He’s the notorious WikiLeaks founder, imprisoned since 2019 in Belmarsh and Britain’s most divisive inmate. She’s the mother of their two small children and the lawyer campaigning for his release.
As Stella Assange knows, the story she shares with her husband, the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, sounds more like fiction than fact, a wild tale of data cloudbursts, sexual abuse allegations and an assassination plot dreamt up at CIA HQ in Virginia. Some mornings, though, life must in practice nearer resemble a remorseless grind – and for them both: he in his bleak high-security prison in southeast London, she in almost her fifth year of trying to get him out of it.
Consider this morning. Her trip from her home in west London to HMP Belmarsh has taken an hour and a quarter by train and bus. On arrival, her fingerprints were taken and her bags locked away. She was issued with a visitor’s pass and her prints were checked again before she passed through an x-ray machine. At this point, she was told to go back to the beginning because she was wearing a hoodie. She made it through again, was magnetically scanned for weapons and patted down for drugs. They also checked inside her mouth, behind her ears and in her hair. Then it was across a yard to the prison proper where her credentials were checked again and a dog sniffed her.
The Assanges meet in a huge hall, observed by guards from a floor above. She is allocated one of the 40 tables – each contains a recording device – and there at last she and Julian embrace and for an hour or so talk, holding hands across the desk. She does all this on average twice a week. Often she takes their two boys, Gabriel, 5, and Max, 4, who sit on their father’s lap or run off to the play area. Today it was just the two of them.
Does her heart leap when she spots him?
“I mean, it’s like getting re-energised and finding some sanity. Even if it’s just an hour, it makes a big difference,” she says in an American accent acquired during her days at an international school in Lesotho in southern Africa.
Daylight, they used to say of government corruption, is the best disinfectant. I wonder if Assange, that great disinfector of state malfeasance, has a window in his cell. He does, and he feeds birds from it. People, she says, think he lives surrounded by computers, but the world’s ultimate cyber-citizen is actually a nature lover who grew up in the Australian countryside before the family settled in Melbourne.
“We talk about what kind of place we want to live in when this is over, and I don’t know where it will be but I imagine that will be somewhere with easy access to the outdoors,” Stella says.
Nature is her hinterland too, I say, since, although her family was also nomadic, she spent much of her childhood in Africa.
“Yes,” she agrees, “and it’s important for the kids. If it weren’t for the situation right now, we’d probably be living in the countryside.”
When does she think they might get this life they are promising themselves? “Well, the nature of this is that it’s so uncertain. It could be next month. It could be three years. Or it could be never. That’s what you have to work with, but you do need a vision to stay sane. You need to work towards something.”
Something such as her wedding, I suppose, which took place in Belmarsh before a registrar and a Catholic priest almost exactly a year ago, Stella in a wedding dress designed by the late Vivienne Westwood, a fierce Assange fan. “That was a lovely day and a lovely dress,” she says, and stops as if to remember the occasion. “I mean, you know, we enjoy each other’s company.”
And suddenly, blazing in front of me, is a dazzling, involuntary grin I had really not been expecting.
Having negotiated the less onerous security protocols at the Times building near London Bridge, she is talking to me on our top floor from where you cannot quite make out Belmarsh. She is 40, a short woman with a brain as big as her smile and a vivid but precise turn of phrase befitting a lawyer who was once part of Assange’s defence team. She will often stop, and for quite a while, to consider what is the best answer to a question, but the answer when it comes tends to be a good one.
In the early days of their romance, she had never imagined Assange would be jailed. Assange was far from a free man even then, however. In 2012 he had lost a legal fight to avoid extradition to Sweden. Stockholm police were investigating what were described as rape allegations by two WikiLeaks volunteers in Stockholm. Fearing America would more readily extradite him from Sweden than Britain to prosecute him for publishing its official secrets, Assange skipped bail and fled to the unlikely asylum of the Ecuadorean embassy in Knightsbridge, London. But when a more pro-American government came to power in Ecuador, the Metropolitan Police were ushered in to arrest him. That year, 2019, he was found guilty of breaching the 2012 bail conditions and carted off to Belmarsh.
Call her naive – and people have – but Stella did not suspect that the 50-week sentence would stretch to 4 years and counting (the anniversary is April 11). Assange had barely heard the jail doors slam behind him when the United States demanded his extradition for his leaking of American war secrets (secrets that included a video, Collateral Murder, which recorded a US Army helicopter crew coldly killing some dozen civilians in Baghdad). The reason for his incarceration had changed: he was now a “flight risk” from US justice. With espionage later added to his charge sheet, if convicted he would probably remain in the harshest of US prisons for the rest of his days. The maximum available sentence is 175 years.
“But it’s completely absurd Julian’s in prison at all,” his wife says. “He did nothing but try to enforce international law.”
Nor did Stella imagine – and this truly alarms her – that his incarceration would become so little remarked upon in Britain, the country to which he had been invited by The Guardian in 2010 to continue his whistleblowing exposés, thereby providing it with days of front-page exclusives. “I think there’s a lack of understanding here that Julian is being prosecuted for exposing the Iraq and Afghan wars. You ask people and they don’t know why he’s in prison, if they even know he is in prison.”
His state of mind varies greatly, she says, and is often dependent on his dealings with the prison bureaucracy. Today? “Today was good. Today I feel energised. Julian was in good spirits.” And on other days? “There have been times that have been very dark where he’s talked about committing suicide, where he’s basically been not communicative, almost completely out of it. But that was mostly when he was in the so-called healthcare unit in Belmarsh because the prison said he was a high suicide risk. And then there was a petition by the prisoners inside Belmarsh to get him moved, because it was making him worse, a lot worse, being there.”
A father of two young children would, I say, need to be seriously depressed, even mentally ill, to consider taking his own life.
“He’s been in a desperate situation that anyone would struggle to cope with.”
Can she talk him around? Can she say, “Come along, we’re going to live in a house in the country some day”?
“Well, it’s private, that kind of conversation.”
I am always slightly amused – I politely call it a paradox – when Assange’s lawyers talk of privacy when their client evidently thinks states have no right to theirs. “That’s an exaggeration. He believes that there are legitimate secrets but his job is to publish information that is of public significance.”
So he is not an incontinent anarchist, throwing everything out there? “No, not at all. He’s not an anarchist. If anything, he’s sort of a libertarian. But he doesn’t label himself and he doesn’t like being like labelled either.”
Although people often imagine otherwise, Assange did redact names in the leaked documents he was passed before he published them. It was, he insists, a Guardian reporter who in a 2011 book published the encryption key that could undo the codenames in 250,000 US diplomatic cables (the reporter said he thought it was a temporary key only). Indeed, a 2016 documentary, Risk, shows Assange frantically trying to contact the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, to warn her that the encrypted files were all over the web and the code was now out there too. He then, however, made the unredacted cables public, arguing it was now the safest, most equitable course, an argument The Guardian and his other co-publishers condemned. This – the exposure of those names – is one of the reasons America wants to try him and why he is still in jail fighting extradition.
In January 2021, the High Court ruled on the American extradition demands. Mostly it found in favour of the US: its request was not politically motivated; the effect on Stella and the boys not unusual; a trial at an espionage court in Virginia would be fairly conducted. Yet the judge unexpectedly denied the extradition on the one ground that would not create case law: that there was a real risk that Assange, given his parlous mental state, would kill himself in a hellish American prison. The US later successfully appealed but the case winds on with a further decision due soon, maybe next month, on whether an appeal against extradition should be heard.
Nils Melzer, a Swiss academic who until leaving for the Red Cross last year was the UN special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, writes in his new pro-Assange book, The Trial of Julian Assange: A Story of Persecution, that the legal delays are strategic: “The US is in no hurry to bring the extradition proceedings to a conclusion. The longer every procedural step can be spun out, the more Assange’s health and stability will deteriorate and the stronger the deterrent effect on other journalists and whistleblowers.”
Stella concurs. At risk is not just her 51-year-old husband’s mental health but also his physical condition. In October 2021 he had a mini-stroke. “What’s being done to Julian is deliberately indefinite and cruel. It is to make him suffer endlessly,” she says.
“This is what dictatorships do. This is not what liberal democracies that value personal freedom and freedom of speech and freedom of the press do. It’s not just something that’s being done to keep him in prison. You need to corrupt the safeguards that exist or that existed to keep him there. You need to remove safeguards for publishers and against arbitrary detention. This is a change that will affect everyone. It’s a cultural political change, and it’s happening here.”
The Assanges fear Belmarsh. A freedom of information request revealed more than 200 violent incidents there in the year up to October 2022 (although, I discover, the Howard League for Penal Reform recorded only one actual death in 2021). But their complaints are nothing compared with what they say Assange endured in the years of his comparative luxury as a bail-skipper/political refugee in the embassy.
Nevertheless, these seven years also contained happy memories. It was, after all, during them that they fell in love. They met first at the journalists’ club the Frontline, in Paddington, in 2011, where she had found him “attractive” but in a “historical figure” kind of way. At the request of his lawyer Jennifer Robinson, Stella joined his legal team. By 2015 they were lovers.
She was not the first attractive member of Team Assange to fall for him. Sarah Harrison, his former personal assistant, was his girlfriend for a time and in 2013 ended up spending 40 days in a Moscow airport with Edward Snowden, another WikiLeaks source. She did not return to Britain for three years for fear of being detained under the anti-terrorist laws.
For years, Stella’s relationship with Assange was one of those secrets that WikiLeaks proved good at keeping (another is that, as with Boris Johnson, no one is sure how many children Assange has sired, although Stella says the true number is somewhere among the court documents). They started a family because, she has explained before, he had not been charged with anything. Freedom seemed tantalisingly close. Even embassy staff were not sure whether the resulting baby being repeatedly taken in by an actor friend of Stella’s was an Assange, Gabriel’s moment of conception having been concealed from the security cameras by means of a tent set up “for privacy and escapism”. To make sure, they tested his nappies for Assange DNA.
That Assange had a new family became known only in April 2020 when he applied to be bailed to Stella’s home. She, meanwhile, to preserve her obscurity, had changed her name from Sara González Devant to Stella Moris. I get no sense, however, that these subterfuges were a turn-on for either of them.
“We felt that the embassy was a very unsafe environment towards the end. I was afraid they were going to kill them.” And was she afraid for herself? “I was afraid that I’d be attacked as a way of getting to him. We didn’t know about the plans to leave the door open so he could be kidnapped.
“To regular people it sounds like some kind of weird fictional story. But we actually have had to deal with assassination plots and kidnap plots and people following us and intimidation. This is his reality. You try to protect yourself as much as you can.”
As director of the CIA from 2017 to 2018, Mike Pompeo became obsessed, she claims, with taking down WikiLeaks and had the CIA work with the Spanish security company employed by the embassy to bring its founder down with it. “There were discussions in the White House that Julian should be assassinated. Pompeo ordered what were called ‘sketches and plans’ to assassinate him,” she says, referencing a Yahoo News investigation with more than 30 sources. Last year Spain’s national high court summoned Pompeo to testify on the allegations. He has not responded.
“But Pompeo confirmed it. I mean, he said that the sources for this story should be prosecuted under the Espionage Act. You don’t prosecute under the Espionage Act if it’s false.”
In his memoir, Never Give an Inch, Pompeo refers to Assange as a “hoodlum” and a “crook” and says he lobbied the Ecuadoreans to “kick Assange out of his pathetic accommodations inside their embassy”. “I will be delighted,” he adds, “the day he is thrown into an American federal penitentiary. Just one less useful idiot for Russia to exploit – and a warning to all such scoundrels in the future.” So certainly no love lost, although in the end wiser counsels prevailed and Assange was neither abducted nor exterminated.
Given the scale of the bullying (I probably put it euphemistically), and given its colourful particulars, it is perhaps extraordinary how little sympathy his case arouses in Britain. Internationally, in contrast, he has the support of the president of the general assembly of the United Nations, more than 2,000 journalists from 108 countries, and 15 current and former world leaders including Anthony Albanese, the Australian prime minister.
One reason for our scepticism is surely the allegations of sexual misconduct, in one case rape, made in Sweden by two women Assange slept with within three days of each other in 2010. One believes he removed his condom during consensual sex, the other that he had unprotected sex with her, initiated while she was asleep. Swedish law, however, requires proof of culpable intent and charges against Assange were never pressed.
Does he – and Stella would know – have a problem with protected sex? “Well, that’s not his version. But I mean, what was written about the Swedish allegations was a misrepresentation. In fact, the second prosecutor who looked into it said that everyone’s version was credible and that it wasn’t a criminal offence.”
But it was something that made people wonder whether he was a very nice man. Is he a nice man?
“I think a lot could be said about that.”
But is he a nice man?
“Of course he is. Of course he is.”
She didn’t just fall in love with his politics or martyrdom? She fell in love with a decent man, maybe more than decent?
“He is the most amazing man in the world,” she says with another of her grins.
She partly blames the clash of journalistic egos for his falling out with The Guardian. Whether that explains director Laura Poitras turning against him while filming Risk is another matter. My impression was that she shared the shock of the civil rights lawyer Helena Kennedy when he referred to his Swedish accusers as a “mad feminist conspiracy”. But Stella points out that Poitras too supports Assange’s release from jail, as does Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian during its on-off love affair with Assange.
I wonder whether Asssange’s autism, diagnosed in 2020, may account for him putting so many people’s backs up. I think it could account for quite a lot, including his extraordinary but obtuse courage. I mean, I say, it’s entirely predictable that when you strip naked a superpower, it will come down hard on you. But his reckless focus allowed him to go where no others dared.
“Well, I think when you read all these things about Julian – these horrible caricatures of his character – when you read it with your autism-spectrum-sensitive glasses on, you get a different perspective. Look at Julian’s untidiness, for example. Actually he’s very structured. He has categories for everything. I am chaotic. He has order to his bookshelf. The books that go here; the books that go there. I am total chaos.”
But he has a reputation for being a slob, not washing, leaving his underpants on chairs when working with journalists. “Well, Julian can go three days without sleep or eating because he’ll forget to eat. Once he called an ambulance after he hadn’t slept or eaten for three days straight because he was so focused on what he was doing. To your [anarchy] question: I think he takes rules seriously.”
I think she means the rules about keeping state secrets. She doesn’t.
“We’re talking about a complete destruction of the international rules that were established after the Second World War. It started with 9/11, then with carving out all sorts of exceptions where you can torture and you can have something called black sites and you can have Guantanamo Bay where you can keep people arbitrarily detained without trial and torture them and even kill them. He was outraged by the breaking of those laws.”
But compare, I say, the case of Chelsea Manning. the US Army intelligence officer who sent the Iraq and Afghanistan files to WikiLeaks. She did that, went to jail, showed no signs of doing anything similar again, and had her sentence commuted by President Obama. Why, having earned fame and infamy, did Assange not stand aside and pass WikiLeaks over to someone else to run?
“Why would he do that?”
Because he was endangering his life. Because somebody else could do it instead. Was it down to his ego, his need to be the face of WikiLeaks?
“He tried not to have any profile for a long time. If you look at the original WikiLeaks, for a few years there was no visible face of it until it wasn’t possible any more, because too many people knew who he was. If you don’t have a frontman or frontwoman, then someone else will pretend to be the frontman or frontwoman.”
I see. So if Assange wins his appeal against extradition and is released, will he simply go straight back to publishing WikiLeaks?
There is an unusually long pause, even by her standards.
“See, how do I answer that question?”
I can see she might need to plead the Fifth on his behalf.
“As far as I’m concerned, knowing Julian, he needs to heal. He needs time. He has done many things in his life and he has many ideas of the things he could do, and it’s not just being the founder and editor of WikiLeaks. He’s a writer. He’s a public intellectual.”
And here we see the real difference between the brains of Julian and Stella Assange. She knows when to obfuscate. She knows, when I ask her whether we have political courts in Britain, to say no, but there are “political cases”. Is there a conspiracy to keep her husband in jail? Conspiracy, she quibbles, is a “problematic” word. She, after all, is a lawyer; Julian is merely a force of nature.
She is also a mother of two and must leave to pick up her children from school and nursery. I say any woman bringing up children on her own must be permanently exhausted: that she copes with the additional legal and political stress is incomprehensible.
“But you know, a lot of people want Julian free. There’s a lot of love and support there,” she says softly.
And much of that, I think, trades under the name Stella Assange.
Written by: Andrew Billen
© The Times of London