“She agreed to wait for him, and after she was finished at work, she hung around town a bit. When she hadn’t heard from him by nine, she called him and he said there was another meeting he had to go to, and that she should come to him there.” When Assange finally emerged, they agree to get the train together to Enköping, the little town 50 miles away where she lives. He asked that Katrin pay for the tickets; it was too dangerous for him to use his credit card, he said. Weiss told the police that, on the train, he admitted he slept in Braun’s bed after the crayfish party but made the unlikely claim that “Sonja only liked girls – that she was lesbian”.
It was midnight when they at last got home to Weiss’s place. “They took off their shoes, but the relationship between them seemed to have cooled off. The passion and the excitement had disappeared … They brushed their teeth together, which seemed everyday and boring.” Assange pushed her vigorously on to the bed “to show he was a real man”, Weiss told the police, but his heart plainly wasn’t in it. Assange suddenly turned over, went to sleep, and started snoring.
Weiss says she felt “rejected and shocked”, and stayed awake, miserably texting her friend Maria. Maria recalls being “woken by a lot of texts from Katrin that were not positive. There had been bad sex and Julian had not been nice. She said she would have to get tested because of his lengthy foreplay.” Matters improved somewhat in the course of the night. Julian woke up and had successful sex, grumbling about her insistence on a condom. He “muttered that he preferred her, rather than latex”. In the early morning, he started ordering her about, demanding she fetch water and orange juice, and then sending her out to buy breakfast. Weiss testified she didn’t much like leaving him alone in her flat. She said, “Be good,” as she went out, leaving him sprawled emperor-like and naked on the bed, holding one of his mobile phones. He answered: “I’m always bad!”
While Weiss was at the shops purchasing breakfast, she took the opportunity to call her friend Maria. “Katrin said she was damned if she was going to buy all this stuff and just wait on him hand and foot.” But she nevertheless went home, she says, cooked him porridge, climbed back into bed, and they had another go, using a condom. “They slept again and she woke with the realisation that he was inside her. She said, “Are you wearing anything?” and he answered, “You.” She said, “You better not have HIV,” and he answered, “Of course not.” She knew it was too late, she said, as he was already inside her so she let him continue. She had never had unprotected sex before. “She said: what if she got pregnant? And he replied that Sweden was a good place to bring up a child. She looked at him, shocked.”
According to her testimony he added, flippantly, that they could call the baby “Afghanistan”. The police report adds a strange and disturbing remark from Katrin: “He also said he often carried abortion pills but that they were actually sugar pills.” Whatever did he mean? Assange often seemed curiously proud of his prowess in paternity: he told friends during this time period that he had recently impregnated a Korean woman he met in Paris, and she was about to give birth.
This single night he spent with Katrin is the basis of a rape charge against Assange. To have sex with a sleeping or unconscious woman is a crime, both in Sweden and in the UK. The subsequent investigation collected testimony from Weiss’s former boyfriend that she was particularly anxious to avoid the risks from unprotected sex, and never allowed it. After Assange headed back to Stockholm (she had to pay for his train ticket again), Weiss changed the stained sheets, which she thought were “disgusting”, and got a morning-after pill from a chemist. “When she spoke to her friends, she realised that she had been the victim of a crime. She went to Danderyd University Hospital and from there to Södersjukhuset (Stockholm South General Hospital) where she was tested with a so-called rape kit.”
Katrin’s friend Hanna, one of those she said she contacted that morning, takes up the story: “She said it had not been good and she had just wanted him to leave … Assange’s personality had changed when he got home to her flat and Katrin regretted letting him stay there … What bothered her was that Assange had had unprotected sex with her while she was asleep. He had also tried again and again to have unprotected sex with her during the night. Hanna asked why Katrin hadn’t pushed him away when she knew he wasn’t wearing a condom and Katrin said she was too shocked and paralysed and didn’t really know what was happening. Hanna is sure that she didn’t just let it happen because he was famous, although it could have been significant that he was older. Hanna said that Katrin wanted Assange to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases.”
The Assange camp’s account contradicts Weiss’s version of events in at least one important respect. She describes buying the breakfast first, before the alleged rape occurred. They stated to the UK court that the breakfast shopping came not before, but “AFTER she claims that he had entered her without a condom”. But Assange does not dispute that he had condomless sex while his partner was, as he puts it, “sleepy”.
Once back in Stockholm, having stayed out all night, Assange now had to return to the home of Sonja Braun, where he was still staying. According to Braun, to whom it seemed clear that he had spent the night with another woman, his approach to this delicate situation was unusual. “Assange suddenly took all the clothes off the lower part of his body and rubbed Sonja with his erect penis. Sonja says she thought this was strange and unpleasant behaviour. She no longer wanted Assange to live in her flat, which he ignored.”
As a result of this alleged incident, Assange was later accused by the Swedes of “molestation”. This would translate into the UK legal canon as “indecent assault” or, as it is now known, “sexual touching”. Braun says she slept on a mattress that night, and the next night stayed with friends.
Her friend Petra adds that on that Wednesday “although Sonja wanted Julian to leave her flat, he wouldn’t”. Braun did not seem frightened, however: “He wasn’t aggressive or dangerous, she just wanted him out.” Böstrom, meanwhile, recalls: “On the Wednesday, Sonja says, ‘I want him to leave.’ ‘Well, tell him,’ I say, and she says, ‘I have done, but he won’t.’ So I confronted him with it. ‘Sonja would like you to move out and says she has asked you.’ He’s surprised and says she hasn’t said a word to him about it. So now it’s like stereo – one channel says one thing, the other channel says another.” Assange’s version of events is completely different: “Böstrom remains in contact with Braun, who continues to insist Julian should stay with her, and speaks warmly of him.”
Behind all the muffled prose of police testimony, some clumsily translated from Swedish, anyone can see how electric the whole situation had become. All that was needed was for someone to bring the ends of the wires into contact. If Braun and Weiss were to get together, they might start to compare notes. Sparks would fly.
Katrin Weiss the very next day sent Sonja Braun a text message. Worried she might have caught a disease, Weiss was anxiously trying to renew contact with Assange. She says she thought Braun might know where to find him. According to Braun’s close friend Kajsa, “Sonja realised what had happened, and they met up.” According to this witness: “Sonja said the other girl decided to go to the police and report Julian for rape and that Sonja would go along as support.”
Braun’s other friend, Petra, testified in similar terms. She said Braun rang her “and said she had met the other girl who had told her she had been raped by Julian. They had found many similarities between hers and Sonja’s experience, and Julian wanted to have sex with the other girl without a condom. Sonja said she didn’t wish to have Julian charged, she just wanted to support the other girl. Petra said that the whole story was becoming more and more confused.”