WikiLeaks (21 page)

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!”

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.”