Assange gives his side of sex story
BRITAIN: Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has provided intimate details of what he termed a consensual sexual encounter in Sweden in 2010, which unfolded into a global legal tussle and a six-year battle on his part to escape confinement.
In a defiant bid to pressure Sweden to drop a presumed sexual assault investigation, which has led to Assange being given asylum in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, the Australian yesterday released a 19-page statement that he gave to a visiting Swedish prosecutor on November 14 and 15.
‘‘I am now releasing my statement to the public,’’ Assange said in a separate note. ‘‘I want people to know the truth about how abusive this process has been.’’
He said he was ‘‘entirely innocent’’ of any wrongdoing.
The statement includes text messages allegedly taken from his sexual partner’s cellphone indicating what Assange said was ‘‘clearly consensual sex’’, not rape.
Assange called on Sweden to drop the inquiry, halt his ‘‘cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment’’, and provide ironclad guarantees that it would not send him to stand trial in the United States, which Assange believes has an open criminal investigation against him.
From his refuge on the first floor of the embassy in London’s Knightsbridge district, Assange and his non-profit Wikileaks organisation, which has published around 10 million secret emails and documents over the past decade, remain a thorn in the side of the US government and US politicians.
In July, the group released internal Democratic National Committee emails, leading to the resignation of its chairwoman, Democratic representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, of Florida.
That leak, and a subsequent one of emails from the inbox of the chief of the Hillary Clinton campaign, John Podesta, proved damaging to Clinton’s ultimately failed presidential bid.
Assange said US prosecutors desperately wanted to see him behind bars.
He blasted Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny for pursuing the criminal investigation without seeking testimony from him and denying him the presence of a defence lawyer.
Assange said that early on during his visit to Sweden, a young woman came to hear him lecture, then joined a small group having lunch with him. He identified her only as SW.
He said SW sent a text message to a friend on August 14 that read: ‘‘I want him. I want him.’’
He said the woman, an employee of the National Museum, took him there, ’’where she kissed me and placed my hands on her breasts’’.
Several days later, on August 16, Assange said the woman ‘‘invited me to her home’’ and ‘‘made it very clear that she wanted to have sexual intercourse’’.
‘‘During that night and again in the morning we had consensual sexual intercourse on four or five occasions,’’ he wrote. The next morning, SW texted a friend: ‘‘JA did not want to use a condom.’’
On August 20, the woman called Assange from a hospital and asked him to come and take a test for sexually transmitted diseases, he wrote. ’’She said ... that if I didn’t come down to the hospital she would go to the police to ask whether I could be forced to get tested.’’
Assange said he was ‘‘certain she expressly consented to unprotected sex’’, and that a subsequent text message she sent to a friend indicated he had not forced himself upon her while she slept.
Assange portrayed other text messages from SW as indicating that Swedish police were eager to press charges against him over her opposition. - TNS