Julian Assange - WikiLeaks (37 page)
Read Julian Assange - WikiLeaks Online
Authors: Sophie Radermecker
⢠Evolution of Saturday, August 21, 2010
Eva Finné decided that Julian Assange could no longer be suspected of rape, yet she didn't rule on the penal qualification of this, which was still considered rape. She also didn't rule on the molestation complaint. The investigation was therefore still ongoing and the suspicions against Julian Assange were not retracted.
⢠No additional decisions in the Assange case on Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Prosecutor Eva Finné finally said she would not decide the matter on Tuesday, August 24, 2010. Additional information would be published as soon as it was made available.
⢠Decision of Prosecutor Eva Finné on Wednesday, August 25, 2010
There are two complaints in the case from two different women. The first was initially described as rape and the second as molestation.
Complaint No. 1 K246314-10
“The information obtained while questioning the victim is, as previously announced, such that the suspicion of rape has been eliminated. This does not mean that I have discredited this information. I have studied the content of the interview to see if the suspicion of another crime
may be presumed, either molestation or sexual assault, but according to my analysis, this is not the case.
The investigation is therefore finished as concerns this complaint as they is no suspicion of offense.”
Complaint No. 2, K246336-10
“The suspicion of molestation has been retained. I will issue instructions to the investigators to interview the suspect.”
⢠Evolution of the case on Monday, August 30, 2010
Claes Borgström contacted Marianne Ny, Chief Prosecutor of the
Prosecution Development Centre
in Gothenburg, in charge of supervising legal evolutions on sexual offenses. Ms. Ny leads a special unit on the development of crime and is specialized in the elaboration of laws concerning sexual assault.
The last day of August caused upheaval in the case's procedure. That day, Julian was questioned at the Kungsholmen police station in Stockholm, where he admitted that he stayed at Ms. Anna Ardin's place for a week and that he had sexual relations with her, although denying any rape or aggression. While Anna thought that he purposely tore the condom, he said he did not. He didn't tear the condom and had no idea there was something wrong with it. The Australian continued by declaring that he had slept in Anna's bed the entire week after their sexual relations and that she had never mentioned any torn condom.
Later, Julian admitted on Swedish television that he had denied all the accusations against him. He did not have any non-consensual sex and refused to answer any
other additional question on his relationships with the plaintiffs, whom he didn't criticize at all.
During his interrogation about his sexual relationship with Ms. Ardin he said: “I had no reason to suspect that I would be accused of something like this.” He added that the complaints made against him to the police, and repeated in the Swedish press, included “a bunch of incredible lies.”
⢠No decision of penal review on Tuesday, August 31, 2010
The civil parties, represented by lawyer Claes Borgström, requested on Friday, August 27, 2010, the review of the decision of Prosecutor Eva Finné according to which Assange could not be suspected of rape. This request was handled by the
Prosecution Development Centre
in Gothenburg. A decision was expected in the following days.
However, the
Prosecution Development Centre
in Gothenburg did not make a decision concerning the review of the Assange case before Tuesday, August 31, as new information had emerged that very day. Prosecutor Marianne Ny said:
“On Tuesday, new information emerged in the investigation. We received it late Tuesday afternoon and we cannot make any decision today.
The decision is expected around 11 a.m. on Wednesday, September 1.”
The case took an unexpected turn on Wednesday, September 1, 2010, when Marianne Ny, Chief Prosecutor, decided to reopen the investigation.
⢠Decision of penal review in the Assange case on Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Chief Prosecutor Marianne Ny decided that the rape investigation must resume. She also decided that the investigation of molestation should be extended to include all the events of the complaint.
“Based on the new decision of the prosecutor on August 25, 2010, I order the investigation concerning the complaint K246314-10 to be resumed.
The investigation relative to complaint K246336-10 concerning a matter qualified as molestation is extended to determine other events stated in the complaint and qualified as sexual coercion and sexual assault.
We have studied the case and I believe that on the one hand, there is reason to think that an offense subject to public prosecution has been committed. As well, there are also reasons to undertake more investigative procedures. On the other hand, I have another evaluation of the qualification.”
Marianne Ny was the lead investigator in this case, assisted by Deputy Chief Prosecutor Erika Leijnefors in West Stockholm. Erika Leijnefors was in constant contact with police investigators in charge of the investigation. All the important matters such as decisions on possible coercion as well as completing the investigation were to be decided by Marianne Ny.
The plaintiffs' lawyer Claes Borgström claimed that it wasn't the first time a man who had forced a woman to have unprotected sex had to face this type of accusation, which conforms to Swedish law on rape.
Julian Assange didn't respond directly to this turn of affairs, but his Swedish lawyer, Leif Silbersky, known for defending the most controversial cases, expressed his views in
Expressen
:
“
Now I'm really surprised. I thought that Eva [Finné] is a skilled and competent prosecutor who draws the correct conclusions from the material that is available to her. Now another prosecutor says that she has not done that. We are back to square one â the circus continues.
”
The lawyer added that Mr. Assange was still in Sweden, “angry and disappointed” by the country's legal system.
Honey trap or not, the case was quickly qualified as controversial. Assange and WikiLeaks sympathizers were convinced that he was the victim and that the two women were accomplices in an American vendetta. The United States was indeed looking for a way to punish WikiLeaks for leaking hundreds of thousands of secret American documents on the Internet.
This possible conspiracy against Julian is at the very least a strange coincidence, as it happened at the same time as Julian Assange started to arise worry in the American government. This could also mean that the Swedish prosecutors' office was under some political pressure.
Borgström described the vendetta in these words:
“
Mr. Assange and his legal team were misrepresenting a justice system that required approval from Sweden's
highest appeals court before the extradition warrant was approved. Those who say that the judges in our court of appeal were influenced by pressure from the United States don't know what they're talking about. It's absurd.
”
Mr. Borgström added that by presenting the allegations against him as part of a political conspiracy, Julian had made âvictims' of the two women who now face vilification on the Internet and regular death threats. Only Julian and the two plaintiffs were in fact in a position to know that it was not a CIA plot or something cooked up by Obama's administration.
C
LASHING
T
RUTHS
The two Swedish women's accusation against Julian Assange was full of inconsistencies. His lawyers were even convinced that he was the victim of a âhoneytrap,' which Julian confirmed by openly accusing the Pentagon in the pages of the
Aftonbladet
. Aside from his lawyer, few people dared to say anything in Sweden, not even the members of the Pirate Party who had been hosting WikiLeaks servers and who continue to defend the website. In a press release dated August 21, 2010 Deputy Leader of the party Anna Troberg said:
“As little as we want to throw Assange to the wolves, just as little would we like to question the integrity of the two women who have filed charges.”
The WikiLeaks group coordinator in Stockholm, a close colleague of Julian said:
“This is a normal police investigation. Let the police find out what actually happened. Of course, the enemies of WikiLeaks may try to use this, but it begins with the two women and Julian. It is not the CIA sending a woman in a short skirt.”
Is it coincidence or are people just being relentlessness? One thing is for sure: the complexity of Swedish rape law is the focus
of these allegations. Now back to the facts. Depositions have crossed paths and revealed many blatant inconsistencies.
Julian and Anna had sex, but the condom tore. Anna was upset with Julian for not stopping at that point. However, despite this, and for the entire week afterward, Anna never asked Julian to leave. She let him stay in her flat a few more days and even organized a
kräftskiva
(âcrayfish party') in his honor, during which she tweeted that she was having a great time with some of the coolest people on the planet. She later tried to delete her tweet. When the police questioned Julian about it, he admitted to having had sex with Anna Ardin, but he said he hadn't torn the condom or even noticed it was ripped.
The day of the conference, Sofia Wilén was sitting in the first row. She was invited to the lunch given in Julian's honor. In reality, there are different versions of these events: one said that the twenty-seven-year-old woman just showed up, the other was that Julian invited her himself. In any case, it was clear that she was able to attract his attention.
Nick Davies confirmed in
The Guardian
that both Sofia and Anna were present at this lunch. In fact, the first called the second to find out if she could attend the seminar. Weird.
Moving right along. Early the following morning, in her apartment in Enköping, Julian and Sofia had sex again, but this time, according to the young woman's statement, she fell asleep and Julian proceeded to have sex with her and didn't want to use a condom. Their disagreement didn't stop them from having breakfast together, though. Sofia even took Julian to the train station on her bicycle and paid for his train ticket a second time. However, the incident of not wearing a condom was important
for Ms. Wilén as she had never had unprotected sex before. When questioned by the police, her ex-boyfriend told them that in the two and a half years that they were together they had never had sex without a condom, because that was âunthinkable' for her.
It was very surprising that after having sexual relations the women described in their statements, they both continued to be in contact with their presumed rapist.
In fact, from August 13 to 20 2010, nothing happened. Neither of the two women said anything, nor did they decide to press charges. It took several days for Anna and Sofia, who claimed that they didn't know each other, to show up together at the police station to report the rape â only after having discovered that they both had had sexual relations with the same man and shared a similar experience.
For Julian's lawyers the situation was crystal clear:
“We understand that both complainants admit to having initiated consensual sexual relations with Mr Assange. They do not complain of any physical injury. The first complainant did not make a complaint for six days in which she hosted the respondent in her flat [actually her bed] and spoke in the warmest terms about him to her friends. The second complainant, too, failed to complain for several days until she found out about the first complainant: she claimed that after several acts of consensual sexual intercourse, she fell half asleep and thinks that he ejaculated without using a condom â a possibility about which she says they joked afterwards.”
Both complainants say they did not report him to the police for prosecution but only to require him to have an STD test. However, his Swedish lawyer has been shown evidence of their text messages which indicate that they were concerned to obtain money by going to a tabloid newspaper and were motivated by other matters including a desire for revenge.”
There was another revelation from a girlfriend to the police. During the
kräftskiva
, Anna told a girlfriend about the ripped condom and the unprotected sex she had had with her guest. During this dinner at her place, she told another friend that she had had the worst sex ever with Assange.
“Not only had it been the world's worst screw, it had also been violent.”
If it were that bad, then why did she throw the man a party? Anna Ardin said in her statement that Julian had torn the condom on purpose. She told a girlfriend that he was still staying at her flat, but they weren't having sex because he had “exceeded the limits of what she felt she could accept” and so she no longer felt safe.
Moreover, the text messages the two young women sent to each other the last week of August 2010 seemed favorable to Julian's defense. Björn Hurtig, his Swedish lawyer was allowed to read some of these messages between Anna Ardin and Sofia Wilén. He was not authorized to copy them or make a note of them. However, he did read that Wilén thought about contacting the
Expressen
, as a friend suggested she could get a lot of money for telling her story. Prosecutor Marianne Ny didn't divulge all of the documents linked to the affair, in particular the text messages between the two accusers. But before there is a decision to
prosecute someone, the law authorizes the examination of all available documents as soon as the prosecution procedure was to start.
Julian is probably a man with a big sexual appetite, and is exploiting his newfound fame with women. But who are these two women accusing him of rape and sexual assault? Not much information can be found online about Sofia Wilén, while suspicions focus directly on Anna Ardin. The blogosphere exploded. She's the instigator of a conspiracy to help bring Julian down!