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by johnrackles 2311 days ago
> The stories of the women involved seemed very credible, and unlikely to have been made up, considering they were supporters of him.

The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, disagrees: https://medium.com/@njmelzer/demasking-the-torture-of-julian...

Specifically, this section:

"Surely, I thought, Assange must be a rapist! But what I found is that he has never been charged with a sexual offence. True, soon after the United States had encouraged allies to find reasons to prosecute Assange, Swedish prosecution informed the tabloid press that he was suspected of having raped two women. Strangely, however, the women themselves never claimed to have been raped, nor did they intend to report a criminal offence. Go figure. Moreover, the forensic examination of a condom submitted as evidence, supposedly worn and torn during intercourse with Assange, revealed no DNA whatsoever — neither his, nor hers, nor anybody else’s. Go figure again. One woman even texted that she only wanted Assange to take an HIV test, but that the police were “keen on getting their hands on him”. Go figure, once more."

2 comments

"Go figure" seems such an odd phrasing for someone writing an objective investigation on such a serious matter.

I think there's a cake and eat it too. That the rape campaign was an organized smear campaign. That the combined resources of Sweden and the US (and possibly the UK) too's best ability at a smear campaign at someone was "may not have used a condom when he implied he would during a sexual encounter". That's a pretty sad indictment of those intelligence communities (regardless of the merits either way).

The important part is that the woman would have had consensual sex, then walked away with the condom to use it as evidence for something that didn't happen. This makes it sound like it was planned from the beginning.