Julian Assange Throws Another Newspaper Under the Bus
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange cycles through friendships like a 13-year-old girl. The object of today's outburst: His former bestie, Guardian reporter Nick Davies, for totally spreading mean rumors about him!
First Assange threw the New York Times overboard after it published a mean, and entirely accurate, story about him. And now he's feuding with the Guardian, one of Wikileaks' media partners in releasing hundreds of thousands of State Department cables, for daring to report on the rape accusations leveled against Assange by Swedish authorities. Making it even more personal is the fact that the Guardian's Nick Davies, who led the paper's previous collaborations with Wikileaks on the Afghanistan and Iraq war logs, wrote the offending story.
On Friday, Davies wrote a story containing the leaked details of the Swedish case against Assange, including allegations that he deliberately sabotaged a condom so that it would rip during sex with one of the women, who described the encounter as "violent" and "the world's worst screw." (It also relayed that Assange ostentatiously stole the girlfriend of a prominent American journalist, the identity of which we're still interested in knowing.) Without seeming to appreciate the irony, Assange's lawyer assailed the leak, accusing the Swedish government of "trying to make Julian look bad."
And today, in the Times of London, Assange lashed out at the Guardian, accusing it of being a stool pigeon for the Swedish government by running the story on the day a judge was set to rule on his bail application: "The leak of the police report to the Guardian was clearly designed to undermine my bail application. It was timed to come up on the desk of the judge that morning. Someone in authority clearly intended to keep Julian in prison, and shopped [the report] around to other newspapers as well." The fact that it was Davies' byline was particularly painful for Assange, the paper said (the Times is behind a paywall.)
All of which means the Guardian is, like the New York Times before it, officially on Assange's shit list for violating the whole "bros before hos" thing. But Davies actually did hold back to protect Assange, according to his boss. David Leigh, the Guardian's investigative editor, told Yahoo! News' Michael Calderone that "Nick left out a lot of graphic and damaging material in the allegations because he thought it would be too cruel to publish them," which inspires a lot of trust in the Guardian's reporting.
Two other important items of note from the Times interview:
1) Assange explains his sexual behavior thusly: "I am not promiscuous. I just really like women."
2) Assange explains his world-historical heroism and status as civil rights icon thusly: "I was handed a card by one of my black prison guards. It said, 'I only have two heroes in the world: Dr. [Martin Luther] King, and you. That is representative of 50 percent of people."
And those Taiwanese people who make funny videos of things are on the case, naturally.