Monika Karbowska
This was the first text I wrote about Julian Assange in August 2019. I didn’t know much about the case yet. I just wanted to unravel the case of the rape charges and to understand why my former feminist colleagues in the Feminist Party participated in the witch hunt. Reading Julian Assange’s legal file as published on the internet, I discovered some surprising facts.
August 2019. This article is the first one in a series of analyses of the Swedish legal case against Julian Assange. I feel the necessity to publish my analysis because I’ve never believed in Julian Assange’s guilt, whose legal file from the very start was an accumulation of unbelievable manipulations by the Swedish Department of Justice. These manipulations will be outlined in another article, mainly the collusion between the main complainant, Anna Ardin, and Irmeli Krans, the police officer who noted down the accusation of the two complainants – Ardin and Krans being not only close friends, but also eligible members of the same political party. This fact should have been enough reason to immediately drop the case due to procedural error, and even an appointed lawyer could have come to this conclusion.
I’m writing this article in order to shine a light on some elements of this case which have been rarely published and, even less so, analyzed. My starting point will therefore not be the accusation, but the defense – being accused of rape by Anna Ardin and having had to learn this through an article published in a Swedish tabloid on August 20, 2010, Julian Assange immediately responds to the subpoena issued by the Swedish police. During his interview with the police om August 30, 2010, Assange gives them his version of what had happened. The summary of his deposition has rarely been published and hardly ever been analyzed. Yet this is one of the rare accounts which have been produced spontaneously and without preparation. That’s why, in my view, this dialogue contains the most authentic elements about the whole “affair”, an affair which has cost this man almost a decade of solitary confinement, an imprisonment in a maximum-security prison at present and soon the certainty of extradition or the secret American torture prisons. Shining a light on the darkness of this “affair” is the only way to set free the political prisoner on European soil he has become.
A second article will analyze the defense of Julian Assange against the accusations of Sofia Wilem, but given the fact that this defense dates from 2016 and has been mainly redacted under the influence of lawyers who have lost all of his cases, like Jenny Robinson, it’s less important than the deposition dating from August 30, 2010, against Anna Ardin.
What’s most striking when reading this document, is that Julian Assange seems so flabbergasted that he fails to defend himself. Initially he believes it is all a misunderstanding, he simply cannot believe that the person with whom he has been sharing the bed, their intimacy and apartment for an entire week, is now accusing him of rape.
The police officer kindly urges him to share the details of his emotional and sexual relationship with Anna Ardin in order to give his version of the facts and constitute his defense. His lawyer, Leif Silbersky, willingly encourages him to meticulously answer the questions so that not only the complainants version will be taken into account.
This is how we know that only one copulatory encounter has taken place, during their first night together which was August 13, and that this particular encounter has been experienced as rape by Anna Ardin. However the nights following this particular encounter have been filled with caresses much appreciated by her – she doesn’t accuse him of anything for those other nights… But Assange has not been able to give any more precise descriptions as the very vague “we’ve been mutually touching each other”. This small phrase isn’t strong enough to counterbalance the raw, harsh and realistic version given by the complainant about the events of that first night – her version being one of an Assange rushing on her directly upon their arrival at her apartment, tearing off her clothes and jewelry before clamping her on the bed. The complainant keeps silent about the caresses given to her by her lover during the entire rest of the week, which makes her narrative more than questionable.
While Assange is unable to describe the caressing and hardly able to mention the two orgasms experienced by Ardin due to his caresses, this remains inaudible and thus the only remaining version – the complainant’s- is being imposed. Why doesn’t Julian Assange manage to talk, could it be out of shame? A shame that, apparently, is nowhere to be seen on the complainants’ side, who are spreading their complaint, providing it with extensive and very explicit sexual descriptions, almost to the extent of provoking arousal with the lecturer. Clearly, the shame here can only be detected on the side of the accused, which is an abnormality in classic cases of a woman being raped by a man.
The same happens with the central point of the accusation: the perforated or torn condom. Assange does not defend himself. He doesn’t remember who had taken the initiative to use a condom, nor does he remember who had put it on or even who had taken it off!
To almost every question he replies: I don’t remember. He is incapable of stating the hour the sexual encounter had taken place, or if there were more than one… The passivity, the prostration as well as the abatement will cost him heavily because every charge is considered equally important as every discharge…Therefore, in absence of details which would underline a discharge, all that remains is the accusation.
To such an extent, that it worries his counsellor, who after the interrogation has come to an end, asks him if by any chance he has been intoxicated with drugs or made drunk. This is exactly the impression an outsider would have upon observation: if the alleged rapist displays such vagueness as well as loss of memory, would it not be possible that he is the one being abused, particularly with some kind of drug? The so-called “rape drug” can obviously functions both ways, meaning its substances provoke the complete erasing of one’s memories of an event.
I’m heartbroken and deeply touched when I read Julian Assange’s answer to the question “ who initiated the sexual contact?” : “ Anna”.
“How did she do that?” Julian Assange’s answer: “she told me to sleep in her bed”. And she “added things that a lover is supposed to do in bed”. It is her who decides, not him. “After all, it is her apartment” – he says.
This image of passiveness and obedience is haunting me, as an outside viewer. The one who the United Stated as well as the mainstream media worldwide have accused and portrayed as a predator, is in fact a submissive, passive little boy. Given that Anna Ardin was also the person who let him use her address as a mandatory part of his residence permit request in the Schengen area, this adds to the completion of his vulnerability. A vulnerability towards the complainant that, logically speaking, should have incited his lawyer to question and doubt the accusation.
As to his lawyer, who has showed himself to be efficient and empathic, Leif Silbersky was sacked after a week. Who was advising Julian Assange then, and who suggested he’d break with Leif Silbersky? The answer to that question could put us on the track of those who have pushed Julian Assange in an indissoluble situation for over 10 years now, and who have had him lose ALL of his trials. Will they have him lose this final trial too, the one on which his life depends, the US extradition trial? If we, citizens who are concerned by injustice, fail to mobilize, this is exactly what “inevitably” will happen.
Documents available here :
https://nnn.se/nordic/assange/protocol.htm
http://www.nnn.se/nordic/assange/docs/protocol.pdf
http://www.nnn.se/nordic/assange/docs/memoria.pdf
