Wow. I wasn’t expecting this.
Back on December 7 of last year, erstwhile feminist Naomi Wolf wrote an op-ed for the Huffington Post in which she claimed that sexual assault allegations lodged against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange were no more than accusations of “consensual sex” with two women who were “upset that he began dating [the] second woman while still being in a relationship with the first.”
This was a gross misrepresentation of what was known about the allegations at the time, as well as a misrepresentation of the sources on which Wolf herself relied in writing her piece. Ten days later, Wolf’s account was again confirmed to be false by a long story in The Guardian.
Wolf as much as admitted that her version of the story was “not sound” in a radio interview on January 7, but she didn’t go back and change the HuffPo piece to reflect that concession. On January 12 I put up a blogpost calling attention to Wolf’s failure to correct the piece, which I described as “a story which cast allegations of sexual assault in a negative, trivializing, and unfair light.” I wrote that I found that failure mind-boggling, given her own previous anti-rape activism.
Well, apparently Wolf got wind of my criticism (or received a nudge from someone else), because sometime in the last week or so she finally added a correction to the HuffPo piece.
Here it is:
The Guardian has, since I wrote this original post based on the Daily Mail, reported that the two women’s complaints to Swedish police centered on the alleged misuse of or failure to use condoms, which can be illegal in Sweden.
Yep. That’s it.
No acknowledgment that she misrepresented her own sources. No apology for ascribing false motives to the accusers. No link to the Guardian story.
And most crucially, no honest description of the allegations themselves.
According to the Guardian’s ccount, accuser A claims that Assange first pinned her down during sex to keep her from getting to her condoms, and then — after subsequently relenting and agreeing to wear one — deliberately tore it so that he could have unprotected sex with her without her knowledge. Accuser W claims that Assange penetrated her vaginally while she slept without using a condom after she had repeatedly told him that she would not have intercourse without protection.
In each of these cases, the women allege that Assange forced himself on them. He is accused of holding A down against her will to keep her from getting at a condom, and then later sabotaging that condom. He is accused of having sex with W while she was unconscious under circumstances in which she had previously explicitly denied him consent to do so. That’s what’s being claimed here. There’s no ambiguity about it.
And for me, that means that the worst thing about Wolf’s correction is its sophistry — because despite its many misrepresentations, there’s nothing in it that’s technically false. Assange is accused of “misuse” of a condom, in the course of deliberately and surreptitiously destroying it. He is accused of “failure to use” a condom, in the course of an act of non-consensual sexual intercourse with a sleeping woman. What he’s accused of is “illegal in Sweden,” but it would be under the rape laws of the United Kingdom and the United States, too. And while it’s true that the Guardian reported all this after Wolf wrote her original piece, it’s also true that she misrepresented what was publicly known at the time she wrote.
Wolf is, of course, aware of all this. She carefully constructed her “correction” in such a way as to make it technically factually accurate while leaving a false and harmful impression in the minds of her readers. If you stumble upon her piece today under the impression that no assault is alleged in this case — that it’s purely a matter of a bizarre quirk in the Swedish legal code that criminalizes consensual sex — you’ll emerge as misinformed as you were when you arrived.
That’s intentional. And it’s appalling.
Update | Comments on Wolf’s piece have apparently been not just closed, but taken offline. When I tried to view them just now, to confirm that I’d posted a link there to my original critique of the article, I wasn’t able to. If anyone can double-check this and make sure it’s not just me, I’d appreciate it.
studentactivism.net 
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February 7, 2011 at 9:08 am
madamgeeky
Here’s the problem: Would he be guaranteed a fair trial outside the UK?
Is there not reasonable doubt that he WOULDN’T?
Of course there is.
Thus, he shouldn’t be extradited.
FYI, all the Wikileaks videos are on this hub:
http://wikileaks.videohq.tv
February 7, 2011 at 9:23 am
wikinews030
sry but the comment is: “yeah, and?”
c’mon, we’re talking about a) selection of outdated condoms and b) about something that they call in German “Morgenlatte-Sex”. there is no “unwanted sex asleep”, you wake up and immediately stand on your legs when your body experiences sth that you don’t want. this was no sex asleep, it was a one-quarter-sleep-encounter and obviously not an unwanted one.
February 7, 2011 at 9:26 am
Angus Johnston
@madamgeeky: I take no position here on whether Assange should be extradited, because I have no position on that question.
February 7, 2011 at 9:35 am
Angus Johnston
@wikinews030: I guess my big question is this: If the actual allegations are so trifling, why is Wolf going to such great lengths, over and over again, to avoid describing them accurately? I’d be much less appalled by her treatment of this case if she would come out forthrightly and say “here’s what’s been alleged, and here’s why I don’t think it’s rape.” But she’s never done that in any sort of honest way.
Beyond that, this question of asleep vs. half-asleep (or, as you now put it, “one-quarter-asleep”) has been coming up a lot, and I think it’s worth addressing.
First, W alleges that she was asleep. We can believe that claim or disbelieve it, but it’s important to characterize the allegations accurately.
Second, even if we conclude that W was probably only drowsing, or that she woke up early in the encounter, we’re left with an account in which Assange entered her without using a condom, knowing that she was adamant that she use one, under circumstances in which she had at best a reduced capacity to object. By her description, he never asked her whether it was okay to go bareback, and never even mentioned that he’d failed to put a condom on until she asked him — while he was already inside her.
Asleep, unconscious, half-asleep, drowsing, just waking up, whatever. From the perspective of consent, none of that really matters. He is alleged to have entered her without a condom knowing that she was insistent that a condom be used, and to have done so without asking whether it was okay. That’s non-consensual. That’s sexual assault. And it’s not made okay by her subsequent acquiescence — there’s no such thing as retroactive consent to sex.
February 7, 2011 at 9:42 am
Pfil
you wake up and immediately stand on your legs when your body experiences sth that you don’t want
Source for this claim of magical self defense? Remind the women around you never to sleep, or it may be a signal of consent that they couldn’t run screaming from you.
February 7, 2011 at 9:45 am
Brian
I just read this article on HuffPo:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/07/julian-assange-trial-begi_n_819410.html
Part of it says that no charges have been laid, and that he is only wanted for questioning, which is why extradition is being opposed. Yet your comments assert that there are in fact charges pending.
Can you please clarify with a link that there are in fact actual rape charges pending? If there are no charges, then how genuine can any allegations be, or any discussion thereof?
February 7, 2011 at 9:58 am
Angus Johnston
@Brian: You’re right that no formal charges have been brought. My using the term “charges” rather than “allegations” was a slip, and I’ve corrected it. Thanks for the heads up.
As for your second question, though, I’m not sure I follow. Allegations have been made. The specifics of those allegations are contained in police documents that have been leaked to the Guardian and the New York Times. That’s how we know what they are.
February 7, 2011 at 11:43 am
Brian
Can you quote the supposed misrepresentation? Your article paraphrases something that sounds more like an interpretation. While interpretation is certainly not immune to criticism (probably even more deserving), it’s also a different animal than misrepresentation.
February 7, 2011 at 12:55 pm
judith.butlertron
“you wake up and immediately stand on your legs when your body experiences sth that you don’t want. this was no sex asleep, it was a one-quarter-sleep-encounter and obviously not an unwanted one.”
Well, that’s revolting.
I mean, obviously I wasn’t there, but having woken up to sex with a partner (admittedly not penetrative, although it could have been had he been an utter creep), there’s a lovely, drowsy, totally abandoned feel to it that doesn’t involve being entirely awake and with all of your faculties online. It’s lovely, when you are with someone you can trust.
Perhaps you’re missing the part where the lack of consent was conditional? She wanted to have sex with him the night before, but she insisted on a condom, and he didn’t want to use one. They feel asleep together, and when she woke up to him having sex with her, she was probably really enjoying it right up until she woke up enough to be aware of peripherals, and to notice or wonder whether or not he was using a condom. At that point she asked, and he said “I’m wearing you.”
Unless you have Just World fantasies regarding a woman’s responsibility to throw her attacker out of her vagina and spring off the bed like a goddamn T-1000 in order for consent to be considered withdrawn, he knowingly abrogated her consent, used the fact that she was asleep to avoid her knowing he wasn’t covering that shit until he was safely inside, and then he used social and emotional pressure to continue despite knowing she didn’t want him to.
If you don’t think that’s rape, I’m not sure what else to tell you aside from “please don’t touch anyone else until you get some therapy.”
February 7, 2011 at 1:24 pm
Angus Johnston
@Brian: I discussed the misrepresentations in the original piece in detail in my original response. I linked to it in the body of today’s post, but here it is again:
https://studentactivism.net/2011/01/12/naomi-wolf-huffpo-retraction/
In summary, neither Wolf’s claim that Assange was accused of nothing worse than “consensual sex” nor her claim that his accusers were “upset that he began dating a second woman while still being in a relationship with the first” are supported by the articles she relied on in writing her post, and both claims have been again contradicted by subsequent reporting. Yet her new “correction” doesn’t address either of these errors, and is in fact carefully constructed to avoid doing so.
I’d say that “misrepresentation” is a generous characterization of that kind of nonsense.
February 7, 2011 at 1:55 pm
Angus Johnston
Oh, and yeah. That @judith.butlertron comment is absolutely 100% spot on. Just perfect. Beautiful. Thank you.
February 7, 2011 at 2:22 pm
judith.butlertron
Thanks. It’s amazing how you have to spell it out for people sometimes, because they cannot even identify the presence of their socialized and highly gendered assumptions about What Rape Is, never mind questioning their validity.
It’s true that the entire situation is extremely complex, and that separating each step into it’s own compartment doesn’t leave you with a clear and completely unambiguous step at which you can say “see, this is the part that is rape, the rest of it is just sex”, which is what rape apologia and its supporters are constantly seeking, but those steps taken in the aggregate indicate a willful desire to commit a sex act that was both explicitly and implicitly forbidden, and that’s rape.
February 7, 2011 at 2:47 pm
Angus Johnston
@judith.butlertron: It seems to me that a big part of what trips people up is the mechanics of conditional consent. There’s something about the concept of “I’m happy to have sex with you as long as you wear a condom” that leads a certain kind of person to say “how could it be rape when she said she was happy to have sex with him?”
As a matter of logic, it’s pretty straightforward, obviously. “You can do X if you do Y” isn’t permission to do X in the absence of Y. As a matter of interpersonal ethics, it’s pretty simple too — we don’t have a problem understanding what “you can’t have any ice cream unless you finish your dinner” or “I’ll give you a ride if you pay for gas” mean.
But as you say, once you apply those same principles to a sexual encounter, a lot of folks suddenly go all screwy — and frequently it’s not any more complicated than a failure to recognize that ANY non-consensual sexual activity is sexual assault.
February 7, 2011 at 5:11 pm
Thomas
Angus, this is one of those areas where it becomes readily apparent that people don’t work on pure logic, but rather on models of how the world works. Much of the commentary about any public rape allegation makes a lot more sense if one views the commenters as tacitly assuming that any woman that X is a slut and sluts are presumed to agree to anything, even if they actually say no. The nature of patriarchy is that those assumptions are not only unquestioned, but generally invisible — often even when pointed out.
February 7, 2011 at 5:24 pm
What We Missed
[…] Wolf has added a non-correction correction to her HuffPo piece about the Julian Assange […]
February 7, 2011 at 5:52 pm
stuartbramhall
The plot thickens, with growing evidence Assange was set up on the sexual charges (the point Moore, Wolf and Pilger were trying to make to begin with), especially given the CIA connections (not of the women themselves but of the LAW FIRM representing the women – see OpEdNews article at http://tinyurl.com/4fo977u).
In addition the Swedish press is reporting that Karl Rove was involved. I’m sure people remember Karl Rove and all his dirty tricks against Bush’s opponents. I also strongly recommend people read the article translated from the Swedish in OpEdNews at http://www.opednews.com/articles/Rove-Suspected-In-Swedish-by-Andrew-Kreig-101219-292.html
In fact, the whole Wikileaks/feminist controversy is starting to smell like classic Cointelpro tactics to me. The use of identity politics to divide the progressive movement dates back to the 1960s civil rights movement. I write about my sad personal experiences with all this in my recent memoir THE MOST REVOLUTIONARY ACT: MEMOIR OF AN AMERICAN REFUGEE (www.stuartbramhall.com). I currently live in exile in New Zealand
February 7, 2011 at 6:53 pm
Angus Johnston
@stuartbramhall: I’ve said many times that I don’t discount the possibility — even the likelihood — that this prosecution is being manipulated for political ends. That’s a real concern, and a grave one. But it’s a separate issue than that of whether the original allegations themselves have merit.
Wolf, in claiming that A and W were simply spurned lovers, implicitly rejects the theory that Assange was set up in advance. Similarly, Assange himself has often characterized the complainants in ways that would seem to preclude the possibility that the two women were put in his path by Karl Rove or his ilk.
And again, once again, the question of whether the charges have merit is separate from that of whether someone like Wolf has an ethical obligation to describe them accurately. She does have such an obligation, and it’s an obligation she’s repeatedly failed to meet.
February 9, 2011 at 1:11 am
Octopodi
@stuartbramhall: In addition to what Angus rightly points out, the “feminist controvesy” (which comes off as a little condescending – “oh those feminists, always confusing their PMS for discrimination”) comes from the fact that the allegations, as described, were dismissed by most on the basis of being “not really rape.” Whether or not the allegations are TRUE is entirely different from whether or not they describe an act of rape, and it would be a terrible thing if, down the line, another survivor’s attempt to get justice would be belittled because everyone would laugh and say “oh that’s just like that bullshit around Julian Assange – everyone knows that’s not really rape.” We’re not asking Britain to extradite and Sweden to convict Assange – we’re asking for humans and the media to reaffirm that the allegations describe rape, and that we take rape and sexual violence seriously. The courts can decide whether or not the allegations are true.
This kind of rape, refusal to use condoms and emotion and physical pressuring stopping short of what morons in the House of Representatives refer to as “forcible rape” (gag, puke, grrr) is far more common, and women don’t learn enough that those things do constitute rape. The feminist outrage (and it should be outrage, ladies) is about not perpetuating rape culture and sending out a broadly, mainstream-media relayed message to rape survivors that no one will believe them and anyway it wasn’t “rape-rape” (in Whoopi Goldberg’s term). There should be NO division in the progressive movement over the total unacceptability of rape and the fact that the allegations as described do describe rape(s). People can make up their own minds about whether these rapes happened (at all or as described).
May 18, 2011 at 5:20 am
zetkin « notebook
[…] you won’t find the allegations against Assange on the Counterfire site. As Angus Johnston has pointed out repeatedly, failure to accurately report the allegations has become a central tactic of the Assange Defenders […]
June 10, 2011 at 4:39 pm
Tony Burke
What? Are you stupid? These charges are obviously false and you know it. How convenient for the Us Fascist State that Assange was charged. It’s an obvious setup. Wolfe knows it, we all know it and most of all YOU know it !