I continue my posting on the misunderstandings of the Assange case. In my preceding posting I argued that the Ecuador strategy is not an attempt to avoid the Swedish sex case. Swedish media is myopic and self-obsessed. Anyone who reads my fresh and well-researched book A Brief History of Swedish Sex will understand how any sexual act involves a high amount of politics in today's Sweden and how the Swedish state, based on an extremist view of sexuality, can spin out of control.
Tragically, Swedish media is not a mitigating force. It willingly participates in creating scandals and injuring people, based on such views on sexuality, as is clear from my book.
Internationally, it is interesting to instead look at the letter about Sweden and at the list of signatories that demand that Ecuador grant asylum to Assange.
2) No Swedish woman has claimed that she was raped by Julian Assange.
If you read the police protocols you will see that the two Swedish women (AA = the Social Democrat that Assange stayed with, SW = the one-night stand admirer) wanted Assange to commit to tests for HIV and STDs, since they realized he was sleeping around a lot when they learned about each other.
There are witnesses who talked to AA and say the demand was that Assange take an HIV test. Otherwise they would go to the police and try to force him to. He said he didn't have time but seems to have realized that they meant it. When he consented they had however already gone to the police. Not to report rape but to simply tell their stories. None of them has ever claimed to have been raped by Julian Assange.
So how could this become a national obsession for Sweden?
Once you tell a story of sexual behavior to the police they look for Sex Offences. As I show in my book there was a connection to Swedish domestic politics with an election campaign. Based on the story that SW told the interrogating police officer (who was a party comrade and radical feminist friend of AA), the police notified the on-call Prosecutor. Based on a purely oral briefing by the police via phone she decided to seek Julian Assange for rape.
It seems that SW was quite shocked by this decision by the police and prosecutor. She had participated in sex play that ended with unprotected sex, and not objected according to her own account, but she was panically scared by sexually transmitted diseases and HIV. She never claimed to be raped but she wanted Assange to be tested. Suddenly the State sought him for a crime that normally carries a two year imprisonment as a minimum sentence. As "the victim" there is nothing you can do. The State sees it as an important task to enforce its own view of sexual encounters, independently of the people involved.
One day later a higher Chief Prosecutor read the interrogation protocol. She states that in the description of the sexual encounter where the police and a lower prosecutor found one count of "rape" there was no crime whatsoever committed. She says she believes the story that was told: "But the content of the interrogation does not support any claim that a crime has been committed"
Enter Claes Borgström. In Sweden virtually anyone who claims that someone else has commited some sexual offence gets a payed-for legal counsel by the state. S/he is supposed to help you go after the other party. The reverse of a defense attorney. Claes Borgström was a party comrade of AA, heavily involved in the election campaign, since he was the Gender Equality Spokesperson for the Social Democratic party. He would get a Ministerial post in the Government if they won. He applied to serve as the state-payed legal counsel for the two women and started running his own show. Borgström is a notorious radical feminist in Swedish politics, despised by many, loved by some. He has been running a war against men for years in Sweden and consistently picked fights, denouncing Swedish men as Taliban etc..
Borgström is the one who demanded that the Assange rape case be reopened after the Chief Prosecutor closed it. He appealed to a Head Prosecutor. Borgström himself seemed unsure whether what the women described could be seen as anything else than the weakest sexual offence category. I requested his application from the Court and I believe my book is the first and only place this document has been cited. He wrote:
"According to my evaluation the abuse of the injured parties have suffered should at least be labelled as sexual molestation, maybe also as graver sex crimes"
One of Borgström's ever repeated views on sexuality is that people don't understand when they are sexually abused. They have sex in ways that the state must take care of, against their wishes. Borgström commented to a newspaper when they pointed out that SW did not consider herself raped: "She is not a lawyer".
Borgström has demanded state propaganda campaigns to teach people when they have been subject to a sex crime. In my book A Brief History of Swedish Sex, Borgström appears a lot. There are mindboggling citations from this man's writings. You will not believe your eyes!
So with Borgström at the rudder the case was turned into politics and became an important principle for the Swedish state. Sex is much more harmful to Swedes than violence. In my book I show that some brief sexual touching is seen as a worse crime than kidnapping someone, keeping him locked-up and tortured for hours until he is unrecognizable to his own girlfriend, with injuries taking months to heal. Borgström is a co-architect behind this.
Assange is now wanted for questioning concerning "less aggravated rape" of SW - although she has never claimed that she was raped. There are also some lesser sexual offences that the Head Prosectuor picked out when she read the description of sexual encounters between AA and Assange. One of them concerns rubbing a penis against the backside of a person you previously had sex with.
My book does not go into details of the sex case. Rather, it puts the case in a context of vitriolic Swedish sexual politics.
Personally, when I read the interrogation protocols I see a man who is not particularly responsive to his sex partners and wants it his own way. This is not equivalent to being a rapist however, and no woman has claimed she was actually raped. But I think it is quite likely Assange will be convicted of some offence in Sweden.
There will be one more posting where I argue that Assange would not serve any time in Sweden, even if convicted of the most serious of his alleged sex offences, "less aggravated rape"..
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