Julian Assange’s wife speaks of elation over plea deal
Julian’s Assange’s wife has spoken of her elation that the WikiLeaks founder has been released from Belmarsh prison in London and will soon be a “free man” under a deal in which he will plead guilty to violating US espionage law.
Speaking from Australia, where she flew on Sunday to prepare her family’s new life, Stella Assange, a human rights lawyer, said she had not yet told the couple’s two young sons about their father’s release from incarceration.
She said: “We weren’t really sure until the last 24 hours that it was actually happening and, well, we were talking about [it]; I don’t know what he needed to do and take from his cell, and I also had to pack things up and head out to Australia 24 hours before he left. So it’s just been non-stop for the past, I think, 72 hours.”
Assange, 52, was released from Belmarsh on Monday and boarded a flight from Stansted that evening in order to travel to a hearing on the island of Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands, which is US territory.
There, he is due to plead guilty to a single criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defence documents, according to filings in the island’s district court.
Under the deal, he will be free to leave the court due to time already served and to travel on to Australia to be reunited with his family.
Stella Assange said her husband would be “a free man once it is signed off by the judge, and that will be sometime tomorrow”. She said she had not yet informed their two boys, aged five and seven, of the plans for fear of the information leaking.
She said: “All I told them was that there was a big surprise. And, on the morning that we left, I told them where we’re heading to the airport, and we got on the plane, and I told them that we were going to visit our family, their cousin, their grandfather and so on.
“And they still don’t know. We’ve been very careful, because obviously, no one can stop a five- and a seven-year-old from, you know, shouting it from the rooftops at any given moment. Because of the sensitivity around the judge having to sign off the deal, we’ve been very careful, just gradually, incrementally telling them information.”
The couple’s two children were born during a period when Assange was living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he had been granted political asylum by that country’s government.
Assange was arrested in the embassy in 2019 when Ecuador withdrew his asylum and allowed UK police to enter the building.
He had been holed up in the embassy in Knightsbridge, avoiding extradition to Sweden over sexual assault allegations that Assange has always denied and which have since been dropped.
Assange was further arrested at that time, however, at the request of the US seeking his extradition over allegations he conspired with the former US military analyst Chelsea Manning to download classified databases in what the US justice department called “one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States”.
Stella Assange said her husband had never seen their children outside the confines of Belmarsh.
She said: “All their interactions with Julian have been in a single visitors’ room inside Belmarsh prison. It’s always been for a little more than an hour at a time. It’s been very restrictive. You know, he can’t walk around. He can’t go to the tuck shop. He wasn’t able to go to the tuck shop and buy a chocolate or anything you see.”
Assange will be sentenced at 9am local time on Wednesday (11pm GMT on Tuesday) at the district court on the Northern Mariana Islands.
WikiLeaks posted on social media a video of its founder boarding a flight at Stansted airport on Monday evening, and the Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, confirmed he had left the UK.
The plane – chartered flight VJT199 – later landed in Bangkok for refuelling, officials at the Thai airport said. He is being accompanied by Australia’s high commissioner to the UK, Stephen Smith.
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“Regardless of the views that people have about Julian Assange and his activities, the case has dragged on for too long, there is nothing to be gained by his continued incarceration and we want him brought home to Australia,” Albanese said on Tuesday.
In a letter to a federal judge in the district court for the Northern Mariana Islands, a senior justice department official said Assange was being sent to Saipan because of its “proximity to the defendant’s country of citizenship”.
The official added that once the sentencing hearing was completed, Assange was expected to travel on to Australia.
WikiLeaks said on X that Assange had left Belmarsh prison on Monday morning, after 1,901 days of captivity there. He had spent the time, the organisation said, “in a 2x3-metre cell, isolated 23 hours a day”.
In an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Stella Assange, who was representing her husband as a human rights lawyer when they first began their relationship, said she could not yet comment at length on the deal agreed but that it would allow him to “walk free”.
She said: “There is an agreement in principle between Julian and the Department of Justice, and that has to be signed off by a judge in this Northern Mariana territories Island, which is in the Pacific Ocean, where he is going to be headed. He’s currently in Bangkok on a lay-over. And once the judge signs off on it, then it is formally real. So I’m also a little bit limited as to what, what I can say right now about the agreement in principle.”
She said that the key to the development was a high court decision in May to allow Assange leave to mount a fresh appeal against his extradition to the US on charges of leaking military secrets.
Assange has struggled with health issues in recent years and his wife said she did not know what the future would look like for the couple.
She said: “We haven’t even had an opportunity to have a long conversation about this, and I think we don’t even know. The priority now is for Julian to get healthy again. He has been in a terrible state for five years.
“To just be in contact with nature, that’s what we both desire for now, and to have time to have time and privacy and just start this new chapter. It’s always been quite extraordinary. I’m just so emotional now, that this is finally over.”