Family life with Julian Assange

Stella Moris is one of the most vocal of Julian Assange’s supporters and she has more reason than most to want him to be freed from jail. The 37-year-old lawyer has two young sons with Assange, and they plan to marry – though that may never be possible: if the WikiLeaks founder is extradited to the US, he could spend the rest of his life behind bars. They first met in 2011: as a Swedish speaker, she’d been recruited to help him fight sexual assault allegations in Sweden, says Kirsty Lang in The Sunday Times. But it wasn’t until 2015, after he’d taken refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy, that their relationship became intimate. As a member of his legal team, Moris was in and out of the embassy all the time. Still, it’s hard to imagine how romance blossomed. Did they have any privacy? “There were security guards there 24/7 and CCTV but not in Julian’s bedroom or office.” The place was bugged, though, so “anything private or secret I wrote down on a piece of paper. That’s how I told Julian I was pregnant.” She took their first son to meet Assange in the embassy (with a friend posing as the baby’s father); their second met him in Belmarsh. She fears they’ll never see him again. Yet she surely knew that was a risk, so why did she go down this path? “We had a stable, long-term relationship and we wanted to start a family,” she says. “It was about taking control. This was one decision that no one could interfere with. It was very elementary.”