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

While Weiss was at the shops purchasing breakfast, she took the opportunity to call her friend Maria. “Katrin said she was damned if she was going to buy all this stuff and just wait on him hand and foot.” But she nevertheless went home, she says, cooked him porridge, climbed back into bed, and they had another go, using a condom. “They slept again and she woke with the realisation that he was inside her. She said, “Are you wearing anything?” and he answered, “You.” She said, “You better not have HIV,” and he answered, “Of course not.” She knew it was too late, she said, as he was already inside her so she let him continue. She had never had unprotected sex before. “She said: what if she got pregnant? And he replied that Sweden was a good place to bring up a child. She looked at him, shocked.”

According to her testimony he added, flippantly, that they could call the baby “Afghanistan”. The police report adds a strange and disturbing remark from Katrin: “He also said he often carried abortion pills but that they were actually sugar pills.” Whatever did he mean? Assange often seemed curiously proud of his prowess in paternity: he told friends during this time period that he had recently impregnated a Korean woman he met in Paris, and she was about to give birth.

This single night he spent with Katrin is the basis of a rape charge against Assange. To have sex with a sleeping or unconscious woman is a crime, both in Sweden and in the UK. The subsequent investigation collected testimony from Weiss’s former boyfriend that she was particularly anxious to avoid the risks from unprotected sex, and never allowed it. After Assange headed back to Stockholm (she had to pay for his train ticket again), Weiss changed the stained sheets, which she thought were “disgusting”, and got a morning-after pill from a chemist. “When she spoke to her friends, she realised that she had been the victim of a crime. She went to Danderyd University Hospital and from there to Södersjukhuset (Stockholm South General Hospital) where she was tested with a so-called rape kit.”

Katrin’s friend Hanna, one of those she said she contacted that morning, takes up the story: “She said it had not been good and she had just wanted him to leave … Assange’s personality had changed when he got home to her flat and Katrin regretted letting him stay there … What bothered her was that Assange had had unprotected sex with her while she was asleep. He had also tried again and again to have unprotected sex with her during the night. Hanna asked why Katrin hadn’t pushed him away when she knew he wasn’t wearing a condom and Katrin said she was too shocked and paralysed and didn’t really know what was happening. Hanna is sure that she didn’t just let it happen because he was famous, although it could have been significant that he was older. Hanna said that Katrin wanted Assange to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases.”

The Assange camp’s account contradicts Weiss’s version of events in at least one important respect. She describes buying the breakfast first, before the alleged rape occurred. They stated to the UK court that the breakfast shopping came not before, but “AFTER she claims that he had entered her without a condom”. But Assange does not dispute that he had condomless sex while his partner was, as he puts it, “sleepy”.

Once back in Stockholm, having stayed out all night, Assange now had to return to the home of Sonja Braun, where he was still staying. According to Braun, to whom it seemed clear that he had spent the night with another woman, his approach to this delicate situation was unusual. “Assange suddenly took all the clothes off the lower part of his body and rubbed Sonja with his erect penis. Sonja says she thought this was strange and unpleasant behaviour. She no longer wanted Assange to live in her flat, which he ignored.”

As a result of this alleged incident, Assange was later accused by the Swedes of “molestation”. This would translate into the UK legal canon as “indecent assault” or, as it is now known, “sexual touching”. Braun says she slept on a mattress that night, and the next night stayed with friends.

Her friend Petra adds that on that Wednesday “although Sonja wanted Julian to leave her flat, he wouldn’t”. Braun did not seem frightened, however: “He wasn’t aggressive or dangerous, she just wanted him out.” Böstrom, meanwhile, recalls: “On the Wednesday, Sonja says, ‘I want him to leave.’ ‘Well, tell him,’ I say, and she says, ‘I have done, but he won’t.’ So I confronted him with it. ‘Sonja would like you to move out and says she has asked you.’ He’s surprised and says she hasn’t said a word to him about it. So now it’s like stereo – one channel says one thing, the other channel says another.” Assange’s version of events is completely different: “Böstrom remains in contact with Braun, who continues to insist Julian should stay with her, and speaks warmly of him.”

Behind all the muffled prose of police testimony, some clumsily translated from Swedish, anyone can see how electric the whole situation had become. All that was needed was for someone to bring the ends of the wires into contact. If Braun and Weiss were to get together, they might start to compare notes. Sparks would fly.

Katrin Weiss the very next day sent Sonja Braun a text message. Worried she might have caught a disease, Weiss was anxiously trying to renew contact with Assange. She says she thought Braun might know where to find him. According to Braun’s close friend Kajsa, “Sonja realised what had happened, and they met up.” According to this witness: “Sonja said the other girl decided to go to the police and report Julian for rape and that Sonja would go along as support.”

Braun’s other friend, Petra, testified in similar terms. She said Braun rang her “and said she had met the other girl who had told her she had been raped by Julian. They had found many similarities between hers and Sonja’s experience, and Julian wanted to have sex with the other girl without a condom. Sonja said she didn’t wish to have Julian charged, she just wanted to support the other girl. Petra said that the whole story was becoming more and more confused.”

Böstrom was startled also to receive a phone call from Braun:

“I can hear from her voice that it’s something serious and she says, ‘It’s not true what I said [before], we did have sex.’ Then she goes on and says that the other woman – Katrin – had called her and told her that Julian had been there and had sex with her. On both occasions it was voluntary … Katrin told her that the next morning Julian continued to want to have sex with her without a condom. And she won’t, and protests, but Julian continues in spite of her protests.

“‘OK,’ I say, quite dumbfounded at suddenly having this conversation. Sonja goes on: ‘And I must tell you that we had sex at an earlier stage at my place and to my surprise during the act, he tears the condom … He has torn the condom and continues against my wishes.”

Böstrom adds: “I believe that Sonja is very, very credible, so I won’t discount it without speaking to Julian and confronting him with what this is all about – what the hell he thinks he’s playing at … They want Julian to take an Aids test otherwise they will report him, as they put it. They don’t want to speak to Julian themselves. So she goes off with Katrin and we speak on the phone a few times and text a bit and I call Julian a couple of times.”

Böstrom determinedly confronted Assange: “And his reaction is one of shock. He doesn’t understand it … [He says,] ‘Katrin didn’t object at all,’ and they had a ‘nice time’ … And I’m really trying to press him here – ‘Did you take the condom off, did you rip the condom?’ He doesn’t understand any of it … So there are two stories and I can’t draw any conclusions … Julian says that he doesn’t understand, and that they just had normal sex.” Told that Katrin claims to have protested about his lack of a condom, “Julian becomes angry a number of times, saying that they just had normal sex … ‘She did not [protest] … It’s lies, lies, lies!’” Assange later assures Böstrom that he has talked to Katrin and he thinks this is all an over-reaction. “But I tell Julian that if he takes a test they won’t report him – and if he doesn’t, they will.”