Balance on Assange Charges

Our fantastic cartoonist Barry Deutsch texted me to ask for more balance on the question of the sexual assault charges against Julian Assange.  In my post yesterday, I linked to the Guardian article that details the charges against Assange, and to a defense of Assange by his former lawyer.  I didn't weigh in myself on the charges, except implicitly by presenting the former lawyer's defense.  (Meanwhile, apparently lots of people in the blogosphere are minimizing the charges and/or expressing skepticism about them, or in some cases smearing the accusers. Barry alerted me to this piece by Kate Harding, The Rush to Smear Assange's Rape Accuser, over at Salon.com. As Harding points out, even Naomi Wolf seems to be minimizing the accusation; Wolf has a piece on Huffington Post mockingly praising Interpol's "new commitment to engaging in global manhunts to arrest and prosecute  men who behave like narcissistic jerks to women they are dating."

Part of the problem is that the charges are a bit murky, and the Swedish law in question is a bit murky.  It was initially widely reported that the charge was not for nonconsensual sex of any kind--and therefore not for rape, including date rape--but rather for something called "sex by surprise"--when a woman finds out after the fact that a man didn't use a condom when he said he would (or something like that--the point is that at first it appeared that the charges against Assange were pretty minor, and for something that is a minor crime under Swedish law, but not a crime at all in most countries).  More recently it looks like the charges are more serious, and are a matter of date rape (i.e., rape--nonconsensual sex). And of course, whatever the charges, we don't know one way or the other whether Assange is guilty.

The best thing I've read (and I'm not spending a lot of time looking through everything that's been written already!) was this comment on Wolf's article, critical of Wolf and others who appear to be minimizing the charges:

The most messed up part of this whole story:  The fact that people are more interested in discrediting  the women who brought up the charges as well as the charges themselves  instead of realizing the political magnitude of the fact that issues  rape and sexual assault are most probably being manipulated in  order to detain someone for their political actions.  That and the fact  that people just can't believe Julian Assange could be capable of sexual  assault.

In a later post, the same poster says:

Julian Assange's charges, whether real or fabricated, have been  treated more seriously than just about any other sexual assault case in  history and this seems clearly tied to his associatio­n with  Wikileaks.  Which is effed up.  It's effed up that sexual assault has  been used as such a blatant red herring to haraung someone into custody  who would have otherwise got off relatively easy--at least one of the  charges, the punishment in Sweden is merely a $700 fine-in what seems to  be a pretty obvious attempt to detain someone for exposing the dirty  little secrets of some very powerful government­s, the U.S., namely.

The comments section after Wolf's article has a bunch of other interesting-looking links.

--Chris Sturr