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Assange Has Signed Book Deals Worth $1.5 Million+
cold fjord writes "Julian Assange has signed a major book deal for his autobiography worth more than one million pounds (1.2 million euros, 1.5 million dollars).
Assange told Britain's Sunday Times newspaper that the money would help him defend himself against allegations of sexual assault made by two women in Sweden.
'I don't want to write this book, but I have to,' he said. 'I have already spent 200,000 pounds for legal costs and I need to defend myself and to keep WikiLeaks afloat.' The Australian said he would receive 800,000 dollars (600,000 euros) from Alfred A. Knopf, his American publisher, and a British deal with Canongate is worth 325,000 pounds (380,000 euros, 500,000 dollars).
Money from other markets and serialisation is expected to raise the total to 1.1 million pounds, he said.
Assange is currently out on £240,000 bail under what his lawyer refers to as not so much 'house arrest' as 'manor arrest', fighting extradition to Sweden for questioning. The Telegraph adds, 'Mr Assange said he regarded himself as a victim of Left-wing radicalism. Sweden is the Saudi Arabia of feminism,' he said. 'I fell into a hornets' nest of revolutionary feminism.' .... A full extradition hearing is due in London on February 7th."
Innocent until proven guilty.
All we know is that a controversial figure is being charged with "sex by surprise" after being accused by two women who didn't decide to report him until after they met each other. Even then, charges were filed, then dropped, then filed again.
He may be guilty, but I don't see any evidence. If this is all they can put in front of the jury, he should be found not guilty.
Please don't let your admiration for Assange's work with Wikileaks prevent you from taking seriously an accusation of rape. Rape is a serious crime, and accusations of rape need to be taken seriously, even ifperhaps especially ifthey are made against people we otherwise consider to be heroic.
Look, I know that in this day and age we are not supposed to say it, but a line does have to be drawn somewhere when it comes to defining rape. If the women claimed that they had been drugged, or that they never consented to have sex with Assange, I would be a bit more willing to hear their claims of rape. However, both women did consent, but are claiming that Assange went "too far" and failed to stop on command -- continuing to have sex with a broken condom, having sex while one of them was asleep, etc. If we start to call these things rape, then a lot of people out there are going to be implicated, including an ex-girlfriend of mine (to be clear, I would not even consider accusing her of raping me).
Either "rape" means violence, or it does not. I agree with the Huffington Post piece quoted in that blog post you linked to: we should not conflate what Assange did the sort of violent crime that most people think of when they think "rape." The last thing we need is for "rape" to refer to things that are so commonplace that people forget that there are truly dangerous rapists out there.
Palm trees and 8
The rape allegations are true and Assange should be held to account.
The problem is that people keep using that word - "Rape". It has an enormous number of negative connotations. Read the link you provided at kateharding.info - how many times does she use the "R" word? Rape, rape rape... From what we know of the Assange case, the women who he is accused of "raping" both continued to see him afterwards. One took him out for breakfast the next day, and paid for his train ticket back into Stockholm. Another arranged a party for him the next day, during which she twittered "Sitting outside; nearly freezing; with the world's coolest people; it's pretty amazing." These are not the actions of women who have been raped - at least, not in the sense of what the majority of people consider the word "rape" to mean. Calling whatever supposedly happened between Assange and these women "rape" diminishes the word, and is grossly offensive to both men and women who have genuinely been the victims of forced sexual intercourse.