Julian Assange's wife Stella: ‘I tell our sons I’ll save daddy - he's facing 175 years’
17.09.2023 - 12:23
/ ok.co.uk
It’s a tale as old as time – and yet stranger than fiction. A young woman meets the love of her life in unexpected circumstances. Forced apart, they face battle after battle, defying adversity in order to be reunited.
Except in this story, a happy ending isn’t guaranteed. Stella Assange, wife of WikiLeaks founder Julian, is measured and quiet, thinking hard before she speaks. Her pauses between questions are pregnant with a careful weighing of words.
She comes alive, though, when she talks about her husband, who is imprisoned in HMP Belmarsh, and about their two sons. "Gabriel is six and Max is four," she beams, a selection of the boys’ colourful artwork displayed on the kitchen wall behind her. "Gabriel is very like his dad around the eyes and Max is big for his age, just like Julian was when he was small." It could be a simple insight into any happy family – but this particular unit is unique.
Her husband has spent four years in the Category A London prison fighting extradition to the US, where he faces up to 175 years in jail on espionage charges for publishing classified military information about operations and alleged war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Before that, he had claimed asylum for seven years in the Ecuadorean embassy in London in an attempt to avoid extradition to Sweden over sexual assault allegations, which have since been dropped. A decision about whether to hear a final appeal against extradition – his last throw of the UK judiciary’s dice – is due this month.
Julian is a divisive figure. Some see him as a poster boy for press freedom. Others say the release of the WikiLeaks intelligence poses a threat to US national security.
To Stella, however, he is simply the man she wants to grow old with and
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