 You first met Julian, if I'm not mistaken, when he was fighting sexual assault charges in Sweden and you initially joined his defense team, what made you interested in that case and what's your perspective on that whole case? Well, I joined his legal team in February 2011 and the, so Julian had started publishing the WikiLeaks publications from that had been sent to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning in 2010. So a year before I joined his team. And so these publications from Chelsea Manning, which were the collateral murder video, the Iraq war logs, Afghanistan, war diaries, diplomatic cables and wantonimo bay files. And these are the same publications that Julian is indicted over now. That had happened in the lead-up to me joining his legal team. And it had also started prior to any preliminary investigation being opened in Sweden. And actually there were never any charges in Sweden. None were brought and that's quite amazing because it kind of defies logic, right? Because there was a big extradition case and Sweden would say, well, we haven't decided whether to actually bring charges against him, but we just want to question him. And then there was this question about, well, why don't you just question him? Because in hundreds of other cases, the Sweden would travel to other European countries to question him and so on. Anyway, that Swedish preliminary investigation was dropped and resurrected multiple times. It was dropped four times, resurrected three. No charges were ever brought. It was quite extraordinary. I mean, the amazing thing about this case is that the prosecutor was refusing to question him. And you think, how can it possibly be that in a sex case, where of course, memories fade and it all depends on the recollections of the people involved and so on that the prosecutor had to be compelled by the Swedish Court of Appeal six years after the fact to question him. And the reason the Court of Appeal compelled her was, she said that she had failed her professional duty to advance the case. And of course this is just one aspect of how that Swedish preliminary investigation was abusive. And the reason it was abusive was because it was, it took place in a highly charged political moment in which Julian was being actively sought by authorities because he was about to publish the Chelsea Mining Lakes. He had already published the collateral murder video around the Afghan war logs. And then it was one month before WikiLeaks started publishing the Iraq war logs that he went to Sweden. There's actually a Daily Beast article it's archived. It's no longer on the website, but it's archived in which the US, the reporter says the State Department was contacting its allies in Europe and urging them to find a way to stop Julian in his tracks to arrest him on whatever because by them they had arrested Chelsea Manning then Bradley Manning. And they knew that WikiLeaks had more major leaks coming out and so they wanted to stop him in his tracks. You're basically saying Sweden was engaged in a politically motivated witch hunt of Julian. But the thing that I'm also curious about is, these are not the traditional circumstances under which most people meet their spouses. What was this like for you emotionally? Was this the sense of, I mean, most of the time when you meet somebody who becomes your husband they're not being accused of rape in another country. How did you feel signing up to work on this case and then getting to know Julian? Like what was swirling around in your head? Well, I was steeped in the documents surrounding this Swedish preliminary investigation and there was no case to answer from the beginning. It was pretty clear that the administrative use of the extradition request from Sweden was a way to trap him basically, to bury him in a legal quagmire in order to interfere with his publishing work. I mean, in Sweden, as I said, like the initial prosecutor who looked at the case said, there is no crime of rape involved in these allegations. But the Swedish conduct in this case also responds to local dynamics. The person who took on the case within days was also running for, there were general elections in Sweden. He was tipped to become the new justice minister. Julian's case was in the media. There were a lot of motivations. It wasn't just the possible nudge or likely nudge from the State Department at the highest levels. Julian's name was leaked to the press, which should never happen in the case of the preliminary investigation where the person hasn't even be formally accused. And as I said, he was never formally accused in those nine years. The UN's working group on arbitrary detention, which looked at this case from 2014 onwards, saw the underlying investigation material. It was an adversarial process in which Sweden and the UK also participated and were unsuccessful in convincing this group of UN experts on arbitrary detention that they had conducted themselves in a lawful manner. They had in fact violated international obligations concerning arbitrary detention when it came to Julian. Because as I said, he was neither convicted or even charged in relation to Sweden. And so it was this extraordinary abusive nature of the Swedish allegations that was immediately obvious to me as a member of his legal team, but also as a Swedish speaker because I'm fluent in Swedish and so I could directly access the material of the case that we had access to to see that this was absurd. And my own experience, I mean, as I got to know Julian was to see how he was persecuted and maligned in all sorts of ways. Of course, the Swedish aspect was just one. It was an effective one because Julian had a lot of support from the left initially because these publications concerned, of course, the Bush Wars and so on. And sex case, even one without a formal accusation or a conviction or anything, obviously is going to alienate a portion of the left and a big portion of women. And there was a deliberate strategy as these FOIA documents show. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from our new show, Just Asking Questions. You can watch another clip here or the full episode here. New episodes drop every week, so subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube channel to get notified when that happens or to the Just Asking Questions podcast on Apple, Spotify or any other podcatcher. See you next week.