Harding, Luke - WikiLeaks - Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy

But Assange had, it seems, found other fish to fry. Promising to show up later for the crayfish party, he left the lunch not with Braun but with another admirer in a bright pink sweater. With long blonde hair halfway down her back, 25-year-old Katrin Weiss (not her real name) is a worker at a local museum, or “some random woman” as Braun is later alleged to have described her.

In Weiss’s witness statement, she explained that some weeks earlier she had seen Assange on television and had followed the WikiLeaks news avidly thereafter. She thought Assange “interesting, brave and admirable”, had been Googling his name, and excitedly discovered he was actually coming to speak in Sweden. She was one of the first to sign up for his talk. “Sonja came up to Katrin and asked if she could help out by getting hold of a cable for Julian’s computer. She then went and bought two cables just to make sure she had the right one. When she returned, he didn’t even thank her.”

However, Katrin did manage to parlay this into a chance to get closer to her hero. “She … overheard that they were all going out to eat and asked if she could come too because she had been helping out. She then went with Sonja, Julian and some others to a restaurant.” According to the statement, she sent excited texts to two friends from the restaurant to say she was with the Australian. “He looked at me!” she wrote in one. She took the opportunity to speak to him. “At one point when he had some cheese on a piece of flatbread, she asked if it was nice, and he reached over and fed it to her. Later he mentioned that he needed a charger for his laptop and she offered to help, as she had fixed him up with a cable earlier on. He took her round the waist and said, ‘Yes, you got me a cable.’ Katrin thought this was flattering and felt that he was now flirting with her.”

Assange’s lawyers argue, however, that it was Katrin who “flirted with Julian”. Böstrom says: “After all the journalists have disappeared we’re left with this woman who I’ve never seen before. I get the impression that this is one of those, you know, groupies … who are attracted by his stardust. I actually don’t think she said much apart from when I asked her about how she got into contact with Sonja so I didn’t give her much thought other than that she seemed interesting. She and Julian sat across from each other and spoke a bit … I got the impression of a person who was fascinated by Julian.”

After lunch, Weiss offered to hook him up to her own workplace computer. Assange eventually tired of surfing the net and searching for tweets about himself on Katrin’s computer at the museum, and they went to the cinema. “On the way, Julian stopped to pat some dogs, which Katrin thought was charming.” He held her hand, he kissed her, and fondled her in the darkness of the back row. Before he caught a cab to shoot back to Braun’s crayfish party, they exchanged phone numbers. He also hugged her, said he didn’t want to leave, and, yes, he did want to see her again.

The crayfish party that night at Braun’s flat appears to have had its tricky moments. One woman friend told the police she “asked Sonja whether she had slept with Julian … Sonja said, ‘Yes!’ and seemed quite proud of it.” Braun then tweeted, apparently enthusiastically, “Sitting outdoors at 2am, hardly freezing, with the world’s coolest, smartest people.” But meanwhile Assange was discreetly chatting on the phone to Weiss. According to another female friend interviewed by the police, Kajsa, Assange was simultaneously making approaches to her, which Braun did not take particularly well:

“[Kajsa] wondered about the strange tension between Sonja and Julian, [who] was flirting with Kajsa and other girls. Kajsa asked Sonja if she was going to sleep with Julian. Sonja said she already had done and it was the worst sex she’s ever had. She told Kajsa that she could have him.” Braun allegedly added something else: “Julian had held her hands down when they had sex and it had been unpleasant. Not only had it been the world’s worst screw it had also been violent.” At 3am, according to Kajsa, Assange actually tried to leave the party with her. Kajsa refused, she says.

The Assange camp has a different take. They say Braun was acting “warmly” towards him. She was asked, they say, whether she wanted Julian to move out, but “insists that he stay … She says: ‘No it’s not a problem, he is very welcome to stay here.’”

Donald Böstrom was at the do, but is not much help in shedding further light on events. It seems he was preoccupied with crustacea: “During the crayfish party, I mostly just sat and ate. I’m very fond of eating. There was talk about Julian moving and staying with another couple, but the general impression was that Julian would be staying with Sonja.”

Braun shared a bed with Assange again that night, but during the course of the weekend she spoke critically of him to another friend, Petra. She told her on the Sunday “they had not had sex any more because Julian had exceeded the limits of what she felt she could accept … She didn’t feel safe … Julian had been violent and had snapped her necklace. She thought he had torn [the condom] on purpose.” Petra added that her friend had volunteered to her a lot of other off-putting information “about Julian not taking showers and not flushing the toilet”.

The Assange camp tell it differently. They say Sonja hosted dinner for Assange that Sunday night. She spoke highly of him and again refused offers to house him elsewhere. The following day she phoned Böstrom, they claim, and joked ruefully that Assange has become “their first adopted child” because she has insisted on washing his clothes, makes sure he eats properly and she feels like his stepmother. There has been no more sexual intercourse, despite Assange’s efforts to win her round.

Meanwhile, Weiss has been vainly trying to get back in contact with Assange: his mobile is frequently switched off. Among other things, he has been busy looking at how he might acquire Swedish residence and journalistic credentials. It is not until late on Tuesday 17 August that they meet up again. Weiss was later to give to police an account of what turned out to be an unhappy one-night stand.

“She agreed to wait for him, and after she was finished at work, she hung around town a bit. When she hadn’t heard from him by nine, she called him and he said there was another meeting he had to go to, and that she should come to him there.” When Assange finally emerged, they agree to get the train together to Enköping, the little town 50 miles away where she lives. He asked that Katrin pay for the tickets; it was too dangerous for him to use his credit card, he said. Weiss told the police that, on the train, he admitted he slept in Braun’s bed after the crayfish party but made the unlikely claim that “Sonja only liked girls – that she was lesbian”.

It was midnight when they at last got home to Weiss’s place. “They took off their shoes, but the relationship between them seemed to have cooled off. The passion and the excitement had disappeared … They brushed their teeth together, which seemed everyday and boring.” Assange pushed her vigorously on to the bed “to show he was a real man”, Weiss told the police, but his heart plainly wasn’t in it. Assange suddenly turned over, went to sleep, and started snoring.

Weiss says she felt “rejected and shocked”, and stayed awake, miserably texting her friend Maria. Maria recalls being “woken by a lot of texts from Katrin that were not positive. There had been bad sex and Julian had not been nice. She said she would have to get tested because of his lengthy foreplay.” Matters improved somewhat in the course of the night. Julian woke up and had successful sex, grumbling about her insistence on a condom. He “muttered that he preferred her, rather than latex”. In the early morning, he started ordering her about, demanding she fetch water and orange juice, and then sending her out to buy breakfast. Weiss testified she didn’t much like leaving him alone in her flat. She said, “Be good,” as she went out, leaving him sprawled emperor-like and naked on the bed, holding one of his mobile phones. He answered: “I’m always bad!”