A soaring ego. Vile personal habits. And after years in his squalid den, hardly a friend left
FOR seven long years, he has resided in one of London’s glitziest neighbourhoods – but there was nothing remotely glamorous about the manner in which Julian Assange was finally evicted from his Knightsbridge bolthole.
Ranting and dishevelled, with his hands cuffed and straggly beard unwashed, the 47-year-old WikiLeaks founder cut a bizarre and somewhat pathetic figure as he was carried horizontally into a police wagon at around 10am on Thursday.
The one-time hero of the chattering classes, who was uncharitably likened to both a vagrant and Albert Trotter from Only Fools and Horses by onlookers, has now swapped his virtual prison for a real one.
Given the extent of the various criminal charges he now faces, it seems unlikely that he’ll taste fresh air and freedom for some time.
Particularly unedifying, for a man who (according to at least one interviewer) counts typing his own name into Google as a favourite recreational activity, will be the dramatic decline in popularity that his various misadventures have produced.
Assange has managed, during his marathon stay at the Ecuadorian Embassy, to fall out with a host of former allies, including many Left-leaning celebrity friends who not only fought his corner, but also financed his expensive legal battles, and at times put him up in their various mansions.
The high-profile supporters to turn against him range from feminists queasy at his decision to jump bail to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he was wanted for questioning after two women accused him of rape and sexual assault, to many free speech campaigners for whom he was once a great hero of our age.
The latter group were outraged by the revelation a few years ago that, seemingly due to a combination of egotism and paranoia, Assange was making WikiLeaks employees sign contracts threatening them with a €14million lawsuit if they spoke publicly about his organisation.
Meanwhile, Assange’s reputation among liberals of every persuasion was severely dented in 2016, when WikiLeaks played a key role in the murky campaign to destabilise Hillary Clinton during the 2016 US election campaign, publishing emails seemingly obtained from her campaign team by Russian hackers.
It was, however, the breakdown of Julian Assange’s once-chummy relationship with the government of Ecuador that really sealed his fate.
After his arrival in 2012, the country’s hard-Left then president, Rafael Correa, had initially said, that he was welcome to stay in the embassy, a stone’s throw from Harrods, for ‘centuries’. Yet as the years went by, the mutual affection soured, with staff reportedly tiring of their house guest’s often belligerent manner and questionable approach to personal hygiene, along with the vast amount of cash it was taking to house him.
Economic troubles have made Ecuador increasingly anxious to rebuild relations with the West, and all too aware of damage that his ongoing residency was doing to their diplomatic standing.
By last year, Assange and his hosts were communicating via lawyers. And in the final months of his stay, relations deteriorated to such an extent that the WikiLeaks founder was even accused of having smeared human waste across the internal walls of his residence
‘During his stay at the Ecuadorian Embassy, during the government of the former president Rafael Correa, they tolerated things like Mr Assange putting faeces on the walls of the Embassy and other types of behaviour of this kind that is far removed from the minimum respect a guest should have in a country which has generously welcomed him,’ said the country’s interior minister.
To evoke such hostility from people who were once close allies is nothing if not true to form.
For ever since he burst into the public eye, as the eccentric founder of a website devoted to publishing previously-secret material, Assange’s life has been overshadowed by an apparent inability to maintain cordial relations with even his most fervent supporters.
Some acquaintances have described this characteristic as ‘a bit autistic’. Other former friends have said he’s governed by a toxic combination of ‘eccentricity, obsession, paranoia and ego’.
Former allies turned adversaries include the Guardian newspaper, which collaborated with him to leak hundreds of thousands of US military and diplomatic cables in the summer and autumn of 2010, turning him into a global celebrity in the process – and, critics said, risking national security and even lives.
Assange, who grew up in Melbourne, and became a computer hacker during the 1990s, had made headlines earlier that year, when his previously-obscure website released a video titled ‘collateral murder’.
It showed a US Apache helicopter in Baghdad repeatedly firing on a group of men, including a Reuters photographer and his driver, killing 12.
He and the Guardian soon struck a deal to publish the various tranches of leaked US cables (which had been obtained by a US army private called Bradley Manning, who later transitioned and said she wanted to be known as Chelsea), in collaboration with two other newspapers: the New York Times and the German title Der Spiegel. On paper, it was to be a commendable piece of public interest journalism. But behind the scenes there were complications.
Specifically: the newspapers believed that many of the documents needed to be heavily redacted before publication, in order to prevent people named in them, including various Western soldiers and Afghan or Iraqi civilians, from suffering reprisals.
Assange, who disliked redaction in principle, was less convinced, and the two sides began to bicker. By November, he’d stopped passing on further documents to the outlets — only for disaffected WikiLeaks staff, who regarded Assange as ‘erratic and imperious’ and were tired of his ‘nearly delusional grandeur’, to leak them anyway. Assange then tried and failed to sue, to stop publication. In the fallout, the Guardian accused him of ‘360 degree belligerence’. He meanwhile described their staff as ‘lily-livered gits in glass offices’. Relations never recovered.
Then came the ugly episode that led to his arrest and eventual incarceration. In August 2010, Assange’s growing celebrity had seen him invited to visit Stockholm, where he slept with two female fans, according to their subsequent testimony to the police.
Both said their encounters had started on a consensual basis, but later turned darker. One of the women claimed he’d intentionally damaged a condom, before pinning her down during sex. The other accused him of having unprotected sex with her while she was asleep.
A police investigation was duly launched, but by the time detectives decided they needed to question Assange about the allegations, he’d left the country. In November 2010, they obtained an international arrest warrant. He was duly arrested, beginning a lengthy legal battle which saw Assange, who has always protested his innocence, initially take up residence at Ellingham Hall, a stately home in Norfolk owned by a supporter called Vaughan Smith, a former war correspondent.
While there, Assange declared that the rape claims were part of a conspiracy to extradite him to the US, where he believed he might face the death penalty for espionage. Perhaps ungallantly, he also describe his female accusers as being motivated by ‘hardcore feminism’.
Around this time, he also spent months working on an autobiography, for which he signed a multimillion pound deal. But the project soon collapsed in hugely acrimonious circumstances after he fell out with his agents and publishers.
The author Andrew O’Hagan, who’d been hired as a ghost writer, later wrote an eye-opening memoir of the period, saying that Assange spent average days ‘sat on his a***’, and alleging that his favourite activity was ‘following what people, especially his enemies, were saying about him on the internet’.
O’Hagan further accused Assange of making a variety of ‘sexist or anti-Semitic remarks’ in his presence, and described his table manners as being ‘like a pig’
He had a belligerent manner and questionable approach to hygiene He ogled a teen girl during a visit to a café