Julian Assange: condemned by his own actions

In the summer of 2010, Julian Assange went to Sweden. The servers which host the main Wikileaks website are based there: in August 2010, the primary host seems to have switched from PRQ to Bahnhof. Bahnof servers are based in a former nuclear bunker.

In August 2010, on two separate occasions, Assange met with and stayed one night/several nights with a woman supporter of Wikileaks. Each woman says that the arrangement to have sex was by mutual consent: each woman says that she had stipulated Assange should use a condom. The two women discovered afterwards that Assange had behaved like a boor with each of them: fighting and disputing and trying to bully her out of her stipulation. Assange had achieved his goal of penetrative sex without a condom with both women: In one instance, Assange claimed the condom had “ripped” and so he had been unaware that there was now no condom: in the other, he waited the next morning until she had fallen asleep, and then got inside her when she couldn’t actually say no. The two women took this to the police, and asked if Assange could be made to take a HIV test. None of these facts are disputed by Assange or his lawyers.

Chutzpah: Julian Assange

It surely cannot be the case that Assange can rely on his own refusal to go to Sweden to escape answering the allegations. However, this does seem to be the case.

It would seem that, in the circumstances, any charge will require an investigation to close; and, in turn, for an investigation to close requires there to be an interview with the suspect. David Allen Green, lawyer & legal blogger

Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish defines chutzpah as

“gall, brazen nerve, effrontery, incredible ‘guts’, presumption plus arrogance such as no other word and no other language can do justice to”.

Famously, Rosten defines the term chutzpah as

“that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan”.

The Oxford English Dictionary will need to add a new definition to chutzpah: Julian Assange.

In Swedish legal procedure, to be charged with a crime you have to be interviewed by the police. Julian Assange has now permanently evaded being charged with sexual assault in Sweden by the following series of actions.

First, Assange left Sweden.

Julian Assange had applied for residency in Sweden on 18th August 2010. On 31st August 2010 he was questioned by the police and told of the accusations: the investigation was re-opened. Assange left Sweden on 27th September 2010, and went to the UK. He did not return. On 18th October 2010, the Swedish Migration Board denied Assange a residency permit: Assange was still in the UK.

On 18th November 2010, the Stockholm District Court approved a request to detain Julian Assange for “questioning on suspicion of rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion”. Marianne Nye, the Swedish Director of Prosecution, told the court that Assange he has “not been available for questioning”.

Julian Assange evading justice

The statute of limitations for the crimes that Julian Assange is evading justice for in Knightsbridge, will expire this August.

Swedish prosecutors will therefore travel to London to carry out the interview that Assange jumped bail to avoid.

During that interview, Julian Assange is likely to be charged with rape and sexual assault.

But as Assange doesn’t want to go to jail in Sweden for the crimes he has already admitted to in his testimony, it’s likely he’ll stay in the embassy in Knightsbridge until the statute of limitations expires in Sweden.

Doubtless he will still have defenders who think raping a woman while she’s asleep is not that big of a deal. But at least he won’t be able to claim he was never charged with any crimes: he just evaded justice.

Update, 12th August:

Julian Assange is still determined to avoid being charged for rape and assault: the new twist is that he’s got Ecuador to demand that Sweden give Assange asylum in Sweden at the Ecuadorean embassy before they can interview and charge him.

Swedish justice department official Cecilia Riddselius: “You can’t give anyone asylum at another country’s embassy, that’s against international law. If he wants asylum, he has to come to Sweden.”

Until Julian Assange had sex with two women without their consent in August 2010, Sweden was where he intended to make his home and where Wikileaks is still based.

Thoughts about “A letter to”

The Guardian has been doing a series of anonymous articles, subtitled The letter you always wanted to write. No one is named in any of the letters.

The letter published today is from a man in his early 20s, about an event from about six years ago: it’s directed to “the girl who accused me of rape when I was 15.”

Assange: Not in jail

Yesterday, Channel 4 News ran an anniversary programme, of sorts:

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange – hiding for two years in the Ecuadorian embassy – is in “a prison cell with internet access” and “yearns to walk in the fresh air,” says a close friend.

Today, Slavoj Žižek, writing in the Guardian, seems to think that Julian Assange is hiding out in the Ecuador embassy because of something to do with Wikileaks and whistleblowing.

In August 2010, Julian Assange had sex with two women in Sweden. He was, so they both report, aggressive and unpleasant, and very unwilling to use a condom. When they talked to each other and realised he had had unprotected sex against their will with both of them, they went to the police to discover if they could force Assange to take an HIV test – and the police, listening to their account, realised that Assange had by their testimony committed sexual assault and rape.

Until Julian Assange stepped into the Ecuadorean Embassy, nearly two years after the legal due process began in Sweden, he had every element of the justice system due him. He was even on house arrest rather than in prison, in the confidence that he could be trusted with the large amount of money his friends would lose if he skipped bail.

Not All M&Ms Are Poisoned

I wrote some time ago about the massive sense of entitlement that men have that lies behind every rape story I ever heard.

Around 7pm on Tuesday 27th May, two young girls of the Dalit caste (the lowest-rank caste in India) were grabbed by men of a higher caste who were lying in wait for them – or other girls – to go to the fields after dark to have a pee and a crap. (The girls had been required to hold it in all day because they had no access to an indoor toilet, and modesty ruled they were not allowed to go out for this purpose in daylight.) The men raped the girls – they were fourteen and fifteen – and then murdered them.

Men in India often do take advantage of the near-universal practice of requiring girls and women to be “modest” and only go to the fields after dark, to lie in wait for a girl or two and rape them. (In areas where Hindu women practice chaupadi – isolation during menstruation and after childbirth – men find the isolated huts where menstruating girls and women sleep and rape them there.) The government and the police do not regard men raping women as a serious crime, nor do they regard it as a problem that the men who rape have found that the simplest way of disposing of the evidence is to kill the girls or women whom they raped.

Now what kind of person, hearing that story, reacts with: they should have had indoor plumbing! Lack of indoor sanitation killed them!

Ruining a career

In December 2012, an 18-year-old athlete who belonged to the Aldershot, Farnham, and District Athletic club orally raped a 12-year-old girl.

The athlete’s name is Adam Hulin. You can see how promising he is as an athlete here.

A 12-year-old child is agreed by law and by ethics not to be old enough to be able to consent to sex. (Exceptions are sometimes made, humanely, when two children of about the same age get together and everything is consensual even if neither of the kids are really old enough. This does not apply when an 18-year-old uses a 12-year-old for sex: that is statutory rape.)

Adam Hulin pleaded guilty to oral rape and assault by penetration in Guildford Crown Court two weeks ago. He claimed the 12-year-old girl had lied about her age and looked “17 or 18”. The judge commented “I certainly wouldn’t want to do anything which would prejudice his future career” and let him off with community service and a £60 fine.

Nigel Evans: accused

Nigel Evans is a conservative and a Conservative.

He’s been a Conservative politician since 1985, when he was elected a councillor for West Glamorgan (the former administrative county in Wales that is now Swansea, Neath and Port Talbot). In 1992, he won Ribble Valley in Lancashire for the Conservative Party, and held it for them until last year when he lost the Tory Whip and became an independent. He held it through the 1997, 2001, 2005, and 2010 general elections.

From June 2001 to November 2003, Evans was Shadow Secretary of State for Wales: he was appointed a Vice-Chairman of the Conservative Party from November 2004 to December 2005: from June 2010 to 10th September 2013, he was First Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means – that is, the second deputy Speaker of the House.

He is also, as I find from his Wikipedia page, a disbeliever in man-made climate change and was a fan of The Great Global Warming Swindle.

Nigel Evans is on trial for rape, indecent assault twice, and six counts of sexual assault, and it is further alleged by the prosecution that the following named, senior Conservatives knew of his record of sexual assaults at least since 2003. Evans denies all charges.

Safe sex and Julian Assange

They fell asleep and she woke up by his penetrating her. She immediately asked if he was wearing anything. He answered: “You.” She said: “You better not have HIV.” He said: “Of course not.” 12th July 2011

The longer Julian Assange delays his return to Sweden to be questioned by the police, charged with rape and sexual assault, and for the Swedish justice system to decide what to do with him, the less likely it is that he will ever be tried at all. It is already three and a half years since two women went to the police to discover if they could force Julian Assange to have an HIV test and, in the process of describing what had happened, gave evidence that Assange had attempted sexual assault on one woman and raped the other woman.

Since 19th June 2012, Assange has lived in a room in Knightsbridge, a guest of the embassy of Ecuador, his request for asylum accepted by the President of a nation who has little concern for free speech. Assange has, in effect, sent himself to jail without trial under much more unpleasant conditions than he would have been subject to in Sweden: where he would have been unlikely – even if found guilty – to have been sentenced to more than three years. If he intends to imprison himself in Knightsbridge until the statute of limitations expires in Sweden, he will stay there til August 2020.

Irony, appreciated

On 8th August, PZ Myers published an email from a woman he knows and trusts (but who had asked Myers not to name her) at his blog. The email said that a well-known figure in the American skeptics community had

“coerced me into a position where I could not consent, and then had sex with me”.

Several other named and unnamed sources, known and considered credible by PZ Myers, have confirmed the incident and have described what may be other similar incidents:

…he deliberately got her very drunk while flirting with her — a story that corroborates a particular pattern of sexual assault. All of these are people PZ knows, and whose reliability he is vouching for.

It’s been noted that there will be no legal repercussions for this man, though there may be social repercussions:

So the best we can hope for as far as repercussions are that because his name is so popular, the accusations against him will give his potential future victims pause against trusting him enough to drink with or spend time alone with him. This might hurt his feelings, but it will not ruin his career or his life.