I don't think I'm going to be able to get inside the Royal Courts of Justice for the Julian Assange extradition trial. I don't have a media pass. Via email, a press officer told me that demand is sky-high, space is extremely limited, and the list of reporters has already been submitted to the court. But he doesn't say no when I ask if I can rock up anyway to try my luck. So, I do. At 9am, the crowd outside the court is already massive. A couple of hundred people have filled all the nearby footpath space, and the mood is tense and excitable. There are lots of black, spider-like news cameras, and a healthy sprinkling of keffiyehs. The Courts are in a dramatic neo-Gothic precinct. Picture a plinth supporting a black metal statue of a roaring, sharp-taloned dragon. Imagine pale grey stone turrets, slender, vertical windows with criss-crossed panes set into deep alcoves, and spiky spires. On the concrete island between the two roads out front, a tent and a podium have been constructed behind temporary metal fencing: a makeshift hub for Assange's VIP supporters to catch up and give speeches to the protestors and the media.
Many people in the crowd hold up professionally printed signs featuring the phrase “Free Julian Assange.” The text sits above a monochrome photograph of Assange with a neat, salt-and-pepper beard and his distinctive slick of bright white hair, staring into the camera with the hint of a smile and knowing eyes. He looks respectable, dignified, journalistic. Another, more DIY placard waving about shows a marble bust of Socrates beside a portrait of Assange, captioned “399 BC/2024” and “a WikiLeak a day keeps tyranny at bay.” Journalists, identifiable by professional dress, digital recording equipment, and notepads, are jostling in a scrum for unimpeded access to the podium. One journo shoves past a woman in her 70s wearing a pink corduroy bucket hat, who is holding up a sign that says “HONK 4 7REEDOM.” “They're never usually here,” she mutters darkly. I am also here in journalist capacity, so I don't have a sign. But if I did, it would say: “Julian Assange started WikiLeaks in a Carlton terrace house. He used to rave at Melbourne techno parties under the alias ‘Prof.’ TPE 4 J.A.!”
Stella Assange, Julian's wife, steps up to the microphone. She is a petite, striking woman of 40, with dark eyebrows, a demonstrative, toothy mouth, and long, shiny, brown hair which cascades in blow-dried curls onto the lapels of her forest green coat. She grips the mic with both hands and addresses the eager crowd with an unreadably international accent. (She was born in South Africa to a Swedish-Cuban father and Spanish mother, was educated as a lawyer in the UK, and met Assange when she joined his legal team as he was contesting Swedish sexual offence charges. Meet cute alert!) “We have two big days ahead,” she says. Her lips purse as she holds back tears, in what I will come to realise is an unusual display of vulnerability. “You are here because the world is watching. They have to know they can't get away with this,” she says. “Julian needs his freedom. And we all need the truth.” Screams, whoops, and cheers ring out as she walks off the stage. The chants start up again: “Free, free, Julian Assange! Free, free, Julian Assange! There is only one decision—no extradition! There is only one decision—no extradition!”
What is this trial about? Well…how long have you got? And how deep state do you want to go? In the most basic terms, the US is seeking to extradite Assange from the UK. They want to try him for espionage and computer “misuse,” aka hacking—charges tied to the publication of leaked, classified documents on the website WikiLeaks. In the early 2010s, WikiLeaks published troves of documents related to US military and diplomatic activities. The most notorious of the files, a video titled “Collateral Murder,” shows US soldiers gunning down unarmed civilians, including children and journalists, in Baghdad in 2007. (Although human rights lawyers say the video documents a war crime, the individuals involved were never prosecuted.) WikiLeaks worked with established publications like The Guardian, The New York Times, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde, sharing stories that challenged government narratives about the so-called War on Terror. Then, from the mid 2010s, WikiLeaks began dropping documents related to US domestic politics—think Hilary emails, Bernie being robbed by the DNC, PizzaGate, Podesta. (Revisiting WikiLeaks’ greatest hits is like taking an increasingly bad trip through the wreckage of the last decade of political discourse.) The website has always had a knack for upsetting those in power. Trump in 2016: “WikiLeaks, I love WikiLeaks.” Trump in 2019: “I know nothing about WikiLeaks. It’s not my thing.” Many of the more recent high-profile US leaks have come under fire for their almost incontrovertible origins in Russian military operations, sparking accusations that WikiLeaks has become a conduit for Moscow-sponsored information warfare, not public interest journalism. WikiLeaks would say origins don’t matter—information wants to be free. And it’s not all about ‘Murica. Throughout this period, the organisation also published files concerning, among other places, Turkey, the Central African Republic, Syria, China, Israel, and Saudi Arabia.
As Wikileaks’ reputation ebbed and flowed over the years, so too did Assange’s. To begin with, he was information’s great liberator. Then, in 2010, Swedish authorities opened an investigation regarding allegations made by two Swedish women that Assange pressured them into unprotected, non-consensual sex—allegations Assange has always denied. The investigation was dropped in 2019. Legal experts have levelled sharp criticisms at the Swedish police and judiciary for their handling of the case. The two women never had a chance at real justice. Nor did Assange. “All three had been instrumentalised and abused by the authorities for the purpose of political persecution and deterrence,” former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer writes, in a recent book on Assange. “It left a bitter aftertaste.”
Assange has been in London fighting legal battles related to WikiLeaks publications and the Swedish investigation for over a decade now. From 2012 to 2019, he lived as an asylum seeker fleeing political persecution inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in Knightsbridge, right next to Harrods department store. In April 2019, after a contested breakdown in the relationship (Ecuador says it was personal; Assange says political), the Embassy withdrew their support. Assange was immediately arrested by the UK authorities for breaching bail conditions. Then, the US revealed a federal grand jury indictment and requested his prompt shipment across the pond. For the past five years, he has been in Belmarsh Prison, a high-security institution in outer east London (colloquially known as the UK's Guantánamo), fighting extradition.
In 2021, the UK High Court ruled that Assange should not be extradited to the US due to his deteriorating mental health and the prospect of gross mistreatment in the American justice system. In 2022, after further legal challenges and assurances from the US that they actually didn't want Assange to die rotting in a gulag—they just wanted to ask him a few questions—this decision was overturned. The extradition was on again. It was approved by the then-Home Secretary, Priti Patel, who reputable British source Hugh Grant once called “the worst Home Secretary in British history.” The case I've shown up for is being billed as Assange’s last-ditch attempt to get a shot at appealing the extradition in the UK again. If he is extradited, Assange's lawyers say he faces a sentence of up to 175 years and will die in prison—probably by suicide.
In other words, the trial is a big deal in the life of Julian, which is why so many of his supporters and detractors have turned up to witness the action first-hand. For many here, outside the court, he is a path-blazing digital journalist and publisher who exposed abject war crimes and corruption at the highest levels of global politics. Fiercely anti-establishment, anti-imperial, and pro-freedom of information, his actions only served to reflect the liberal West's hypocrisies back to itself. He should be celebrated as a principled hero, a free press martyr, an extraordinary man who has literally done nothing wrong, you sheeple brainwashed by the consent-manufacturing corporate media. Also, he’s a neurodivergent lothario who does naughty things sometimes. No need to get all radfem about it.
His critics see things differently. They say he is a grandiose narcissist who sowed chaos by indiscriminately leaking hundreds of thousands of unredacted documents, recklessly endangering the lives of people acting on the side of democracy, due process, and freedom. He is not a real journalist or publisher. Politically, he is naive. His actions only led to more secrecy and state paranoia, more persecution for whistleblowers. He cannot be let off the hook for his illegal activities, which created—and continue to create—tangible threats to the national security of the US and its allies. And, if that wasn't bad enough, he is a degenerate pervert who didn't feed his Embassy cat properly.
For seasoned Assange-watchers, certain words, phrases, and questions function as explosive triggers, signifying mind-blowingly complex, years-long, info-war-torn sagas: Sweden. Rape. Russia. Skateboard. Chelsea Manning password hash. Is he a journalist? Is he a libertarian cyberpunk, a misguided ideologue, a techno-optimist accelerationist, a cult leader, or a non-state hostile intelligence service agent? Assange has become a kind of fulcrum around which the ideological contradictions of our epoch spin. And yet the man himself will not be attending today’s extradition hearing—apparently Assange is in such abominably poor mental and physical health that he can't make it, even via video link. His absence leaves an eerie void at the centre of the spectacle. It forces my attention outwards. Who are all the wildly different people who have been sucked into the Assangeworld orbit at the Royal Courts of Justice on this grim, grey day at the end of February?
*
I queue up to get inside the Courts. A wrought iron fence, demarcating the boundary between the protestors and the pathway leading up to the entrance, has been covered by hundreds of yellow ribbons, tied on by Assange supporters. A distinctive banner catches my eye: a dangling stretch of thin cream silk printed with a wall of hand-scrawled black and red text and a drawing of a playing card, the Jack of Clubs. Inside the card, a disembodied hand is dangling a man’s head, his severed neck dripping blood. It looks like it could have been made by a genius, or someone in the midst of a psychotic break, or both. “Vivienne Westwood made it,” the stylish woman holding it says, on inquiry. “That's her son.” She points out a wiry, middle-aged man standing on the other side of the banner. Dame Viv was a famously committed Assange supporter. She once suspended herself in a bright yellow suit in a gigantic cage outside Old Bailey in a pro-Julian publicity stunt (ever heard the little saying “canary in a coalmine”?). Ben is here carrying on his mother's legacy. He says that his wife used to make bento boxes for Assange when he was in the Ecuadorian Embassy, though Julian didn't return the Tupperware. Evidently, they forgave him.
Inside, in a cavernous, church-like central hall with vaulted ceilings, there are two lanes of airport-style security checks. I pass through with no incident. Now, time to attempt trial entry. In the middle of the hall, overlooked by giant oil paintings of illustrious lawyers of the past, there is a makeshift media station. I walk towards the desk with maximum bluster, waving my phone with the email from the press office guy who said I could try and squeeze in. “You're a journalist?” a woman on the desk asks. “Where are you from?” “The Paris End,” I say. “We're an independent weekly…” She doesn't seem to care. “Ok, I'll note your name down and give you a slip for Courtroom 3,” she says. Because the trial has attracted enormous interest, the court administration has set up an overflow room for press and civilians, where the action from the main, adjacent courtroom will stream live. I'm in! Well, as in as I'm ever going to get.
I walk down a long, stone hallway populated by lawyers in black robes, starched shirts, and scruffy poodle wigs and join the plebs waiting in line to enter Courtroom 3. A couple of blokey Aussie journos in front of me are talking about property prices in Sydney. When the courtroom doors open, no one can figure out who is meant to be seated where, so there's a mad rush to claim a prime piece of real estate.
The courtroom has carved wooden panel walls lined with leather-bound books, two elaborate lighting fixtures with a number of broken bulbs, and a water-damaged roof. Two large flat-screen televisions have been set up at the front on a raised wooden dais. A male court official sits between them. He is about to have a very bad couple of days at work.
As soon as the trial begins, it becomes apparent that the streaming set-up is appalling. The shots of the courtroom are distant and it is impossible to hear what the lawyers are saying. Their voices are quiet and muffled, overlaid with the extremely loud clacking sound of a person typing on a keyboard and the pinging sounds of notifications which keep popping up on the TVs. Random people who have obviously been granted remote access to the trial appear on screen. One man seems to to be sitting in a pub, staring down into his phone camera. Everyone in the courtroom grumbles, first quietly, then louder as it becomes apparent that the situation is not readily being fixed. After a few minutes of unintelligible noise, the room abruptly reaches breaking point.
“This is gobbledy-gook!” a glamorous Scottish blonde in her mid-50s shouts, pounding the bench.
“Hard to know if it's on purpose or just epic incompetence,” a middle-aged, balding male civilian guffaws good-naturedly. “Probably the latter. But I'm just saying…if you wanted to do a cover-up, this is the way you'd do it.”
Nearby attendees nod knowingly. He tells the group that he has a fair bit of experience setting up complex hi-fi systems, before heckling the officials with technical suggestions. The Scottish blonde is staring with laser eyes at the official guy sitting between the two TVs. “He knows exactly what's going on,” she hisses.
The journalists are seriously pissed off, too. We're supposed to be reporting on the extradition trial of the century, or at least the decade, and it sounds like we're listening to a bootlegged recording of a pirate radio transmission broadcast in an alien tongue. Finally, the audio improves. Posh British voices intoning legalistic phrases ring out: “My Lady… my Lord…”
Compared to the adrenaline rush of the protest outside, the courtroom proceedings are animated by pomp, precedent, and soporific numbered clauses. Dame Victoria Sharp and Justice Jeremy Johnson are presiding over the case. Assange's lawyers argue that their client’s extradition is political, and therefore illegal under the UK-US Extradition treaty and the Extradition Act 2003. They say his human rights have been violated—that the conditions he has been held in amount to torture—and that this abominable treatment will only continue in the US, where he could face the death penalty. How can the UK justify sending an Australian-born political dissident to face such barbarism? Assange was clearly acting as a journalist and publisher undertaking “protected news-gathering activities.” These standard practices (soliciting classified information; protecting the identities of sources) led to the exposure of “apex level” criminality conducted and concealed by some of the world's most powerful people and institutions—exactly what good investigative journalism is supposed to do. Mark Summers KC is emphatic: “It's difficult to conceive of a case more in the public interest.”
This may be true, but after several hours of painful legislative minutiae, many members of the interested public are snoozing or scrolling on their phones. Occasionally, something obviously diabolical penetrates the crowd's stupor. For example, when Assange's lawyers reveal that the CIA and the Trump administration drew up high-level plans to kidnap Assange from the Ecuadorian Embassy and even potentially assassinate him: “This plan only fell away when the UK authorities weren't that keen on rendition or a shootout in the streets of London!” What the hell?
Dame Sharp has a cut-glass accent and arch style. When she intervenes to ask a question or pose a challenge, her voice rings out across the room like she's some omniscient god. At one point, she gets into a spat with the Assange team about their use of the word “routinised.”
“Do you mean routine?” she asks.
“Routinised?”
“Is ‘routinised’ an Americanism?”
The lawyer is forced to take the correction.
I find this mannered back-and-forth bizarre. Here in the uppermost echelons of power in Great Britannia, one doth not despoil our beloved English language with tawdry Americanisms. Here, we say “my lord,” not “my dude.” But, my lady, and to deploy a crude American phrase only to prove a point—one could argue that this trial is fundamentally about whether the UK is going to be the USA's little bitch or not. Does the extra “ised” really matter?
*
As the trial lurches on, I notice that the courtroom benches are populated by a not-insignificant number of meticulously made-up women staring with utmost alertness at the proceedings on the screens. One grips a bouquet of yellow roses. They all seem to feel deeply connected to Julian. Involuntarily, an image of Ted Bundy’s groupies piled up in the courtroom at his trial comes to mind.
One attendee tells me she helped facilitate the meeting between Lady Gaga and Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in 2012. Footage of the rendezvous shows Gaga, wearing a ridiculously oversized black felt hat, interviewing Assange, in a thin white tee, using a handheld digital camera.
“What's your favourite food?” she asks huskily.
“Well, I went to Malaysia…” he begins, then changes tack. “First of all, let's not pretend for a moment I'm a normal person. I am obsessed with our political struggle. I am not a normal person.”
Gaga pouts. “I just would really like for you to tell me how you feel...”
“Why does it matter how I feel? I mean, who gives a damn?” Assange says sardonically. He stares into the camera. “I don't care how I feel.”
Gaga pauses, processes, then leans in closer. “Do you ever just feel like fucking crying?”
“No.”
Gaga is not Assange's only celeb fan. The actor Pamela Anderson is a long-time friend and ally. Poetry she wrote around 2017 gives some insight into their dynamic:
As for Romance
How impossible it is to
have feelings for
Someone completely
Unavailable
Not because of his heart
But his circumstances.
Constantly under threat
Threatened to be killed.
Sexy. But this was all years ago now—before Belmarsh. In the courtroom, the mouthy Scottish blonde tells me that Julian is really not doing well at the moment, and that she knows this firsthand because at a previous trial she attended she saw him getting put into the van to be sent back to the high-security prison. She says that you couldn't really see Julian unless you got really close to the window of the van and pressed your face right up against the glass, which she did. She caught a glimpse of our man. “He looked absolutely shockin’,” she says mournfully, shaking her head.
*
It's raining on Day 2. The light filtering into the court is colder, gloomier. I'm in Courtroom 3 again, but this time, I am directed upstairs via a spiral staircase to the balcony. All the journalists are up here today, crammed into wooden benches with an aerial view of the two TVs. At the start of the proceedings, Dame Sharp notes that she understands there were technical issues yesterday and that these should be resolved today. One of the US lawyers starts speaking. She is completely inaudible. The crowd goes wild. “How can the press report on this if they can't even hear?” someone shouts. “It's unacceptable!” The beleaguered officials attempt, again, to fix the set-up. “This is worse than Turkey,” a Turkish journo says incredulously to his neighbour.
The paranoid civilian interpretation of the tech situation—“they know exactly what they are doing”—is perhaps overly conspiratorial. But this is getting ridiculous. It seems likely that the court bureaucrats aren't being given appropriate resources to fix it, but how hard and costly is it to set up a livestream these days? Is Britain really this broken? Or do they just not care? The Centrelink of it all is disturbing. “The policy of small compromises… where human dignity, transparency, and accountability are always the second (or third) priority, is universal,” former UN official Melzer writes, in reference to Assange's case. “This is the unspectacular material from which the most atrocious crimes and the greatest human tragedies are made, through appeasement of the powerful, denial of responsibility, and bureaucratic complicity.” The court's rank technical ineptitude shows that providing press and civilians with open access to the trial is not a priority.
Eventually, the audio slightly improves. The US lawyers are setting out the pro-extradition case. Contrary to the moral appeals from the Assange side, they affect a serious, seemingly reasonable tone. They are simply following the rule of law, acting like the grown-ups in the geopolitical room. Orthodox interpretation of the relevant legislation, they argue, does not prohibit extradition for political offences. They skirt around the death penalty question, but assure the courtroom that Assange will receive a fair trial that respects his fundamental human rights. “Freedom of speech is obviously highly prized in the United States.”
Key to the case for extradition is a semantic dispute about “responsible” journalism and publishing activities. Assange cannot be “treated as akin to an ordinary journalist or Wikileaks akin to an ordinary publisher,” the lawyers argue. They don't agree that it was normal journalistic practice for Assange to solicit classified documents from Chelsea Manning, who passed on approximately 90,000 Afghanistan war-related reports, 400,000 Iraq war-related reports, 800 Guantanamo Bay detainee assessment briefs, and 250,000 U.S. Department of State cables to WikiLeaks. (Allegedly, at one point, after the Gitmo drop, Manning wrote: “after this upload, thats all i really have got left.” Assange replied: “curious eyes never run dry in my experience.” She later told an affiliate that she'd downloaded “possibly the largest data spillage in US history” while lip-syncing to Lady Gaga and Beyonce's “Telephone.” Ok, queen.)
One of the major points of contention is WikiLeaks’ failure to redact sensitive information, such as the names and identifying details of human sources, from leaked documents. Take, for example, the release of the Afghan War Logs in 2010. WikiLeaks undertook this project in collaboration with a number of prominent media outlets. The plan was that the newspapers would publish stories at the same time as WikiLeaks dropped the raw material. Assange had promised the other mastheads that WikiLeaks would redact the most sensitive information in the files. However, as the deadline approached, this process was nowhere near close to completion. At the last minute, WikiLeaks held back 15,000 of the approximate 90,000 documents, the ones most densely packed with names, but this wasn’t exactly a considered approach to redaction. And there was still sensitive information (such as the name of a person in Afghanistan who had reported a planned attack on US and allied forces in 2007) in the ones that did get released.
The US lawyers argue that such indiscriminate dumping of classified information put people at grave physical risk. “This wasn't a slip, or an error.” It had “profound consequences.” According to the US, government officials had to assist families in fleeing their homelands after their identities were exposed by the leaks. Assets were frozen, and reputations ruined. Furthermore, it had long-term consequences. Now, would-be informants have reason to doubt their safety. Trust has been eroded in the US government’s ability to keep names and communications secure.
Assange’s lawyers take the mic again. They are not impressed. The US lawyers have managed to spend hours outlining all of Assange’s ethical failings and alleged illegal activities without once mentioning the elephant in the room—the US government’s own war crimes. “It's a miracle!” says Edward Fitzgerald KC. Plus, in terms of the redaction issue, the US has never proved that any specific individual has actually suffered grave physical harm as a result of WikiLeaks’ publications. Assange did what journalists and publishers have always done—used adversarial tactics to print something someone does not want printed. On balance, the public benefit of publishing the documents outweighed the potential harm to a relatively small number of individuals. Even if the worst did happen—innocent people died after their identities were exposed by the documents—this does not necessarily mean that, legally, Assange should be extradited to the US.
I’m not wholly convinced by a moral argument that entirely disavows WikiLeaks’ responsibility. To be fair, given the volume of the documents, and the nature of the data in them, it's a bit deluded to think there is a magic wand solution to redaction. But it’s not just military spooks who have criticised the organisation’s approach to withholding information. Many journalists, human rights campaigners, and WikiLeaks affiliates have said that they could have been more careful over the years. Reporter Raffi Khatchadourian writes that “WikiLeaks documents have revealed the identities of teen-age rape victims in Saudi Arabia, anti-government activists in Syria, and dissident academics in China.” On the flipside, reams of documents on the site are inane communiques that are far from news-worthy. Just as the UK court’s technical failures are a byproduct of their systematic disregard for open justice, this model of publication—publishing everything, or almost everything—is a byproduct of WikiLeaks’ ideology of total transparency and Assange’s cynical worldview. When Khatchadourian asked Assange about what he thought of criticism about his approach to redactions, he replied: “It’s nearly all bogus. In any case, we have to understand the reality that privacy is dead.”
*
As the day draws to a close, the judges retire to deliberate. Will they return a verdict today? The journalists upstairs stop filing copy and tweeting for a moment and begin to commiserate and share predictions. Most think we won’t know the outcome immediately. After my time among the journos, I’ve identified two main factions. These can be summarised as: journalists working for maligned mainstream publications with large readerships; and journalists working for anti-establishment, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist independent rags with micro-readerships. The normie journos and the cool journos. Sort of.
The first group are in plain suits and carry Davos backpacks. They publish sentences like: “Assange himself was again not in court on Wednesday nor watching remotely because he was unwell, his lawyers and his wife Stella said.” The latter kind publish sentences like: “This war against WikiLeaks is a direct warning to those who might stand up against the current war mania.” That's a quote from Jacobin’s guy, Chip Gibbons, who is here in a three-piece chequered suit and a newsboy cap. He approaches Matt Kennard, an incredibly handsome journo wearing a black t-shirt and a silver chain and says, in a squealing Chapo accent, “Declassified UK is so inspiring. I don't know enough about the British military state to comment, but I love it.” It takes all sorts.
The judges return. Dame Sharp gives the final update: no decision. More to come in a few weeks. This was expected, but the balcony deflates nonetheless. Assange will not be free today.
There is a mad drum circle banging outside the Courts. Rain spits down. Rhythmic vibrations fill the air. The mood is feral. A roar of screams and cheers and shouts swell up when people see the Assange contingent, with Stella Assange at the centre, walking towards the gate. “Stella! Stella! Stella!” “Free, free, Julian Assange! Free, free, Julian Assange!” Someone has covered their face with a paper cut-out of Julian's face, his mouth taped shut by the American flag. “Stella! Stella!” Others are in orange jumpsuits, Guantánamo detainee-style, and white, rictus-grin Anonymous masks. Police in fluorescent yellow jackets have parted the crowd, creating a pathway for the trial attendees to walk through. The drum circle gets louder and louder. One protestor's sign just says “TRUTH,” but the rain has caused the ink to begin dribbling down the paper. It looks like TRUTH is crying. Stella keeps walking purposefully across the slick, wet pavement, her dark green coat marking her out from the fleuro-clad police. Then she disappears in the throng ahead.
Hundreds of protestors head to Downing Street, accompanied by a full marching band. A laser device projects pro-Julian, pro-Palestine, anti-Rishi Sunak messages on the facades of the nineteenth century buildings. En route, a temporary podium has been set up for speeches, but the organisers are, of course, having technical difficulties. Screeching feedback rings out. Someone in the crowd starts offering advice—it’s the same congenial bald civilian with hi-fi systems experience from the courtroom. “It’s sounding like it’s bouncing off that wall over there,” he says, gesturing towards a nearby wall.
I ask a few people why they are here.
A guy who moved over from India to study in London says he's protesting “for the sake of the truth.” He supports WikiLeaks and Assange because they give a platform to independent journalists who criticise authoritarian governments. “People picture the UK when they think about democracy—they should support the people. Hear the people.”
A Swedish woman is here to say “sorry from Sweden,” and protest the extradition to America specifically. “He’s not American. If he did something really terribly illegal, surely you don't send him to America. Maybe you send him to Australia.”
One woman who lives near Belmarsh Prison started going to the Saturday vigils for Assange during Covid. From the very first time she attended, she felt welcomed by the organiser. She went down and said: “‘Well, I'm a local person, I want to do something for Julian.’ And he came up and he shook my hand. That was the first contact I'd had with a human being since the start of lockdown.” I thought about all the people who experienced profound social isolation during the Covid years, and the sense of purpose, ritual, and community that supporting Assange clearly provides.
The bongo players are not stopping anytime soon. Energy is high. But it's not all peace and love. Just a few metres down the road, a smaller, separate rally for Ukraine is happening. A burly Russian man pauses as he leaves the Free Assange contingent. He starts berating the group of young Ukrainians, saying that they've been sucked in by Western propaganda, that their countrymen actually did want to be invaded. This is not received well.
The philosopher Byung-Chul Han says we are at a point in human history where “there are hardly any shared values or symbols, no common narratives that unite people.” There is no longer a public sphere—digital media has fragmented it into many competing, contradictory private spaces. We receive information at a frenetic pace. But these pieces of information “do not coalesce into knowledge or truth, which are forms of narration.” The Assange extradition trial is a microcosm of this moment, when the info wars never stop.
*
In early April, the court returns its judgement. They reject some of the Assange team’s propositions, such as the assertion that harm caused by publishing unredacted names is overinflated, or even untrue. But they say Assange has a real shot on three of the grounds for appeal: that the extradition is incompatible with his human right to freedom of expression, that he might receive prejudicial treatment at his trial because he is not a US citizen, and that he might face the death penalty. There will be no immediate extradition. Not bad news. Not great news. The judges give the Americans a chance to come back with assurances: that Assange will not be prejudiced at trial because he’s Australian, that he will be allowed to rely on the First Amendment as though he was a US citizen, and that he won't get executed. Assange supporters aren’t buying it. “US assurances are not worth the paper they are written on,” Stella says in a press conference.
A few weeks later, I decide to go to Belmarsh prison to see where Assange has spent the last five years decomposing. It’s bloody miles away—in Zone 4. I get on a bus, a train, then another bus. As the double-decker winds its way past chicken shops, billboards advertising vocational training colleges, and condo construction sites, I wonder how Stella is going.
Without a doubt, she is the most intriguing person connected to the extradition trial, and as close as you can get to the beating heart of Assangeworld. Stella is beyond committed. She’s changed her name not once, but twice, for Julian. Not just her surname. To evade surveillance and confuse authorities about her identity, she changed her birth name from Sara Gonzalez Devant to Stella Moris. The couple conceived not one, but two, secret children while Assange was living in the Ecuadorian Embassy. Apparently a camping tent was involved. Apparently the US organised the theft of a dirty nappy in order to conduct patrimonial DNA tests. Apparently the US was secretly and illegally recording the couple’s every move through a Spanish company subcontracted by the Ecuadorians for embassy security (the firm’s owner, who suddenly started constantly referencing his mysterious “American friends” to his employees and going on extravagant yacht holidays, is currently being investigated in the Spanish courts).
What could motivate a woman to commit her life to a relationship—and to parenting—with a man in this extraordinarily wretched situation? There’s WikiLeaks, of course, and its noble, Herculean project of holding power to account. But many people believe in WikiLeaks; you have to be a particular kind of person to end up marrying it. Her current X/Twitter banner shows her standing in front of a huge, frankly hideous mural of Julian, his face daubed in colourful, Impressionistic strokes of pastel paint. This is a picture of a union between a flesh-and-blood woman and the public image of a man.
It's obvious that Stella is deployed strategically as Assange’s key spokesperson, in a dual role as an articulate human rights lawyer and loving wife. She is capable of entering into combat in the media arena, and clearly shares some of Julian’s anti-authoritarian troll proclivities. In one interview on Piers Morgan Uncensored, she appears opposite former US National Security Advisor/Ambassador John Bolton.
“I hope he gets at least 176 years in jail for what he did,” Bolton says.
“Stella?” Morgan prompts.
“Well, of course, Ambassador Bolton is kind of the ideological nemesis for Julian,” she says calmly. “He has, during his time in the Bush administration and, later, the Trump administration, sought to undermine the international legal system and ensure the US is not under the International Criminal Court's jurisdiction. If it was, Mr Bolton might in fact be prosecuted under the ICC. He was one of the chief cheerleaders of the Iraq war, which Julian exposed through these leaks. He has a conflict of interest.” She smirks. Bolton releases an apoplectic laugh.
Stella also appears regularly in mainstream newspapers. When she and Julian were married in a ceremony held at Belmarsh, she was photographed in her grey satin Vivienne Westwood bridal gown with her two young sons. She is the tragic bride, his children two fatherless boys. Assange's supporters often beg that he be allowed to return to his family, to the warm embrace of the perfect nuclear home waiting for him on the outside. Yeah, right. When has Julian Assange ever wanted a quiet life behind a white picket fence? This is a man who has boasted about having children on every continent, some living under secret identities, and not paying child support for any of them. But Stella is clearly not a naive young girl swept up in a fantasy of playing hacker house, nor his camp’s media patsy. I think she knows exactly what she is doing. Or, at the very least, she can see a few more steps ahead on the 3D chessboard than most.
The bus to Belmarsh rolls along a major road, past an industrial business park. The prison stop approaches. I stumble down the double-decker's stairs to the first floor and run straight into… Stella. I double-take. I’ve spent so much time thinking about her and Julian that it feels like I've conjured an apparition. But it’s actually her. We’re on the same bus.
She’s not dressed up for court today, and it feels weird to see her completely alone, in practical sneakers, carrying a tote bag, her face free of make-up, her hair pulled back into a messy ponytail. Her phone is stuck to her ear. The bus pulls up to the stop and we both get off. I tail her. We cross the road, pause at a concrete island while the lights are red, then keep walking towards the prison when the lights turn green. Her phone conversation looks to be intense and all-consuming, though my time in Assangeworld has taught me that holding a phone to an ear could be a tactic to deter journalists seeking unsolicited interviews. She's walking with purpose, like she really just wants to get where she’s going. Neither of us know it yet, but this afternoon, the US will announce that they will agree to give the assurances requested by the UK (though he will only be able to “raise and seek to rely upon” the First Amendment), making it more likely Assange will be extradited. Joe Biden has said some words about “considering” requests to drop the case—vague promises that are not legally binding.
The entrance to the prison is up a road lined by red footpaths that lead to a nearly full carpark, a bike shed, a few small external buildings, and an imposing, plain brick entrance to the main prison complex, emblazoned with an elaborate regal insignia. It's officially His Majesty’s prison. Massive grey walls, streaked with water stains and topped with a barrel-like structure covered in lichen (impossible to climb), extend around the entirety of the complex. There are security guards and CCTV cameras everywhere. Stella turns left and trudges up one of the paths, past a building labelled, in a disturbingly cheerful teal blue Comic Sans font, “Spanky's Gym.” She heads towards the prison. The whole scene is extremely bleak. This is the reality of their relationship 99% of the time—the everyday banality of a Belmarsh marriage.
There's not much to see after I've scoped out the car park. I take some photos, then realise I'm taking a photo of a sign that stipulates no photos, so I shuffle back towards the trees at the entrance of the complex to check out the greenery. It's filled with litter. What now? There will be a final hearing in London on May 20th to decide whether Assange will be given another chance to appeal the extradition. He still has a technical sliver of hope. But things at Belmarsh feel dire. Then I realise that the fence I'm standing in front of is covered in yellow ribbons. Some are faded, some are fresh. There are tiny stickers with Assange’s face on them attached to a pole nearby. The ideals of WikiLeaks’ mission remain a potent force—powerful enough to motivate some punters to schlep it to Belmarsh to leave traces of their support. On the other side of the fence, inextricable from those ideals, is a man paying an almost unfathomable price for them. I look at the footpath beneath me. Faded white spray-paint spells out a barely legible phrase: “Free Julian Assange.”