Swedish Police Report Details Case Against Assange
By JOHN F. BURNS and RAVI SOMAIYA
Published: December 18, 2010
LONDON — Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks who was released from a British jail late last week, is facing a new challenge: the leak of a 68-page confidential Swedish police report that sheds new light on the allegations of sexual misconduct that led to Mr. Assange’s legal troubles.
Carl Court/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, on Saturday. He faces sexual misconduct allegations.
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Scanpix Sweden, via Associated Press
Marianne Ny, director of the Stockholm prosecutor’s office.
The Swedish report traces events over a four-day period in August when Mr. Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, had what he has described as consensual sexual relationships with two Swedish women. Their accounts, which form the basis of an extradition case against Mr. Assange, state that their encounters with him began consensually, but became nonconsensual when he persisted in having unprotected sex with them in defiance of their insistence that he use a condom.
The case has prompted widespread controversy, with supporters of Mr. Assange alleging that he is the victim, and the women are complicit, in an American-inspired vendetta seeking to punish WikiLeaks for posting hundreds of thousands of secret American documents on the Internet.
The conspiracy, supporters of Mr. Assange have said, hinges on what they have described as an improbable coincidence: that he is facing potential criminal charges in a sex case just as he is challenging the United States government. These critics have also pointed to possible political manipulation of the Swedish prosecutor’s office, which had dropped the most serious allegations against Mr. Assange, but later revived them, listing the allegations that prosecutors wished to question him on as “rape, sexual molestation and forceful coercion.”
But the details in the police report and dozens of interviews in recent months with people in Sweden linked to the case suggest that the Swedish case could be less flawed than Mr. Assange’s supporters have claimed. As for the prosecutors’ actions, interviews with legal experts suggest that it would not be abnormal for such a high-level case to move up the hierarchy of prosecutors, with disagreements over how to apply Sweden’s finely calibrated laws on sexual misconduct.
Still, the police report also provides support for a claim made by Mr. Assange’s supporters that the women involved seemed willing to continue their friendships with Mr. Assange after what they described as sexual misbehavior. The women did not decide to go to the police, the report shows, until they discovered by talking to each other that they had both been sexually involved with him and, by their accounts, had similar experiences.
The British newspaper The Guardian broke the news of the report on Saturday, and quoted extensively from what it said was an unredacted copy. The New York Times later obtained a redacted form of the report in Swedish from another source. The report is a preliminary summary of the evidence taken by investigators in August after their initial interviews with the two women and with Mr. Assange, who left Sweden for Britain in early October but subsequently refused to return to Sweden for further questioning.
Mr. Assange has told friends in Britain that he concluded that the Swedish case was being driven by a desire to punish him for WikiLeaks’ disclosures, and to fatally weaken the organization.
The Swedish document traces the accounts given by the two women of their intimate encounters with Mr. Assange. As previously reported, both women say that Mr. Assange first agreed to use a condom and then refused, in the first instance by continuing with sex after the condom broke, and in the second by having sex without using a condom with a woman who was asleep.
Mr. Assange himself has declined to publicly address the women’s accounts directly, both before his Dec. 7 arrest on the Swedish extradition warrant and since he was released from a 10-day period in a London jail on Thursday after posting $310,000 bail. But he has vehemently denied any wrongdoing, and has long insisted that he is the victim of a political conspiracy. On Friday, he told the BBC that the case presented in the London courts was “a smear attempt,” and that the impending publication of the Swedish police report amounted to “another smear attempt.”
Mr. Assange told the BBC that he did not know “precisely who is behind” the “conspiracy” against him, although his supporters have flooded the Internet with charges that theC.I.A. is working to discredit him. But he added, “It’s the case of any organization that’s exposing major powers, and has major opposition, that they will be attacked.”
And in his police interview, he said the women’s accounts included “incredible lies.”
The two women have been referred to in the British courts only as Ms. A and Ms. W. Ms. A, according to the police report and to Swedish friends, is a left-wing activist in her early 30s who was Mr. Assange’s point of contact when he flew to Stockholm from London on Aug. 11 to give a speech at a gathering hosted by the Swedish Association of Christian Social Democrats on Aug. 14. Her friends say her political leanings suggest she would not want to harm WikiLeaks, which is dedicated to revealing states’ secrets.
Ms. W, who has worked part-time in a Stockholm museum, has told friends that she is a strong supporter of WikiLeaks, a description supported by the lawyer who was represented the two women in Swedish courts.
Ms. A told the police that arrangements had been made for Mr. Assange to begin his visit to Sweden by staying at her Stockholm apartment for a few days while she was out of town. But the report said she returned Aug. 13, sooner than expected and, over dinner with Mr. Assange, agreed to allow him to stay in the apartment.
The details of their sexual encounter that night were redacted from the copy of the police report obtained by The Times. But The Guardian reported Saturday that Ms. A told the police that Mr. Assange had stroked her leg, then pulled off her clothes and snapped her necklace. The report quotes her as saying that she “tried to put on some articles of clothing as it was going too quickly and uncomfortably but Assange ripped them off again.”
According to The Guardian, Ms. A told the police that Mr. Assange pinned her arms and legs to stop her from reaching for a condom. Eventually one was used — but, she told her police interviewer, he appeared to have “done something” with it, resulting in its tearing.
Ms. W, 25, lives in the town of Enkoping, about 30 miles north of Stockholm. A few weeks before Mr. Assange arrived in Sweden, she saw him on television, according to the police interview in The Times’s version of the police report, and found him “interesting, brave and worthy of admiration.” When she discovered that he would be speaking in Stockholm, she contacted Ms. A to volunteer her help.
Her offer was not taken up, but she decided to attend the lecture anyway, where she met Ms. A in person. After the speech, she told the police, she sat next to Mr. Assange at a group dinner. He flirtatiously fed her bread and cheese, she said, and put his arm around her.
The group dispersed after dinner, leaving Mr. Assange and Ms. W alone, the police report said. They decided to go to a movie, where, the report said, the couple began caressing, then moved to a back row, where they continued. Two days later, Ms. W and Mr. Assange met again and walked around the city’s old town together, according to the police report. It said they decided to go by train to Enkoping after Mr. Assange balked at staying in a Stockholm hotel. Ms. W then bought his rail ticket, for about $16, after Mr. Assange told her that he did not have any money, and that he feared he could be traced if he used a credit card.
The unredacted police report obtained by The Guardian says that after arriving at her apartment the two had sex using a condom. In the report, she described waking up to find him having sex with her again, without a condom. Later that morning, Ms. W told the police, Mr. Assange “ordered her to get some water and orange juice for him.” She said “she didn’t like being ordered around in her own home but got it anyway.”
The assertion that Mr. Assange initiated sex without a condom while Ms. W was asleep led the prosecutors to list rape among the allegations they wanted to explore with Mr. Assange, according to testimony in a London court. Swedish legal experts have said that the section of the Swedish penal code involved in the allegation refers to the third and least serious of three categories of rape, known as “less severe,” commonly invoked when men in relationships use threats or mild degrees of force to have sex with partners against their will. The maximum penalty for the offense is four years.
From Enkoping, Mr. Assange returned to Ms. A’s apartment, despite what she describes as a deteriorating relationship in the light of their previous sexual encounter. Then, the following day, according to the statements the prosecution has made in the British courts, Mr. Assange tried to initiate sex by rubbing himself against her. The Guardian suggests that he was naked from the waist down. This, lawyers for the Swedish government have said in court, is the grounds for one of the allegations of “sexual molestation.”
Later the same week, according to the police report, Ms. W got in touch with Ms. A to try to seek out Mr. Assange, after he had failed to keep a promise she said he had made to call her. In the conversation, the report said, the two women discovered that both had had sex with Mr. Assange without a condom. A friend of Ms. A’s said in an interview this summer that the two women then decided to insist that Mr. Assange have a test for sexually transmitted diseases.
At around this time, Ms. A asked Mr. Assange to leave her apartment, according to a friend. The police report says he did so on Aug. 20. On that day, when he had not taken the test, the two women went to Stockholm’s Klara police station, where, according to the police report, they “wanted to get some advice” and were “unsure of how they should proceed.” By that time, acquaintances of the two women have said in interviews that both women had already confided similar details of their experiences with Mr. Assange to friends.
After the two women were interviewed at the police station, prosecutors issued an arrest warrant within hours. Mr. Assange said at the time he did not know who his accusers were. “Their identities have been made anonymous so even I have no idea who they are,” he said to the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet.
The police report quotes lengthy passages from Mr. Assange’s interview with investigators, which occurred when he voluntarily submitted to questioning in Stockholm, before the prosecutors’ office allowed him to return to Britain. Throughout the interview, he insisted that he had committed no offenses in his sexual encounters with the two women, while declining in many instances to respond to detailed police questioning about sexual details. Speaking of his relationship with Ms. A, the report quoted him as saying that “I had no reason to suspect that I would be accused of something like this.” He added that the complaints made against him included “a number of false statements” and “a bunch of incredible lies.”
Mr. Assange’s suspicions of political interference in the case were confirmed, he has said in recent days, by the decision of the Swedish prosecutors to drop the initial arrest warrant, and to downgrade the investigation to one of “molestation,” a minor offense. Those decisions were reversed in late August when the chief state prosecutor, Marianne Ny, overruling a subordinate prosecutor in Stockholm, Eva Finne, restored the original allegations, saying that rape was the appropriate charge for the evidence on file with the prosecutors.
Legal experts in Sweden have said that the decision was not unusual given the success that the women’s movement in Sweden has had over the last 30 years in recasting Sweden’s criminal laws on sexual issues, making them extremely protective of women’s rights.
But Mark Stephens, Mr. Assange’s lead lawyer in London, has repeatedly said, without providing details, that “a senior political figure” worked to have the case reopened.
The reference appears to have been to Claes Borgstrom, the lawyer for the two Swedish women, who is Sweden’s former equal opportunities ombudsman, and the spokesman on gender equality issues for the Social Democratic Party, the main opposition group in the Swedish Parliament. In an interview in Stockholm, Mr. Borgstrom, 66, said it was common under Sweden’s rape laws for men who force sex on women without a condom to face prosecution. “It’s a violation of sexual integrity, and it can be seen as rape,” he said.
By presenting the case as a vendetta, he said, Mr. Assange and his legal team were misrepresenting a justice system that required approval from Sweden’s highest appeals court before the extradition warrant was approved. “Those who say that the judges in our court of appeal were influenced by pressure from the United States don’t know what they’re talking about,” he said. “It’s absurd.”
He added that by presenting the allegations against him as part of a political conspiracy, Mr. Assange had made “victims” of the two women, who now faced vilification on the Internet and regular death threats.
“There are three persons who know for a fact that this has nothing to do with WikiLeaks, the C.I.A. or the Obama administration, and they are Julian Assange and my two clients,” Mr. Borgstrom said.
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