‘Julian Assange molested me and lied … but I forgave him’, says Swedish accuser Anna Ardin

A Swedish woman who accused Julian Assange of molestation is glad he is out of jail, but says he is ‘no hero’ and it’s a shame the Albanese government made his return ‘political’.

Assange’s Swedish accuser Anna Ardin says he is no hero. Picture: AFP

Anna Ardin says an apology from Julian Assange would be nice, but she’s not expecting one.

This week the WikiLeaks founder has been escorted from ­Belmarsh Prison in London to Canberra, via a US courtroom in North Mariana, escorted by two ambassadors, while the woman originally known as “Miss A’’ who accused Assange of sexual molestation is picking up her daughter and cooking potatoes for dinner in her Swedish home.

Like many times over the past 14 years, Ms Ardin, 45, has had a rollercoaster week. She really wants to be distant from anything that Assange does but she admits to The Weekend Australian: “I’m not able to be out of it because, I mean, I’ve tried to be. This is not about me. This is about the US, and (the US government) not wanting their secrets to leak.”

She adds “everyone is confusing my story and the extradition case to Sweden with the extradition case in the United States. And I mean Julian appears to have been wanting that (confusion) from the very beginning.”

As Anthony Albanese comes under fire for greeting Assange with a prime ministerial phone call on his arrival and the Coalition accuses the Prime Minister of rolling out the red carpet for a felon, Ms Ardin says the man she alleged molested her is “no hero”.

“It’s a shame it’s been made political,” Ms Ardin told The Weekend Australian, after hearing of Assange’s welcome home by the Australian government.

But Ms Ardin wants to acknowledge that she is happy Assange, 52, is now free from Belmarsh Prison.

“I’m sincerely happy for him that he is not in this high security prison. He never should have been in the beginning. The good things that he did was exposing war crimes, the Chelsea Manning leaks and exposing the misuse of power and the abuse of human rights. People committing war crimes should be punished, not the ones exposing them.”

But she warns people who do good things are not heroes because they can also have flaws. “If you get a label of being a hero, many times you get a free pass. People think you’re a perfect person, and then they excuse things.”

Ms Ardin knows the imperfections of Assange first hand having worked with him to promote the work of WikiLeaks in Sweden in August 2010. He was to stay in her spare room, but having been given a key, he greets her at the front door holding one of her bras. “I’ve been looking through your underwear drawer,” he says. “I saw the size of this and thought ‘this is a woman I’d like to meet’.”

They end up having “uncomfortable” sex, and Ms Ardin claims he deliberately ripped a condom before ejaculating.

Assange is greeted by wife Stella at Canberra Airport. Picture: AFP

She says from the very first hours of confronting Assange about this, he had begun to twist a nasty narrative. Within days Ms Ardin discovered it was alleged Assange had also had unwanted unprotected sex with another woman (in this case the woman claims she had been woken up finding Assange inside of her) and they jointly asked him to have an HIV test to reassure them about their health. They were anxious because they would have to wait three months to find out if they had been infected, whereas a test on Assange would provide immediate information.

He allegedly refused. Ms Ardin claims he said “I am a white Australian, Australian men don’t have HIV’’ and that he was too busy.

So the two went to the police to try and force him to have the test. Instead, they found themselves on the end of a sustained vitriolic attack, firstly by Assange and then by his many supporters.

Assange denied the allegations, telling the media he had no idea what this claim was about, who the people are and who was accusing him.

Ms Ardin says of Assange’s public outburst: “That was a complete lie. We had talked to him just hours before and he knew exactly who we were and why we reported him and what he had done, and he knew that, but he chose to say that it was a smear campaign and that they had been warned about dirty tricks and something about the Pentagon. And he knew the Pentagon was not involved, but he still said that. He tried to avoid the ­responsibility.”

The attacks on the women were vicious and unrelenting. According to Ms Ardin, Assange and his team accused her of being a liar, a CIA spy, a honey trap for the Americans, speculated that Jews were behind the police report, that it was a feminist mob job, that she was a lesbian, that she was part of a conspiracy with a politician and a police officer. She said malicious information was spread about her on Facebook to impact her credibility. One person put a bounty on her head.

“That has been, for me, much worse than the initial the original abuse,’’ she says.

Ms Ardin says she wasn’t any CIA spy but rather a complainant of sexual abuse, and six different courts, three in Sweden and three in Britain, believed there was enough evidence for the investigation to continue.

“People take for granted that he is innocent,’’ she notes. “That creates a need for a scapegoat or to vilify me. That’s a very common thing in (alleged) sexual abuse cases, that kind of turnaround – the perspective that the woman reporting a sex crime is seen as a traitor, or as an abuser of the man.’’

Such was the harassment that Ms Ardin fled to Spain.

Assange scarpered off to the Ecuador embassy in London for the next seven years to avoid an arrest warrant issued by the Swedish authorities to question him over these complaints lodged by the two women.

There would be no astonishment when reports emerged of Assange’s questionable hygiene inside the embassy. Ms Ardin had complained in 2010 to her friends about Assange’s personal habits when he was staying at her place. He never takes a shower or washes, she says, so by the last day, the flat “smells strongly of unwashed body, of dried-in sweat, and there are turds floating in the toilet”.

Ms Ardin was surprised that Assange sought asylum in the embassy if he was worried about US extradition for WikiLeaks releasing hundreds of thousands of ­Afghanistan and Iraq war logs and other US military information.

“Sweden doesn’t have an extradition agreement with the US that the UK has. So as far as I can understand it, he would have been safer in Sweden,’’ she says. She also believes he would have received a short sentence if found guilty, far shorter time than his self-incarceration inside the embassy. However, Assange believed he would be immediately extradited from Sweden to the US under a speedy temporary rendition.

The statute of limitations for Ms Ardin’s complaint expired after five years and the second complainant after 10 years. Only then did Ms Ardin come forward and write a book – No Heroes, No Monsters: What I Learned Being the Most Hated Woman on the Internet – to tell her side of what happened. She is currently finishing a PhD in civil society at a Stockholm University.

Ms Ardin’s claims and Assange’s denials will now never be tested in a legal court. “It’s sad. I mean, he won’t be convicted, but he will also never be freed,’’ she says. “It’s a frozen issue, and the whole thing has only been debated in the media. It’s been more of a people’s tribunal … and that tribunal hasn’t been fair, it has not looked at all the evidence, all the evidence hasn’t even been out in the media.”

In reply to whether she would like an apology from him, Ms Ardin says: “Yes, that would be nice. I mean, if he admitted that he did things that I didn’t want and that I didn’t like and that he should have gone to Sweden.

“But I think that he’s made quite clear that he sees it as I have done something to him by not being quiet about it, and that he doesn’t have any obligations. That is what he has shown so far. So I don’t have any expectations. And I wouldn’t demand that he apologised because I’ve forgiven him a long time ago already.”