Difficult, paranoid and polarising: Dissecting the contradiction that is Julian Assange

In the years Julian Assange lived in Ecuador’s London embassy, from when the country embraced his asylum claim in 2012 until they evicted him (“We’ve ended the asylum of this spoiled brat”) seven years later, the WikiLeaks founder was under constant surveillance. Cameras recorded the comings and goings of lawyers, friends, and celebrity acolytes including Lady Gaga, Bianca Jagger and former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson.

The footage would make fascinating viewing. Tales abound of his life in those cramped rooms, where the Queenslander fled to avoid a sexual assault investigation in Sweden. From there, he released documents that influenced US elections, waged a legal battle for his freedom, and lived alongside increasingly hostile Ecuadorian embassy staff whose belief in the importance of his crusade gave way to exasperated demands that he pay for his own food and laundry, clean the bathroom and tidy up after his cat.

Assange spent those seven years in a state of constant hypervigilance, but then, the one-time teen computer hacker had been looking over his shoulder for most of his life. He kept the blinds closed during the day in case of spies, bought a white noise machine to drown out his conversations, and had a pair of handcuffs ready to affix himself to the consul if there was a raid. His bedroom did not have cameras but was likely fitted with listening devices. His former lawyer, who became his wife, Stella Assange, wrote private messages on a piece of paper. “That’s how I told Julian I was pregnant,” she told Britain’s Sunday Times.

Julian Assange stands on the balcony of the embassy of Ecuador in London with Reverend Jesse Jackson. Embassy staff found him to be a difficult housemate.Credit: AP

As the Ecuadorians learnt during those difficult seven years, Assange is a difficult, paranoid and polarising character. To some, he is an inspiration, a warrior for transparency and free speech who has courageously taken on global superpowers and endured deep suffering for his principles. To others, he’s prideful and self-absorbed; a man who demands truth from power yet weaponises information, disregards the welfare of others yet claims victimhood, and holds people to account while avoiding accountability for himself.

“We’re all flawed characters, and Julian is just one of those,” says Peter Greste, a veteran Australian reporter who is now a professor of journalism at Macquarie University. “You can criticise and admire him at the same time.”

In the fight for Assange’s freedom, which was finally achieved this week when the United States dropped all but one of its 18 espionage charges against him, there was an attempt by some to dismiss the messier parts of his story. As one MP wrote: “Many of the arguments against Assange have been discounted over time.” It shows how hard it is, in the modern political discourse, to advocate for a flawed man and to make the argument that while Assange may be guilty of crimes of character and judgment, he could still have been unfairly persecuted for espionage.

Assange was arrested by British police when he left the Ecuadorian embassy in 2019 and has spent the past five years fighting extradition to the US. An eclectic group of Australian MPs, and the Albanese government, felt that was long enough. “If the [US] Justice Department is seeking a sense of retribution, that’s already been achieved by the amount of time Assange has been in jail,” said Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce before a lobbying trip to Washington late last year. “I don’t know if I’d like him if I met him, but this is about the law.”

Assange was born in Townsville, a mining and port town in northern Queensland. His mother, Christine, a puppeteer, reportedly fell pregnant to his father, John Shipton, at an anti-Vietnam War rally in 1970 (Assange did not meet Shipton until he was in his 20s).

Throughout his childhood, the family travelled the country (Assange took the name of his theatre director stepfather). He was educated at 35 different schools and at times taught at home by a mother who believed, she told The New Yorker in 2010, that formal education would lead to an unhealthy respect for authority in her children. “I didn’t want their spirits broken,” she told the magazine. Christine long rejected suggestions that Assange had Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism, but Stella confirmed it in The Sunday Times. “Julian is on the spectrum,” she said.

Assange loved reading science books and writing programs on his Commodore 64 computer. By his teens, he was a sophisticated hacker and joined a group known as the International Subversives. He hacked major networks but also became paranoid about being caught.

Young hacker: Julian Assange outside court in 1995 after being accused of hacking into global computer systems.Credit: The Age

“Mendax [Assange’s online name] dreamed of police raids all the time,” says a 2011 book, Underground, that Assange co-authored. “He dreamed of footsteps crunching on the driveway gravel, of shadows in the predawn darkness, of a gun-toting police squad bursting through his backdoor at 5am.” Eventually, his fears came true. He was still a teenager when the Australian Federal Police charged him with 31 counts of hacking and related crimes; he pleaded guilty to 25 and had to pay $2100 damages.

Around this time, Assange had a son, Daniel, who is now an adult and has changed his name. It’s unclear how many children Assange has; in addition to the two born during his incarceration, he has referred to having one in France. In a piece written for the London Review of Books in 2014, author Andrew O’Hagan, a three-time Booker Prize nominee who was hired to ghost-write an autobiography, quotes Assange’s then girlfriend Sarah asking whether he had been present for the births of all his children. “All except one,” he replies (he watched the birth of his first son with Stella over a livestream in the Ecuadorian embassy).

In 2006, Assange and a group of activists and dissidents founded WikiLeaks, a website that published documents governments wanted kept private. It links back to Assange’s interest in science, a discipline in which academics publish their research. He believed the public should have full access to raw sources rather than the edited, analysed version they see in newspapers. In his recent fight against extradition to the US, Assange claimed to be a journalist, but he has also held the profession in contempt. “We come not to save journalism, but to destroy it,” he said in 2017. “Doesn’t deserve to live. Too debased.”

WikiLeaks was less of an organisation than an insurgency. There was no head office; Assange would roam the world, afraid of being followed by US spies or investigators funded by corporations, and is said to have moved between eastern Africa and Europe for years, rarely staying in one place for more than a few days. The website used a complicated series of servers and an encrypted pipeline to ensure secrecy and prevent information from being taken offline.

It published leaked documents from 2006, but its biggest scoop came in 2010, with the release of US military footage of a helicopter firing on civilians, dubbed Collateral Murder, followed by classified documents about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and a quarter of a million diplomatic cables. The Americans were furious. It caused them deep embarrassment and serious diplomatic headaches, as well as concern for the safety of people named in the documents.

WikiLeaks has been criticised for not redacting names to protect people’s safety and for failing to provide context for the documents, as newsrooms that adhere to journalists’ codes of ethics would have done (and did, when Assange collaborated with The New York Times and The Guardian). That’s why many argue Assange is not a journalist. But the release of the documents did expose a shameful secret that a superpower wanted to hide and that – holding truth to power – is a central tenet of journalism.

“I disagree with some of what WikiLeaks released, but I also absolutely applaud a lot of what they released, which exposed evidence of crimes and abuses by the American military in Afghanistan and Iraq,” says Greste, who was detained in an Egyptian prison while reporting for Al Jazeera. “We can hold these contrary truths together; that it was vitally important … while not agreeing with everything WikiLeaks did.”

As his global fame grew after Collateral Murder, and celebrities such as British socialite Jemima Khan flocked to his cause, Assange went to Stockholm in late 2010. Two women accused him of sexually assaulting them during his trip. Both said they agreed to sex but only on the basis that he used a condom; one alleged he initiated sex without a condom while she slept, and the other that he deliberately broke a condom during sex. He has always denied both allegations.

Swedish authorities wanted him extradited from Britain for questioning (he was never charged with anything). His lawyers claimed the accusations were politically motivated, and Assange reportedly told friends he was convinced the US was behind Sweden’s extradition attempts. When Assange was detained for a hearing in Britain, filmmaker John Pilger, director Ken Loach and Khan offered to cover his bail. He was released on the condition that he lived with another rich backer at Ellingham Hall manor (Swedish authorities have dropped the probe; while they say the alleged victims were credible, the passage of time has weakened evidence).

Andrew O’Hagan’s essay focuses on this period at the manor when Assange agreed to participate in an autobiography. The WikiLeaks founder lived at the house with a ragtag bunch of supporters, staying up all night and sleeping half the day, reading everything written about him, wearing an electronic bracelet on his foot and getting his girlfriend, Sarah, to check for assassins in the bushes outside the police station before he entered for his daily check-in.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange walks across the lawn at Ellingham Hall in Norfolk in 2010.Credit: PA Images via Getty Images

O’Hagan observed the contradiction that is Julian Assange. There was what he called the cult-leader aspect – “his pride could engulf the room in flames”, he wrote – and yet, he was still compelled by Assange’s story. “What Julian lacked in efficiency or professionalism, he made up for in courage.” O’Hagan also realised that Assange did not want to write an autobiography, in part because he shied away from looking within himself. “The man who put himself in charge of disclosing the world’s secrets simply couldn’t bear his own,” he wrote.

In 2013, longtime supporter Jemima Khan also began to question the Assange mythology and warned that he might become a modern-day L. Ron Hubbard (the founder of Scientology). “I have seen flashes of Assange’s charm, brilliance and insightfulness – but I have also seen how instantaneous rock star status has the power to make even the most clear-headed idealist feel that they are above the law and exempt from criticism,” she wrote in The New Statesman.

While the accusations of sexual assault might not be substantiated in court, she wrote, “I have come to the conclusion that these are all matters for Swedish due process and that Assange is undermining both himself and his own transparency agenda – as well as doing the US department of justice a favour – by making his refusal to answer questions in Sweden into a human rights issue ... the women in question have human rights, too.”

Assange had been living in the Ecuadorian embassy for four years when WikiLeaks released another trove of documents that many argue influenced the 2016 election result in favour of Donald Trump. Many believe that move was less the disclosure of information in the public interest than an attempt by Assange to thwart the presidential ambitions of a woman he deeply disliked.

The emails showed Democratic Party officials, ahead of Hillary Clinton’s nomination, scoffing at her rival, Bernie Sanders, and his supporters. A US government report later found that in the lead-up to the leak, Assange wanted a Republican win, telling members and associates of WikiLeaks that Clinton was “a bright, well-connected, sadistic sociopath”.

The Mueller Report also found that in October 2016, WikiLeaks sent a direct message to Donald Trump jnr, asking “you guys” to help disseminate a link alleging candidate Clinton had advocated using a drone to target Assange, while Assange had “made several public statements” that wrongly implicated murdered Democratic staffer Seth Rich in the leaking of the damaging documents “apparently” to disguise the source.

But it was Collateral Murder that remained unfinished business for the US. It had laid no charges when Assange fled to the Ecuadorian embassy in 2012. The first came in 2018, followed by 17 more alleging violations of the Espionage Act in 2019 (the same month he was evicted from the embassy). A British judge refused a bid to have him extradited to the US, saying his mental health was too fragile, but he remained behind bars because he was a flight risk. The decisions triggered appeal after appeal. Assange sat in Belmarsh prison for five years.

Assange has been criticised for his behaviour towards women (he has spoken out against Sweden’s “crazed radical feminist ideology”). Yet, it was two powerful, impressive women who fought for his eventual release. One was his long-time lawyer, Australian barrister Jennifer Robinson.

The other was his wife, Stella, an articulate, passionate, former Rhodes scholar who grew up in South Africa, where her parents were part of the anti-apartheid movement. They met in 2011 when Assange was at the height of his fame. “To my mind, he was a historical figure,” she told the Times. They married in 2022; Vivienne Westwood designed her dress.

Julian Assange owes his freedom to women like his wife Stella, who married him while he was in prison.Credit: Getty

For years, Robinson and Stella Assange have advocated for Assange. Stella has given interviews, met politicians and had an audience with the Pope. She was his chief spokeswoman as he flew to the US island of Saipan this week, in a private jet once chartered by Taylor Swift, where he pleaded guilty to a single Espionage Act offence and was released on time served in a plea deal negotiated by his lawyers.

For the first time in her marriage and their children’s lives, the four will be able to live together as a family. They’ve asked for privacy and for Assange to be given time to adjust to freedom. But watch this space. Assange is a restless, driven man who is used to wielding influence and being in the spotlight. This may be the beginning of a new chapter. “I can’t speak for Julian, but he’s never struck me as the kind of character to sit quietly and go and play golf all day,” says Greste.

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