Staring out from the morning papers (and news websites) yesterday was a photograph of Julian Assange. The Wikileaks founder was last seen being dragged – horizontally and in handcuffs – from his self-imposed confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy in London last April to attend an extradition hearing to face charges under the Espionage Act in the US.
His decision to release highly classified documents a decade ago is said to have put dissidents in Afghanistan and Iraq at ‘risk of serious harm, torture, or even death’.
Assange, 48, is now banged up in high-security Belmarsh Prison as proceedings continue. So, you could be forgiven for thinking you’d seen (and heard) the last of him – for the foreseeable future at least. Obviously not.
Few, though, could have predicted the story which accompanied the latest picture of a beaming Assange cradling not one, but two babies. It turns out they are his sons Gabriel, two, and Max, one.
First sight: Assange with Gabriel after the baby was smuggled into the Ecuadorian embassy
Sons: Both Assange’s children were conceived in the embassy
Yes, that’s right, he fathered two children while he was holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy where he was given asylum in 2012. The mother of his children is his lawyer Stella Morris, a regular visitor to the embassy to see her client.
We now know her services were not just restricted to giving him legal advice.
Assange’s libidinous behaviour, in other words, was effectively subsidised by the taxpayer at a time when police budgets were being slashed, stations closed and crimes, such burglaries, not being probed because of a lack of officers.
The bill for Assange’s stay at the embassy – including assignations with 37-year-old Miss Morris – is put at £13.2million. The Met later provided a breakdown of the round-the-clock costs: £7.1million in normal police pay, £3.4million overtime and £2.1million in indirect costs.
Officers stationed outside the embassy, not far from Harrods in Knightsbridge, were finally removed in 2015 because, the Met said, ‘resources were finite’ and there were so ‘many different criminal and other threats to the city’.
This costly policing certainly didn’t seem to have impeded Assange’s prolific social – and love – life during his seven years at the embassy.
High profile visitors have included Vivienne Westwood, Lady Gaga, American actors John Cusack and Maggie Gyllenhaal, Yoko Ono and her son Sean, even former Manchester United star Eric Cantona. The former Baywatch star and Playboy model Pamela Anderson was another frequent visitor, bringing vegan treats for ‘one of my favourite people’.
Miss Morris, a Swedish national who has lived and worked in the UK for almost 20 years, gave a breathless account of their affair, avoiding, allegedly, the watching eyes of the CIA. It reads like a Mills & Boon love story, the ‘romantic lead’, in this case, however, is a man with a questionable attitude to the opposite sex – he openly chats up girls and ‘puts his hand on their a***’ according to one Wikileaks staffer. And a man who sought refuge in the embassy in the first place to avoid being brought back to Sweden where two women had made allegations of rape and sexual assault against him, following a visit by him to Stockholm in 2010.
Miss Morris, in fact, was the lawyer who helped him fight the Swedish claims which he denied and have now been dropped.
Fiancée: The Wikileaks founder with the mother of his children and his lawyer, Stella Morris
‘I was in the embassy every day and Julian became a friend,’ she tells the Mail on Sunday. ‘Over the years he went from being a person I enjoyed seeing to the man I wanted to see most in the world.’ She describes him as ‘a generous and tender loving partner’ adding: ‘He asked me to marry him in 2017 [when they were engaged] and I chose a diamond ring, which I showed him online, that we both loved.
‘We even hoped we’d find a way of marrying in the embassy.’
All this was going on, remember, with bobbies posted just yards away from them outside the entrance to the embassy – which clearly added to the intrigue for Miss Morris.
Fearing the American intelligence agencies watching Assange would be suspicious of her pregnancy, she excitedly reveals how she tried to disguise her bump in baggy clothes. Then, when Gabriel was born, he was carried in and out of the building in the arms of a friend who passed the child off as his own.
Even so, she is convinced the CIA tried to steal Gabriel’s DNA from his nappy after suspecting that Assange was the father. For what purpose, who can say, but it’s a nice detail – one that she surely hopes will illicit sympathy for Assange along with the pictures of him with the sons who were smuggled into see him.
Playboy model Pamela Anderson was another frequent visitor, bringing vegan treats for ‘one of my favourite people’
Miss Morris, who joined his legal team back in 2011, had an international upbringing with a theatre director mother and urban planner father. Fluent in Swedish and Spanish, she has a degree in law and politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and took her MSc at Oxford where she was noted scholar.
But her depiction of Assange as ‘generous, tender and loving’ will raise incredulous eyebrows in more than one country.
The author Andrew O’Hagan, who’d been hired as ghost writer for Assange’s autobiography, accused him of making a horribly sexist remark about his former ally, Jemima Khan, who put up the surety for his bail conditions on the Swedish charges – conditions he broke when he sought asylum at the embassy. Earlier, he says he watched Assange leer at two teenage girls as they walked past a café table at which they were sitting. Even his then girlfriend Sarah Harrison, a Wikileaks researcher, grew increasingly frustrated by his behaviour. ‘He openly chats up girls and has his hands on their a*** and goes nuts if I talk to another guy,’ she is quoted as saying.
‘He threatened to fire me a few times and always for crazy reasons. One of the times was because I literally had hugged another member of staff.’ Another Wikileaks staffer, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who wrote a memoir that later became a film called the Fifth Estate, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, summed him up thus: ‘His main criterion for a woman was simple. She had to be young, preferably under 22. She was allowed to be intelligent – Julian likes that – but it went without saying that she couldn’t question him.’
Miss Morris ticks at least one those boxes and is the latest in a long line of women in Assange’s life. He is believed to have at least four other children by different women around the globe, including an estranged son Daniel, now in his late 20s who reportedly lives in Melbourne and works as a software designer. He was the subject of a decade-long custody battle with Daniel’s mother – a woman called Teresa. In his book, Mr Domscheit-Berg says Assange admitted to multiple children. He wrote: ‘Often I sat in large groups and listened to Julian boast about how many children he had fathered in various parts of the world. He seemed to enjoy the idea of having lots of Julians, one on every continent. Whether he took care of these alleged children, or whether they existed at all, was another question.’
This the background to the ‘love story’ between Assange and Miss Morris behind the doors of the embassy. No one could have imagined when he first walked in in June 2012, disguised as a motorcycle courier, it would be almost seven years before he would come out again – and having fathered two children.
He was forced initially to sleep on an inflatable mattress on the floor of a small room – measuring 15ft by 13ft – one of ten in the embassy – sharing a bathroom and with access only to a basic kitchen. He was eventually given another room (with a treadmill) which became his Wikileaks office. He survived mostly on takeaway food, swapping restaurants because he feared being poisoned.
Soon, though, his hosts began to tire of their increasingly unwanted guest with unnamed sources suggesting he was rude, unhygienic, and had irritating habits which included skateboarding on the polished floors and playing football. He defied pleas not to leave his stove on and ignored complaints about half-eaten meals and unwashed dishes.
Staff grew so exasperated that they threw out his pet cat after he failed to clean up its mess.
Eventually Ecuadorian president Lenin Moreno revoked his asylum, accusing him of being ‘despotic’ toward embassy staff and outstaying his welcome.
In an interview with the BBC, he said: ‘He exhausted our patience and pushed our tolerance to the limit. He did not behave with respect for the country that has warmly welcomed him.’
Many might think that is also the way he has treated the women in his life. This time, though, the taxpayer picking up the bill.