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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.
This morning’s New York Times story on the Dominique Strauss-Kahn rape investigation declared that the case was collapsing due to “major holes in the credibility of the housekeeper who charged that he attacked her.” That article, however, contained no allegations that the complainant had lied about the attack itself. Instead, the paper claimed that prosecutors had found inconsistencies in her asylum application and evidence that she had engaged in (and attempted to cover up) shady financial dealings prior to the incident. In the wake of the publication of the Times piece, many — myself included — have argued that such alleged misrepresentations had no bearing on the question of whether she had given an accurate account of her encounter with Strauss-Kahn.
Now, however, in a letter to DSK’s lawyers, the District Attorney’s office contends that the accuser lied to them about the immediate aftermath of the incident itself.
In conversations with detectives and prosecutors, they say, as well as in her grand jury testimony, DSK’s accuser repeatedly declared that she fled to a nearby hallway after leaving his suite (Suite 2806), remaining there until she encountered her supervisor, to whom she reported the assault. “The complainant has since admitted,” the DA’s office says, “that this account was false and that after the incident in Suite 2806, she proceeded to clean a nearby room and then returned to Suite 2806 and began to clean that suite before she reported the incident.”
Such misrepresentations do not themselves prove that DSK’s accuser was not attacked. As I’ve noted before, a woman who has been “raped in circumstances in which her judgment may be called into question … can expect to be disbelieved, shamed, and attacked, and that expectation may lead a rape survivor to alter her story to make it more palatable to police, or to a jury, or even to her friends and family.”
That said, though, this latest allegation is of a very different character than those the paper reported earlier. The Times bungled the story, and in doing so seriously misrepresented the state of the case.
Stockton, California resident Kenneth Wright says a team of federal agents sent by the Department of Education busted down his door without warning yesterday morning, handcuffing him in the back of a cop car for more than six hours. And, he says, it was all because his estranged wife defaulted on her student loans.
The feds, meanwhile, deny that the raid was conducted over a student loan default, but confirm that the squad was sent by the DOE. The department’s Office of the Inspector General, a spokesperson says, “conducts about 30-35 search warrants a year on issues such as bribery, fraud, and embezzlement of federal student aid funds.”
Nine activists, seven of them students, were arrested at Ohio State University yesterday afternoon at the offices of university president Gordon Gee. The nine were part of a group of more than a hundred who had gathered to protest OSU’s relationship with campus contractor Sodexo.
The activists were affiliated with the OSU chapter of United Students Against Sweatshops, a national organization whose members have mounted nearly a dozen major campus protests across the country in recent weeks. USAS was spurred to action by reports of Sodexo worker rights abuses in at least five countries, as well as reports of mistreatment by Sodexo workers at OSU’s own sports stadium.
Western Washington University last week broke ties with Sodexo in the face of a USAS-led campaign, while administrators at Emory and the University of Washington have arrested students peacefully protesting against the company.
studentactivism.net 
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