Julian Assange rape allegations: treatment of women 'unfair and absurd'
http://watchingyouwatchingyme-steelmagnolia.blogspot.com/2010/12/assanga-and-situation-in-sweden.htmlLawyer for two women whose assault allegations led to arrest says case has nothing to do with WikiLeaks or CIA
Claes Borgström, the lawyer for the two women whose complaints of sexual assault triggered Julian Assange's arrest, said his clients had been assaulted twice: first physically, before being "sacrificed" to a malevolent online attack. The women were having "a very tough time", he said.
A wealth of hostile material attacking the two women has appeared on the internet since August, when they took their complaints to the police. Their right to anonymity has been abandoned online, where enraged bloggers have uploaded dossiers of personal photographs, raked through their CVs and tweets, and accused them of orchestrating a CIA-inspired honeytrap operation. These online rumours were a convenient way for Assange to divert suspicion from the actual allegations, the women's lawyer said.Keen to set some of the more outlandish rumours to rest, Borgström, a highly respected Swedish lawyer with 30 years of experience, today rebutted the claims and counter-claims that Assange's arrest has unleashed. He said his clients were "the victims of a crime, but they are looked upon as the perpetrators and that is very unfortunate".
In an interview at his fifth-floor office in central Stockholm, he continued: "What is going on now is very, very unfair to them because they are being pointed at as if they have started a conspiracy against Assange and WikiLeaks, and that is not true. There is nothing wrong with their reputation and they have done nothing wrong in going to the police. What they are going through is unfair and absurd."
He questioned whether the women would have pressed charges had they known in advance how their reputations would be attacked. "If they had known what was going to happen, maybe they would not have gone to the police at all … I would not have done it," he said.His own involvement in the case has not been without complications. On Monday night his firm's website was hacked and shut down. "We have never experienced anything like this before," he said.
In today's London Evening Standard, Assange's UK lawyer, Mark Stephens, repeated his conviction that the affair was politically motivated. "The honeytrap has been sprung. Dark forces are at work. After what we've seen so far you can reasonably conclude this is part of a greater plan," he said.
But Borgström rejected the notion that the rape case and the extradition demand form part of a conspiracy to damage the reputation of the WikiLeaks founder. "It has nothing whatsoever to do with WikiLeaks or the CIA and I regret very much that Julian Assange does not publicly say that himself. That would be a way of leaving all these rumours," he said. "There are no political ingredients in this at all, but I quite understand that there are rumours.
"WikiLeaks is headline news all over the world at this time and Assange is suspected of a sexual crime in Sweden, so of course people think there is connection. There is nothing, zero."
The women were "very credible" witnesses, he said. "They have given very detailed stories about what they have been through."Assange's reputation is less the focus of scrutiny online, but an acquaintance who met him and both women in Stockholm around the time of the alleged assaults told the Guardian he had warned Assange that his behaviour towards women was going to get him into trouble.
"I don't think it was a conspiracy, but this provided a golden opportunity for the enemies of WikiLeaks to use the situation to neutralise him," said the man, who wanted to remain anonymous. "A personality like Assange, who is known throughout the world, in the media every day, has a huge attraction to women. A lot of women invited him to their beds and he took that opportunity too much … all the time.
"I spoke to him about this. I warned him that it was not a good way to behave ethically and also in terms of his security. His weakness was – is – women. I warned him it would cause him trouble."
He said women responded to him in the way they might respond to meeting Mick Jagger. "When you attract that many women you have to think about how you behave," he said.
The unusual circumstances surrounding the initial handling of the alleged assault have been used by Assange's online supporters to fan suspicions about the case. Why was an investigation launched by the Swedish prosecutors before being dropped and then revived? Why did the women, who had not previously known each other, go together to the police to report the assaults? Why was an extradition required when Assange had earlier been allowed to leave Sweden?
Borgström attempted to refute this speculation point by point today. He would not say where the women were, only that he was in daily contact with them. He had advised them not to read what was being said about them on the internet, he said. "But they do …"
There was nothing unusual about different prosecutors, of varying seniority, coming to different conclusions about whether a crime had occurred, he said. Rape was rarely a clear-cut case of an unknown man pouncing on a woman, he said, and this case, like most, was nuanced and complicated.
He refused to reveal sensitive details of the evidence provided to him by the women. "It is important for the future investigation that the suspect himself does not know more than necessary before he is interrogated by the Swedish police," he said.
But he gave a concise summary of the key allegations. "These two women were molested by Mr Julian Assange at two different times, independently of each other," he said. One of the two women, who met Assange at a lecture he gave in Stockholm in August, wanted to contact him after the alleged assault because she wanted him to take a test for sexually transmitted infections. She contacted the second woman, who had helped organise the lecture, to see if she could help her to find him. "When they spoke to each other they realised they had been through something very similar so they went to the police. That's not odd," he said.
"They decided to go to the police, to inform the police of what happened, to ask for advice; also they were interested in whether there was a risk that they could have got HIV. They were not sure whether they should make a police complaint, they wanted to have some advice. But when they told the police officer, she realised that what they were telling her was a crime and she reported that to the public prosecutor, who decided to arrest Assange."
Two days later a second prosecutor, who conducted a preliminary investigation, came to a different conclusion, judging that the evidence did not meet the criterion of a rape or sexual molestation charge. "She made another judgment, saying: 'No it's not. It's very close, but not quite,'" he claimed. "So she cancelled the arrest order and he was still suspected of molestation without sexual motives.
"When I read that decision, my own conclusion was and still is that it was a rape, so I asked for a reopening of the case, and then the investigation was reopened." There was nothing suspicious about this closing and reopening of the case, he said. "The law is not an exact science. You can always make different judgments. Different courts and different prosecutors make different decisions. I think that the prosecutor who cancelled the arrest warrant did not study the case well enough."
Assange was at that time free to leave the country, Borgström said. "He didn't have to ask anyone if he could." It was only later when it appeared that Assange was unwilling to return voluntarily for questioning that the extradition process was launched, he said.
"It turned out it was impossible to get him here for an interrogation, he wanted to be interrogated in the embassy, or wherever. Then the prosecutor decided to arrest him," he said.
Privately, Assange has suggested that he is being victimised because Sweden has a tougher approach to prosecuting rape than other countries. There are differences, not least the division of the charge of rape into three different subsections: severe, standard, and less severe. Assange is charged with the lesser charge, but still faces a maximum sentence of four years' imprisonment.
Lawyers are said to joke here that men in Sweden need written permission to have sex, but Borgström, who was for seven years the country's equal opportunities ombudsman, dismissed this today as an inaccurate, chauvinistic interpretation of the country's law.
"Men like to repeat that joke … no woman would say that. I think it is very unfair. There is not an equal situation for men and women in society as a whole, but especially not in this field."
Whether Assange will be prosecuted in Sweden on the four charges of rape, sexual molestation, and coercion against him depends on whether or not the Swedish director of prosecutions, Marianne Ny, finds enough evidence to be confident that the case will stand up in court. Before she does that, she needs to question Assange further, and may also need to question the women again.
The probability of the prosecution going ahead is around 50-50, or perhaps a little more than that, Borgström said.
"In Sweden, like in other countries, the burden of proof lies upon the prosecutor. The prosecutor must prove beyond reasonable doubt that a client is guilty of the crimes. Beyond reasonable doubt is very high – I don't know whether she can reach that level. And history tells you that you can reach different judgments on the same material depending on how you interpret that material."
The way the case has been handled in Sweden attracted criticism in the UK earlier this week, amid confusion over the opening and closing of the case. But Assange would get a fair trial, Borgström asserted: "The Swedish court system is one of the best and strongest in the world. The WikiLeaks affair will have no influence on the case if it goes to court."
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