Julian Assange, released; know his controversial history with WikiLeaks

Julian Assange, who regained his freedom on Monday after reaching a plea agreement with the United States justice system, is the man who became a nightmare for this country.

The US government accuses the 52-year-old Australian of espionage, following the massive leak of classified material on his WikiLeaks page.

But on Monday a plea agreement with US justice was announced that allowed him to be released after years of detention in the United Kingdom.

Under the agreement, Assange will appear in federal court in the Mariana Islands, a US territory in the Pacific, where he is expected to plead guilty to “conspiracy to obtain and disclose information relating to national defense.” For now, according to the WikiLeaks portal, Assange was released and immediately left the United Kingdom to join his wife, Stella Moris, and her two children.

Julian Assange and how WikiLeaks was born

Assange was an unknown who in 2006 created a non-profit media called WikiLeaks. It was there where, in July 2010, he published 70,000 confidential documents about the international coalition’s operations in Afghanistan. In October, the portal published another 400,000 reports on the US invasion of Iraq and, a month later, the contents of 250,000 US diplomatic cables.

Media from around the world took up the information, which did not leave the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom in a good light, with reports of mistreatment and abuse against prisoners.

Latin American and European governments complained to the United States for the information released in the so-called “Cablegate”, where ambassadors and collaborators spoke of hidden illnesses of political leaders, or criticized governments in confidential documents. Washington had to face shame, and then-President Barack Obama accused Assange of endangering the national security of the United States and informants and collaborators whose names came to light in the leaked documents, more than 10 million, according to WikiLeaks.

Assange thus became one of the men most hated by the United States government, but for many others, he was a kind of “hero” who had exposed the worst of the government. Readers of “Time” magazine chose him as their 2010 character; Two years later, Newsweek defined him as one of the most revolutionary characters.

Assange: legal problems and his love life

However, with fame came problems and persecution. That same 2010, Sweden demanded the arrest of Assange for two accusations, one for the rape of a woman and another for sexual harassment, attacks that would have taken place during a visit to Stockholm to give a conference.

Assange denied the veracity of both accusations and always assured that they were consensual relationships, but he had to undergo house arrest in his English rural home, until in May 2012 the High Court of London agreed to his extradition to Sweden.

Shortly after, in June 2012, faced with the harassment to which he was being subjected and to avoid his extradition, Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he stayed for seven years, during the government of Rafael Correa.

His stay there was not without controversy and, with the arrival to power of Lenín Moreno in Ecuador, the country stopped granting asylum to the Australian, denouncing that he had violated the conditions of his asylum and even accusing him of acts of espionage. Thus, Assange was arrested in April 2019 by the British police and imprisoned in Belmarsh, a maximum security prison.

Being imprisoned did not prevent him from having a love life. In 2022 he married lawyer Stella Morris inside prison. He met her when he was asylum in the embassy and she was part of the legal team working for him. They had had two children: Gabriel and Max, currently six and five years old, respectively.

“We found ways to be private. We had a tent in his room in which we put fairy lights,” Morris narrated in an interview with CBS News in 2020, about the conditions in which their love occurred.

This was Julian Assange’s childhood

The founder of WikiLeaks was born in Townsville, in northeastern Australia, without meeting his father John Shipton until he was 25, as his mother separated from him before Julian’s birth.

His mother had a new relationship, for eight years, with Brett Assange, from whom the WikiLeaks founder inherited his last name.

In that first part of his childhood, Julian Assange led a wandering life, since his mother and stepfather founded a theater company and lived traveling.

After that separation, his mother married and had another child with a musician Leif Meynell who was a member of a sect, in which Assange lived.

But Meynell mistreated Assange and his mother, so they ended up fleeing.

Attracted by self-taught computing, between 2003 and 2006 he studied Physics and Mathematics, as well as Philosophy, at the University of Melbourne, without finishing any degree.

That would not prevent him from creating a website, like WikiLeaks, which was a headache for the largest world power.