Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

15:27

Wikileaks: The Rape Charges Against Julian Assange | True News

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Okay, so nobody's going to know what the final truth is about these sex crimes allegations until the trial, and even then we may not know the truth.
	But the first thing to understand is that, at least in activist circles, Assange is kind of like a superstar.
	He's won the Amnesty International Media Award, the Economist Index on Censorship Award, and the Sam Adams Award.
	He's also been nominated as one of the 25 visionaries who are changing the world.
	And on November 12th, he was leading in a poll by Time magazine for Person of the Year in 2010.
	So what's going on with this rape stuff?
	Well, look, rape is an extremely serious crime, second only to murder in its devastation.
	So what happened? Well, there are two women involved.
	One of them—these aren't their real names.
	You can look them up on the Internet if you want— One of the women we'll call Beth is pretty well known in Sweden.
	She holds radical feminist views on how men dominate society through sex.
	And she has a history of exacting vengeance against former lovers.
	She wrote a blog entry in January called Seven Steps to Legal Revenge, describing, quote, how women can use courts to get their own back on unfaithful lovers.
	Beth was a press spokesperson and secretary at the Christian Association in Sweden, known as the Swedish Association of Christian Social Democrats, a kind of a socialist political party, and she organized the event for Assange, or was involved.
	She was a research assistant, formerly at a local university, the protege of a militant feminist academic, and also held the post of campus sexual equity officer.
	Her job was to fight male discrimination in all forms, including...
	So she'd be well aware of the laws and standards in Sweden.
	Look, Assange has balls.
	There's no question about that.
	The man's like a forest of exercise balls.
	But he's a little bit old to be playing the man-whore, but we'll see how that plays out.
	So Assange flies into Stockholm on Wednesday, August the 11th, to speak at a socialist political event.
	Beth offers him her apartment, since he's traveling incognito for reasons that we don't have to go into here, but which are pretty obvious.
	So Beth is supposed to be away, but she comes home early.
	And according to reports, Assange says, hey, I'll move out because you're here.
	And she's like, no, no, no, no, no, stay.
	Let's go for dinner. And they go for dinner and they come home and they make the beast of two backs.
	They have sex. According to Beth, the condom broke.
	And I think he's agreed that this did happen, and she seems to think that Julian did this deliberately, but he says it was an accident.
	I don't know how you deliberately break a condom, but that's the story.
	According to reports, Beth appeared relaxed and untroubled throughout the seminar the next day.
	Not what you'd really expect from a rape victim.
	She also threw a party for him at her home that evening.
	Aha! Enter the other woman, who we'll call Gwen.
	So a couple of weeks before he comes to Sweden, Gwen sees Julian on TV and finds him, quote, interesting, brave, and admirable.
	Gwen began to follow the Wikileaks story, and when she found out Julian was going to come to Stockholm, she offered to help out at the seminar.
	Her offer was refused or ignored, but she attended anyway and took a large number of photos of Julian during his 90-minute talk.
	There are reports that Gwen and Beth met during the seminar.
	So after the talk, Gwen hung around and either asked to come or was invited to join Julian and a group of his male friends for lunch.
	One of Julian's friends recalled that Gwen had been, quote, very keen to get his attention.
	Apparently they flirt a bit during lunch.
	After lunch they go to see a film and she reports that he was intimate with her in the theater.
	Unforeseen. Unprecedented.
	And then Julian took a 20 minute nap in a nearby park while she sat awake by his side.
	Julian wakes up and says, listen, I've got to go to a party.
	He didn't say it was with a woman who he just slept with.
	So he goes to the party thrown for him by Beth, one of the victims.
	And a few hours afterwards, Beth tweeted, quote, sitting outside nearly freezing with the world's coolest people.
	It's pretty amazing. She later tried to delete this message as somewhat incompatible with the sexual assault victim story.
	So during the party, Julian apparently phoned Gwen and then she boasted to her friends about his flirting with her.
	At this point, according to police reports, her friends told her, the ball is in your court.
	So on Monday, Gwen called Julian and they got together in Stockholm.
	They agreed to go to her place, but he had no money for a train ticket and said he didn't want to use a credit card for fear of being tracked.
	Gwen then bought both their tickets.
	They went to her place and, shocking of shocking lists, they had sex.
	So according to Gwen, Julian wore a condom that night, but the following morning they had sex again, and he didn't use a condom.
	She reported that she was upset that he refused to wear a condom when she asked him to, but obviously not so upset that they didn't have sex.
	After sex with Assange on the morning of August 17th, Gwen went out and bought, then cooked, breakfast, oatmeal, and juice.
	You know, just as you do when you are the victim of a rape.
	Gwen insisted that Julian promise to stay in touch, and then she brought him his ticket back to Stockholm.
	The man is a player.
	Gwen then called Beth and told Beth that she had had unprotected sex with Julian.
	Then... Beth reported that she had also screwed Julian.
	After a couple more days, the two women go to the Stockholm police station where they claim they're only seeking advice on how to proceed with a complaint by Gwen against Julian.
	They say, well, it was unprotected sex.
	We want him to get tested for STDs.
	Of course, if you're worried about STDs, you get yourself tested, not somebody else.
	But anyway...
	So the female interviewing officer, probably because of the allegations of a sabotaged condom in one case, and a refusal to wear one in the second, concluded that Gwen had been raped and Beth subjected to sexual molestation.
	This is some weird Swedish laws that unprotected sex can be considered a sexual assault, and there is an obscure Swedish law called the Surprise Sex Law, It holds that if a woman withdraws her consent at any point during intercourse and the man continues, it becomes rape.
	This transition from consensual to non-consensual sex is what Julian is accused of.
	All of this, of course, will have to be proved in a court, a Swedish one, because this crime doesn't exist in just about any other country.
	The analogy is, you lend your car to a guy you recently met, and then you call the police because you're mad at him, and you say, oh no, he stole my car.
	Yeah, okay, originally I loaned it to him, but now I called him and asked him to come back, and he's not bringing it back, so he stole it.
	Well, anyway, I think we can all see what silliness this is.
	So, let's get back to Sweden.
	So, by the Sunday, the news had leaked to the press.
	Legal papers were then rushed to the weekend home of the chief prosecutor who dismissed the rape charge.
	She felt that what had occurred was no more than minor offenses, which, you know, fine, 150 bucks or something like that.
	On September the 1st, a third prosecutor reopened the rape investigation, implying that she had new information in the case.
	This is when the surprise sex law was invoked.
	On November the 18th, Swedish judicial officials approved a prosecutorial request that Assange be detained for questioning for alleged sex crimes.
	And on November the 30th, Interpol issued a red notice against Assange for alleged sex crimes in Sweden.
	Now, despite what has happened, the women who organized the event This woman, and had Assange stay at her apartment, told the newspaper that she never intended that Assange be charged with rape.
	Gosh, heavens are. She is an expert on sexual assault and sexual harassment and rape laws because of her prior job, but she never intended for that to happen, of course.
	Quote, she says,"...it is quite wrong that we were afraid of him.
	He is not violent, and I do not feel threatened by him.
	The responsibility for what happened to me and the other girl lies with a man who had attitude problems with women." One of Assange's lawyers has been quoted as saying, the exact content of the mobile phone text is not yet known, but their bragging and exculpatory character has been confirmed by Swedish prosecutors.
	Neither of the women's texts complain of rape.
	Now, what has happened now, which is slowing down the investigation considerably, is that this Beth woman, the woman who put her place up for Julian to stay at, She has left Sweden and may have ceased actively cooperating with the Swedish Prosecution Service and her own lawyer, sources in Sweden have said.
	So she's gone to the Middle East and is not available, apparently, for continuing.
	I see your main complainant and witness is gone, so what's going to happen, right?
	Naomi Klein, Naomi Wolf, and the European group Women Against Rape have all made statements questioning the nature and purpose of the prosecution.
	One source from Beth's old university reported rumors that she had stopped cooperating with the prosecution service several weeks ago.
	And this was part of the reason for the long delay in proceeding with charges and what still appears to be an absence of charges.
	So what does this all mean?
	Well, this is all the result of a tragic lack of self-knowledge.
	Julian's childhood was wretched and chaotic and violent.
	He and his mother, from his age of 11 until he was 16, were on the run from a man who Julian described as a violent and dangerous psychopath, This man was allegedly involved in a cult where Julian felt or believed that this man had access to government records and data so he could track where he and his mother were, what they were fleeing from this dangerous guy.
	So the man was on the run through most of his formative adolescent years, from 11 to 16.
	Then of course he gets married to this crazy woman, has this kid, gets involved in a Decade-long legal battle to try and get custody of his son.
	This is when he gets hacking into the computers of the child care protection services in Australia and so on.
	So, if you don't know your own history, if you don't have a strong and deep and wise understanding of the factors that shaped how you think, how you view the world, you are condemned To live the same days over and over again, like a blind photocopier just stuck on auto-repeat, auto-repeat, auto-repeat, like that movie Groundhog Day.
	You're just living the same day over and over and over again.
	So he was on the run from the government when he was 11.
	He's on the run from the government in his late 30s.
	I think this is really, really important to understand.
	That this is what happens when you don't know yourself.
	This is not to say that there's bravery in what he's doing.
	I think that there is. This is not to say that there's not value in the information that he's putting out.
	I think That there is.
	But the way in which it is occurring is self-destructive.
	Because he doesn't know, to all intents and appearances, he doesn't understand the connection between his childhood and his current actions.
	And if you don't understand that connection, you, me, Julia and everybody, and the women, of course, who are persecuting him, If you don't understand that connection, you will live the same day over and over again.
	You will live the same life over and over again.
	It's like reading one page of a comic book.
	You get to the end, you go back to the beginning, you read it over and over again.
	It may have different names, there may be different costumes, it may be even a different background, but the story is exactly the same over and over and over and over again.
	This aggression and rage that he feels towards people who are in positions of political authority or who have power over him must come entirely from the choices of the men that his mother made when she was younger, when he was younger, the men that she led into his life.
	I guarantee you that neither his biological father nor his first stepfather Was a saint because his mother then chose a violent psychopath.
	This doesn't come out of nowhere.
	These aren't choices that just reverse themselves magically.
	These are patterns that occur in people's lives until self-knowledge is achieved, which is why I continually tell people, if you're going to try and rock the boat of the world, if you're going to try and uproot the dead tree of culture and prejudice and bigotry and nationalism, Then you need to talk to a therapist.
	You need to talk to somebody who's an expert to make sure that you're doing it for the right and clear reasons.
	This is nothing new to me.
	Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living.
	And he didn't mean just the life outside your head, but the life inside your head.
	That self-knowledge is essential for true, consistent, and sustainable virtue in this world.
	And that is the great tragedy of what is occurring here, in my opinion.
	Sleeping around with basically screwing people you've just met is playing Russian roulette with your dick.
	And if they happen to be radical feminists, you're playing Russian roulette with your dick with a machine set to frappe.
	It is a dangerous, dangerous game to get involved with, particularly with these crazy laws where they are at that time.
	For the women, you know, these are two women who were starbangers who seem to have not liked comparing notes and went on a vengeance kick.
	You can't call one of them crazy and not the other because they're colluding in this kind of attack which means they can't see each other's craziness which means that they're crazy themselves.
	So this kind of persecution This is what is a consistent theme in his life.
	It was inadvertent when he was a child, but because of his lack of self-knowledge, it is now something that he can avoid and continue to sustain what he's doing with WikiLeaks.
	But if he doesn't know this, if he doesn't figure this out, if he doesn't start to understand this, if prison doesn't give him some time to reflect on this, and thank you for those who corrected me, I mistakenly said that he was in...
	Prison in Sweden, he's still in England.
	If he doesn't understand this, then the great potential that is WikiLeaks, his potential, will evaporate and fade away.
	It will be replaced by something else, and the internet is changing everything, of course, even as we speak.
	But that is the plea, is for self-knowledge so that you don't continue to repeat the same mistakes that were inflicted upon you as a child involuntarily.
	You can choose not to replace them, but it means confronting your history, experiencing the emotions that you couldn't experience, the fear, the panic, and the rage.
	That sets you free, and through that, you can help to free others.
	But until then, it doesn't work at all.

▲