? He seemed quite moderate on the issues which did not affect his financial interests; certainly surprised me.
….yes, he came across as a rather pleasant bloke in that interview.
Since the thread topic has unaccountably meandered away from It’s subject, I feel I should mention that a report from SOA Watch in the ‘states, just passed on ten minutes ago, elsewhere announces that President Corea has just ended Ecuador’s participation in the notorious School of the Americas, in the presence of US delegates.
Our School Motto is “Give me the cadet at age 18 and we will show you the Dictator/Chief or Police/Judicial Functionary/ at age 40″
Thanks for that news Paul.
allthumbs, ta for that.