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Wednesday Update | A representative of the Swedish prosecution team is forcefully rebutting the Assange defense’s definition of consent in today’s hearing. Click here for ongoing coverage.
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Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is in a London court today, contesting an order that he be extradited to Sweden to face allegations that he raped two women there last year.
Assange’s attorneys are contending that the extradition order is invalid because the actions alleged are not criminal under English law. In doing so, they appear to be conceding the sincerity of at least some of those allegations. “Nothing I say,” Assange lawyer Ben Emmerson told the court this morning, “should be taken as denigrating the complainants” or to “trivialize their experience.” His arguments should not be construed as disputing that they honestly consider Assange’s behavior “disrespectful” or “disturbing,” he said, or that Assange “push[ed] at the boundaries of what they felt comfortable with.”
Emmerson went on to provide accounts of the two encounters in question which granted — for the purposes of today’s hearing — the validity of Assange’s accusers’ central claims. He described Assange as penetrating one woman while she slept without a condom, in defiance of her previously expressed wishes, before arguing that because she subsequently “consented to … continuation” of the act of intercourse, the incident as a whole must be taken as consensual.
In the other incident, in which Assange is alleged to have held a woman down against her will during a sexual encounter, Emmerson provided this summary of the allegations: “[The complainant] was lying on her back and Assange was on top of her … [she] felt that Assange wanted to insert his penis into her vagina directly, which she did not want since he was not wearing a condom … she therefore tried to turn her hips and squeeze her legs together in order to avoid a penetration … [she] tried several times to reach for a condom, which Assange had stopped her from doing by holding her arms and bending her legs open and trying to penetrate her with his penis without using a condom. [She] says that she felt about to cry since she was held down and could not reach a condom and felt this could end badly.”
As in the case of the first incident, Emmerson argues that subsequent consent renders the entire encounter consensual, and legal.
While Emmerson was not vouching for the accuracy of these accounts but merely offering them as summaries of the charges against his client, his introductory statement, excerpted above, was striking in its tone and approach:
“Nothing I say should be taken as denigrating the complainants, the genuineness of their feelings of regret, to trivialise their experience or to challenge whether they felt Assange’s conduct was disrespectful, discourteous, disturbing or even pushing at the boundaries of what they felt comfortable with.”
At a minimum, such language would seem to preclude two of the defenses that have previously been offered by Assange defenders — that the complainants were merely spurned lovers or government plants concocting fantastical stories for their own purposes.
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Selected previous Assange coverage:
- Guilt, Innocence, and Justice in the Julian Assange Case
- Assange Accuser’s Only Interview Mostly Ignored By US/UK Media
- First Thoughts on Naomi Wolf’s BBC Interview
- Why Naming Names is a Problem Even When the Names Have Been Named
- Naomi Wolf Still Peddling Falsehoods About Assange Assault Case
Note | This post has been edited to further clarify the distinction between Emmerson’s own descriptions of Assange’s behavior and his summaries of the allegations against his client. The core arguments of the piece remain unchanged.
Billy Bragg debuted a new song on stage this weekend, a throwback to the topical political tunes of his youth. Titled “Never Buy the Sun,” it’s a commentary on the scandals currently engulfing the British tabloids owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News International.
If you haven’t been following that story, it’s a doozy. For several years now, it’s been known that the weekly News of the World tabloid had illegally hacked into certain celebrities’ voicemail messages as part of its newsgathering operations. But in the last few weeks that story has been completely transformed, as the full scope of the hacking and related misbehavior has come to light.
First it was revealed that the paper gained access to the cellphone voicemail of teenaged murder victim Milly Dowler while Dowler was still missing. Journalists at the time went so far as to delete messages from the system in an effort to free up space for more incoming calls, leading Dowler’s parents to conclude that their child was still alive and checking her phone. It has also been suggested that the deletions misled police as to the facts of the crime, hindering their investigation, and may even have destroyed evidence in the case.
Not long after the Milly Dowler story broke, it was charged that News of the World had hacked into the phones of British servicemembers who had been killed in action, and into those of relatives of victims of the terrorist bombings that struck London on July 7, 2005. More recently, it’s been learned that the paper had made a habit of bribing police officials for tips, and just today, a series of revelations emerged about how papers throughout the News International organization targeted former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his family.
This is a huge scandal in Britain right now — it’s already led to the permanent closure of News of the World and several high-profile arrests, and it’s been compared to Watergate in its potential scope and significance.
Which brings us back to Billy Bragg. Billy’s been a political songwriter for a very long time now, and about a quarter century ago he wrote a song about the British tabloids called “It Says Here.” He’d been messing around with an updated version over the last week or so, but kept finding that new developments were overtaking his songwriting, so eventually he wound up putting together something completely new — “Never Buy the Sun.”
“Never Buy the Sun” is a good song, but its title, and its most repeated lyric — Scousers never buy the Sun — depend on a bit of knowledge of British history that most Americans don’t have. Here’s the skinny:
On April 15, 1989, Liverpool’s local football (soccer) team was playing an important game at Hillsborough Stadium, a neutral venue. At the time, Hillsborough — like many British stadiums — had non-reserved seating and high fences between the stands and the playing field. There was a big crowd for that day’s match, and a bottleneck developed at the entrances at the Liverpool end of the field. Large numbers of fans remained outside even after the game began, and when police opened a small gate to eject a fan, some members of the crowd surged forward. In response, the police opened several larger exit gates to serve as an additional entrance, without putting crowd control measures in place to direct foot traffic. As a result, thousands of fans pressed forward into stands that had no room to accommodate them, and those in the front had no ability to leave — or even move — when they began to be crushed by those behind. Ninety-six people were killed in the crush, one of the worst such disasters in British history.
Four days after the Hillsborough Disaster, the Sun newspaper — like the News of the World, a part of Murdoch’s News International empire — ran a front-page story claiming that as events were unfolding, Liverpool fans attacked and urinated on police who were trying to bring events under control, sexually abused the body of a girl who had died in the crush, and picked the pockets of the dead.
These were all lies.
The Sun did not immediately retract its story, and the paper has subsequently veered between apology and justification. Sales of the paper in Liverpool plummeted in the wake of of the incident, and have never — twenty-two years later — recovered. Today Liverpool is one of Britain’s largest cities and the Sun is one of the country’s best-selling newspapers, but only a few thousand copies of the paper are sold in Liverpool each day. Many newsstands won’t even carry it.
In local slang, a person from Liverpool is called a Scouser.
And Scousers never buy the Sun.
The leadership of the Simon Fraser Student Society (SFSS) has announced a Sunday lockout of SFSS’s union employees, after two years of unsuccessful contract negotiations. Unless an agreement is reached by tomorrow afternoon, CUPE local 3338’s twenty employees will be barred from working their jobs.
Unsurprisingly, the two sides characterize the state of negotiations differently, with CUPE arguing that SFSS is demanding “dramatic wage rollbacks and cuts to staffing levels,” while SFSS president Jeff McCann says that the student society is asking for a 12% average pay cut, with about a quarter of that loss to be restored over the course of the new contract. (Edit: see comments for more details on the proposed cuts.)
Activists claim that this move is ideologically motivated, noting that newly-elected SFSS leaders announced the lockout simultaneously with an effort to evict the Simon Fraser Public Interest Research Group (SFPIRG) from student-owned offices.
I’ll be following this story as it develops, but I think one element that hasn’t yet received much attention is worth emphasizing — the timing of the lockout.
Now, I don’t know anything about what triggered this particular decision. It’s possible that there’s a compelling reason why this had to happen now. But as I’ve written many times before, summer is the season when university administrators traditionally launch their most obnoxious initiatives, on the premise that there aren’t any students around to object. If you want to pave a community garden, or eliminate a department, or create a new parking fee, or whatever, summer’s the time to do it.
Like I say, I don’t know why SFSS acted when it did. Maybe they had a good reason. But if they timed this lockout — and the SFPIRG eviction — to take place in July because they knew that their student opponents wouldn’t be able to mobilize … well, that’s just punk. It’s anti-democratic, and it’s anti-student. It’s wrong.
So Michele Bachmann has signed a pledge to support families that’s got some very creepy stuff in it. In particular, there’s this:
“Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.”
Others have noted just how brain-curdlingly offensive this is, and I agree 100% with what they’ve written. But I want to pause for a second and look at the numbers behind the claim.
The pledge cites an invalid source — the 1880 census doesn’t have great data on slave family structures, it turns out — but the standard estimate for the number of slave families broken up by the sale of children away from one or both parents is about one in three. With life expectancy so much lower in the 19th century than it is today, I’d guess that about half of all slave families in the antebellum US were ones in which children were living with both of their parents.
And yes, the percentage of two-parent households in the black community today is a little lower than that.
But again, let’s pause for a second. Contrary to stereotypes, most African American fathers who don’t live with their kids are involved with them on a regular basis. Almost half see their kids or speak to them by phone at least once a week, and fully two-thirds spend face-to-face time with them at least once a month. (This percentage, by the way, is significantly higher than the analogous stat for white fathers who don’t live with their kids: 67% vs 59%.)
So when you compare slave families to black families today and wring your hands about the decline in the two-parent household, you’re not just ignoring the fact that slave children lived in “households” where their white master, not their own parents, had final authority over them. You’re not just ignoring the fact that many of them saw their parents savagely beaten and their mothers repeatedly raped. You’re not just ignoring the fact that their parents were in many cases prohibited by law from reading them a bedtime story. You’re not just ignoring all that.
You’re also saying that a family destroyed by the sale of its children is functionally identical to one in which the kids sleep at their mom’s most nights but have a bedroom in their father’s place, cereal in his cupboard, and drawings taped to his walls.
You’re saying, not to put too fine a point on it, that my ex-wife and I, by amicably separating and choosing to raise our children together while living apart, behaved comparably to the slaveowner who tore a toddler screaming from her mother’s arms and sold her away forever, permanently severing the bond between parent and child.
That’s what you’re saying. And it’s an repulsive insult to every parent in America.
Update: Santorum signed the pledge too. And Pawlenty is apparently considering it.
Heading down to Washington today for tomorrow’s Campus Progress national conference. I’ll be moderating a panel on students and youth in social justice movements in the United States with Carmen Berkeley of Choice USA (a former US Student Association president), John Halpin of the Center for American Progress, and Evangeline Weiss of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.
It should be a really good panel. If you’re going to be at the conference, stop by and say hi!
NOTE: The conference schedule has changed to accommodate Bill Clinton’s schedule (he’s keynoting). Our panel starts at 11:00 now.
studentactivism.net 
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