The Diminished Wardrobe of Julian Assange

Today's blog entry is a fictionalised account of the moment when WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, learned that his leather trousers had been deported to Sweden.

The Diminished Wardrobe of Julian Assange

For almost seven days there was no news. The white haired man stayed in his room. He wrote down his thoughts in a journal. He conducted interviews over Skype. He exercised. He ate three modest meals a day, and spoke to the few people who visited him in person.

When, at last, the news came, it was bad.

“Mr Assange?”

The white haired man was sitting bolt upright in a rattan chair, positioned so that it faced away from the door. In moments of depression he imagined this as the pose he would be found in, following his assassination. The chair had a sloping backrest that was designed to encourage a more recumbent posture. The man resisted the temptation to slouch. He did not regard himself as defeated and was reluctant to appear as such, even to himself.

A hand emerged from behind one of the steep armrests and pushed a half-eaten meal, consisting of maize and Ecuadorian potatoes, into the centre of a small, low table.

“Mr Assange: I am afraid that the Swedish consulate has been successful in their attempt to extradite your leather trousers.”

The bearer of the bad news was called Jarvin. He was a recent graduate from Oxford University who had worked at the Ecuadorian Embassy for six months. He paused for a moment, waiting for a response, or some acknowledgement, from the man in the chair. When none was forthcoming, he resumed his monologue. Assange realised that he was was reading from a communiqué:

“The trousers were removed from an address in South Wharf Road, in Westminster. They were taken to Paddington Green Police Station. Following a closed session of the Supreme Court they were driven to Heathrow Airport where they were escorted onto a plane to Stockholm. The flight departed London Heathrow at 06:19am and arrived in the Swedish capital at 12:34pm. The trousers have been remanded in custody at Hall Prison outside Södertälje, pending their trial.”

Julian Assange made a mental note of the unusually long flight time between London and Stockholm. He assumed that, at some point along their journey, the trousers had been informally interrogated. The thought troubled him and he pushed it to the back of his mind.

He had sought refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in the summer of the previous year. It was a desperate last measure, following his legal team's failure to quash an extradition order to Sweden, where he was to stand trial for sexual offences, and face possible onward deportation to the U.S. on espionage charges. The days following his successful application for asylum in Ecuador had been marked by much chest-beating from the British, Swedish and American governments, all of whom had expressed frustration that their target lay within such easy reach, and yet could not be seized without sparking a major diplomatic incident.

The restrained, yet strongly-worded, rhetoric and legal back-and-forth had eventually lapsed into a sluggish stalemate, which had seen the Swedish Government opting to chip away at his former existence, by systemically laying claim to those possessions that he had failed to carry with him into the embassy.

Every week Assange would add a few more items to an inventory of his belongings that had been extradited to Stockholm to face criminal charges in his absence. In the past month he had lost a complete set of ZZ Top albums, and a Goblin Teasmade. Most distressing of all had been the discovery and subsequent arrest of his copy of the Milton Bradley board game – Guess Who? - which had been tracked down to a left-luggage storage locker in St Pancras Railway Station.

He could replace it, of course, however he noted that the most current version of the game omitted several of his favourite characters. Reports, which had filtered back from Sweden, indicated that his Guess Who? set had already been broken down. The individual character cards had been separated by gender and locked-up in jails across Sweden. Some, fearing for their lives, had already joined prison gangs. Others, such as the clean-shaven, sandy haired man with thick glasses, were in the process of being extradited to America, where they would face charges of being accessories to espionage and endangering the lives of Americans from ages 6 and up.

The loss of the leather trousers came as a further blow. In time they too would be deported to the United States. Assange privately dreaded the moment when they would appear, as part of a carefully orchestrated televised press conference, stretched out of shape by the ample buttocks of the Secretary of State, John Kerry.

The Americans were doing their best to break him, but they would not succeed.

“A man is not the sum of his possessions,” he said. His knuckles whitened until they were the same colour as his hair. The tips of his fingers digging into the tight, unyielding weave of the rattan armrests.