Julian Assange: Sex Criminal or Political Refugee?

WikiLeaks creator Julian Assange appeared before a London court Tuesday fighting extradition to Sweden on charges of "sex by surprise." He's been accused by two women of taking consensual sex and turning it into nonconsensual sex, of pushing women past their point of comfort, of forcibly having sex without a condom. His lawyers, who are fighting extradition, claim that sending him to Stockholm means condemning him to illegal rendition by the United States to prison in Guantanamo Bay or, even, to death row. Assange, for his part, claims no wrongdoing. He claims this is a set up, orchestrated by the West, or the White House, to shut him up. He's won a $1 million book contract from Knopf even as he's pent up in a lush estate, wearing an an electronic bracelet to track his movements, like a wayward Lindsay Lohan.

But you know all this already. You know this because the Assange case has become yet another in a long history of events in which words like "rape" and "sex" are used to batter the women who have dared to bring them up.

To some, Julian Assange is a hero. He's the Robin Hood of information, a sprightly imp with that crazy yellow-white hair and an Australian accent. But, as Sarah Ellison suggests in a biting Vanity Fair profile out this week, he's got the megalomaniacal idea that he alone can stop two intractable wars and bring down the West.

There is no doubt that Assange has helped expose civilian deaths and shined a light into how our military and embassies work. Yet, whether Assange is a new breed of journalist, or one man against the Western world, or just a really talented hacker who figured out how to tap into sensitive material, should have no bearing on whether he forced himself on two women with whom he had ambigiously sexual relationships. (Sweden's laws in regard to sexual assault, permissiveness, and the grey area of right and wrong in a bedroom resemble, to some degree, campus codes of conduct, rather than our legal system.)

According to the Guardian, which based a story on statements by prosecutors, the wording of the charges, and other material, Miss A, as one woman is called to protect her identity, "realised he was trying to have unprotected sex with her. She told police that she had tried a number of times to reach for a condom but Assange had stopped her by holding her arms and pinning her legs. The statement records Miss A describing how Assange then released her arms and agreed to use a condom, but she told the police that at some stage Assange had "done something" with the condom that resulted in it becoming ripped, and ejaculated without withdrawing.'"

But rather than address these claims, Assange has been able to leverage his Robin Hood status, to claim for himself a cloak of victimization and in the process victimize his accusers. The result, as Libby Brooks at the Guardian pointed out last month, has been old school "slut-shaming and misogyny." The women have been outed on the web; they have been pilloried.

Assange's cause -- transparency at all costs -- has been confused with his person. It has led to all sorts of voices to blithely dismiss as "hooey" the accusations of the two Swedes, from Michael Moore to Brit socialite Jemima Khan (both of whom posted bail money though, as Khan said, "I concede I don't know the full facts.")

Perhaps the best example of the most unlikely Assange defender is Naomi Wolf, author of the "Beauty Myth," who herself pursued, decades after the fact, a sex discrimination complaint against a former Yale professor. Wolf has spilled endless ink pushing the world to see the claims against Assange as specious. Her commentary in the form of a letter to Interpol (headlined "Julian Assange Captured by World's Dating Police"), which mocked the charges against Assange, was a travesty of feminist ideology. (A sample line: "As a longtime feminist activist, I have been overjoyed to discover your new commitment to engaging in global manhunts to arrest and prosecute men who behave like narcissistic jerks to women they are dating.")

Her subsquent defense of that letter -- "How do I know that Interpol, Britain and Sweden's treatment of Julian Assange is a form of theater? Because I know what happens in rape accusations against men that don't involve the embarrassing of powerful governments" -- was a dodge at best, intellectually dishonest, and a mockery of her former work. Assange has angered the U.S. Government, but he might still be a total neanderthal in the bedroom. Wolf believes that simply because most suspected rapists are not treated this way -- pursued this vigorously -- that Assange has been set up.

Is it not possible that Julian Assange, who believes to be well above all laws, believed himself to be above the law in the bedroom as well? Is it not possible that ambiguity existed and that Assange flaunted it?

Not in the minds of his defenders. As his lawyer put it: "The honeytrap has been sprung ... After what we've seen so far you can reasonably conclude this is part of a greater plan."

As Brooks at the Guardian noted, "The speed with which this latest episode in the WikiLeaks saga has been reduced to weary tropes about honeytraps, castrating feminists and undeserving victims is depressing. In an apparent plea to haul the debate back from the soup of smear and counter-smear, Naomi Klein argued that 'defending WikiLeaks is not the same as defending rape.' But the fact that the defence of Assange has spawned such naked and vitriolic misogyny should be of concern to all women and men who find it as distasteful and counter to the pursuit of truth as the attacks on WikiLeaks itself."

Surely there is truth to the idea that the vigor with which the Swedes and the British have pursued this case far outpaces the manner in which they might have had he been some random bloke who forced himself on a girlfriend in the back of a car. And yes, of course, Assange is innocent until proven guilty. But that's not the argument being made here. The argument is that Assange has been set up in some way, that he's being exploited for who he is, that Sweden is aiding the United States in arresting a man who's become a thorn.

But as the Dec. 31 conviction of former Israeli President Moshe Katsav -- for rape, indecent assault, and sexual harassment -- underscored there are men who assume they are untouchable. Katsav was convicted of raping one of his aides twice, and trying to assault another. He too claimed a "media witch hunt." Ronit Amil, one of the lawyers on the case, told The Washington Post after Katsav's conviction, ""The message sent today by the court to other victims of exploitation of authority is, 'Don't be silent."

Sadly, the message in the Assange case is exactly the opposite.