Sexism is a potent political force and an important part of Assange’s legacy. We ignore it at our own peril.
Much has been, and will be, written about the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his potential extradition to the United States.
Some will argue that extraditing Assange to face charges of conspiring to hack into US Government computer systems would set a chilling precedent that could endanger the institution of journalism, while others will believe that he, like anyone else, should face justice for his alleged criminal activity.
But, as these discussions play out, we shouldn’t lose sight of why he was holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in the first place and what that tells us about him.
The undeniable misogyny of Julian Assange is the thread that weaves together so many of the seemingly unrelated pieces of the WikiLeaks saga.
Julian Assange was not a “political prisoner”; in fact, he wasn’t a prisoner at all. He wasn’t being pursued for bravely standing up for truth; rather, he was hiding from it.
Assange is a misogynist who spent nearly seven years living in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London because he didn’t want to return to Sweden to answer to the two women accusing him of sex crimes. Regardless of your feelings toward WikiLeaks, this is a major part of Assange’s legacy – and it matters.
The undeniable misogyny of Julian Assange is the thread that weaves together so many of the seemingly unrelated pieces of the WikiLeaks saga.
It was his lack of respect for women’s bodily autonomy that resulted in the charges that he ultimately hid from in the safety of the embassy, and it was his disdain for feminism and the “establishment” he believes it represents that made bedfellows out of Assange, Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin.
Hiding from the Truth
Assange stands accused of non-consensually tearing a condom during sex with one woman and of non-consensually having unprotected sex with another woman while she was asleep. Both are crimes in Sweden, where the incidents allegedly took place, and similar cases have been successfully prosecuted in other countries, as well.
Like other forms of sexual assault, the act of removing or breaking a condom during sex is a way of exercising power and control over a woman’s body, and is rooted in an ideology of male dominance in which access to women’s bodies is viewed as a man’s right. Men who engage in and encourage the behavior typically believe they have a right to “spread their seed” and often view women as little more than vessels to be used and then discarded.
Assange’s own statements speak to his motives.
According to court transcripts, Assange allegedly said he “wanted to impregnate women” and “preferred virgins because he would be the first to impregnate them”. He also reportedly told one of his alleged victims that “Sweden is a good country to have kids in”.
There is no indication that either of his accusers had any intention to become pregnant – in fact, both women had insisted on using protection, but Assange allegedly disregarded that.
According to court transcripts, Assange allegedly said he ‘wanted to impregnate women’ and ‘preferred virgins because he would be the first to impregnate them’.
It’s unclear if Assange has engaged in this behavior with other women, but it is clear that he was fixated on, if not obsessed with, impregnating women. By the time he was accused of sexual assault, he had impregnated at least four women, all of whom gave birth to the children.
Assange’s case became a flashpoint in the debate over sexual assault, feminism, and feminist constructions of sexual assault.
The allegations against him were met with a tidal wave of backlash from Assange himself, as well as his supporters and, of course, men’s right activists (MRAs) and other like-minded men who found common cause in wanting to delegitimise his accusers and, more broadly, the feminist movement that they blamed for making victims out of men like Assange. To this day, Assange and his defenders reject the idea that Assange’s alleged behavior even constituted sexual misconduct.
It’s important to note here that, initially, Assange’s two accusers only went to the police when he refused to voluntarily get tested for sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Even then, an arrest warrant was only issued because there was no way to force him to take a test without one.
Assange was eventually arrested in the UK and then bailed out with the help of WikiLeaks’ supporters. More than a year later, the UK Supreme Court decided that Assange should be extradited to Sweden to face the charges, but they never got the chance. The next time Assange was seen publicly was on the balcony of London’s Ecuadorian Embassy.
Assange’s Anti-Feminist Vendetta
When the allegations against Assange emerged, there was disagreement within WikiLeaks regarding how to handle the case.
For the most part, Assange’s colleagues wanted to keep the charges against him separate from the organisation of WikiLeaks, but Assange had a different idea. He saw an opportunity to use WikiLeaks and its growing base of supporters to smear his accusers by pitting them against WikiLeaks and framing them as manipulative women who had set him up to take down the organisation he founded.
In the documentary ‘Risk’, Assange described how he hoped to use WikiLeaks to turn his accusers into pariahs in an effort to persuade them to drop the charges against him.
“An actual court case is going to be very, very hard for these women,” he warned. “They will be reviled forever by a large segment of the global population, so I don’t think it’s in their interest to proceed that way.”
‘I fell into a hornets’ nest of revolutionary feminism,’ Assange said in a 2010 interview.
When Swedish authorities took out an international arrest warrant after Assange fled the country and failed to show up for a police interview, he responded by blaming the charges on a government conspiracy, saying the women were “honeytraps” sent by the CIA. Supporters of WikiLeaks followed his lead, crafting new conspiracy theories to explain away the accusations and launching a vicious smear campaign against the two women.
Both of his accusers’ identities were leaked and private details about their lives were spread all over the internet. Defenders of Assange took to the web to encourage people to dig into the women’s lives and post pictures, video, and other private information, which was then used to further the narrative that Assange himself had crafted.
In 2017, the investigation into Assange was “discontinued” – not because prosecutors no longer considered him a suspect, but because they could not officially notify him of the criminal allegations against him while he was inside the embassy.
Throughout it all, Assange saw himself as a victim – a victim of censorship, of a vast global conspiracy, of overbearing sexual assault laws, of feminist culture run amok. Before long, his vendetta against his two accusers had broadened into a full-fledged information war against feminism.
“I fell into a hornets’ nest of revolutionary feminism,” Assange said in a 2010 interview during which he also described Sweden as “the Saudi Arabia of feminism”.
In one scene in ‘Risk’, Assange admitted that he privately believed that one of his accusers was running a “tag team” against him along with a lesbian nightclub owner and a rogue female police officer. The whole scheme, Assange told his lawyer, was part of a “radical feminist political positioning thing”. His remarks were so outrageous that even his own female lawyer was left speechless.
And while the WikiLeaks founder often claimed to be a victim of the “media machine”, many mainstream publications were happy to amplify his version of events. The UK’s Daily Mail described one of his accusers as a “seasoned feminist warrior” – not in a complimentary manner – while another prominent website referred to her as a “psychotic feminist”.
WikiLeaks as a Vehicle for Weaponised Misogyny
Over the years, Assange has continued to use WikiLeaks as a vehicle to carry out his personal agenda and wage war against the feminist movement.
His beliefs about feminism – namely, that it’s a repressive movement aimed at punishing men – bear striking similarity to the beliefs espoused by men’s rights activists and far-right ideologues. But, by cloaking his hostility towards feminism under the banner of an organisation that was heralded by many on the left, Assange managed to establish broader appeal for his brand of misogyny.
In 2015, WikiLeaks used its official Twitter account, which is widely believed to be run at least in part by Assange himself, to launch an anti-feminist tirade that positioned feminism as a threat to free speech and questioned whether feminism was “a reactionary vehicle to push state interests such as censorship and imprisonment”.