The operative word there being might. This is a board for skeptics, mights are irrelevant, only what could be proven. The whole thing might be a fight between the shape shifting Lizards from Venus and the shape shifting amphibians from Titan too, that doesn't mean we should be considering it as a serious possibility if there is zero evidence.
Hrm. I'd say some of those statements count for something. At any rate, those actions certainly make it more probable someone might be, or
might think they're being targeted by certain groups. For example, if (an American) says they're being investigated by the Secret Service the possibility that might be true, or they might think it true, goes up if you find out they recently posted that someone should shoot the president. This happened to a sixteen year-old girl here
recently.
I don't think it happened that way, but I can certainly understand why someone in his position might think so, getting charged with rape from what was described is ridiculous and might well have suggested to him he'd been set up, or they had suborned the two in order to punish him.
3 of 5 yes, that really doesn't matter, 5 courts have reviewed the case, which is what I stated.
We know why it is being used in this case, 3 courts have stated its validity in no uncertain terms. The Italian case has zero relevance to this case, and an EAW cannot be used to further extradite a person on, in fact to do so requires more work than doing it from the UK.
The relevance of the Italian case was that wouldn't even be considered prosecutable in the UK, but they extradited him anyway. That suggests there's not much of any discretion on the part of British courts regarding the legitimacy of the charge.
In absentia (no defense offered or allowed) and double hearsay is pretty damn specious for a murder charge. Thus the number of British courts it went through is quite probably irrelevant to its validity and might even undermine it for being considered by so many.
Then there's the part where it might actually be a legitimate charge in Sweden (which might be spreading to Britain!) in which case 'the law is an ass.' That's his, and their, problem, and that's my opinion on it. I note that I'm not the only one to come to that conclusion, and rather explains Sweden's extraordinary rate of rapes.
How do you get that the sex was consensual if they specifically stated that there was to be no sex without a condom, but he went ahead anyway? Which part of "no" are you not understanding here?
They had sex, that's what might be considered invasive or abusive, not the existence or not of the millimeter of latex. The sex was consensual, the conditional irrelevant in my view to a charge of
rape.
No, they stated that it started out consensual and became non-consensual when he went further than they wanted him too.
Post-hoc semantics contradicted by the evidence. If at one point she didn't want to go that far but then consented, that doesn't mean that the earlier decision is still relevant. There was no violence or threat of violence by their own admission, nor any coercion, and the incapacitation is dubious as well, being as she admits to actually being awake and is immediately responsive. Lying on top of someone and even deterring them once from reaching doesn't qualify especially being as despite that position he acceded to her wishes. That doesn't suggest he's the raping type.
Now you're running the "All rape victims have to act in the same manner" play.
This was debunked 2 years ago. Not all rape victims act the same way, Some may not even understand that they were offended against or think that it was their fault that the person did what they did to them. Claiming to be able to determine is someone was raped based on their actions afterward is a fallacy.
No, not quite. I'm arguing that those who keep hanging around and send happy tweets and invite the other to the room later and live with them as well are acting in a manner suggesting they weren't raped. When the charge itself turns out to be not that they didn't consent to sex, but that a condom wasn't used and they'd have preferred that but allowed it the charge becomes even more specious in my view.
Which they are perfectly entitled to do. Being naked in bed with someone does not mean that that person gets to have sex with you however and whenever they want. In this case both women specifically stated that there was to be no sex without a condom. Assange allegedly violated those wishes by attempting to have sex without a condom in one case and actually doing so when he knew that the woman was not fully aware of what he was doing in the second. We have a legal term for that.
What would that be? Attempted sex without a condom? Trying to get sex without a condom? That's not rape!
She had sex without a condom anyway, people's minds change during sex, which is what happened here--or at least the impression she gave him by her own admission--that doesn't mean they get to pretend they were raped afterward. At any rate without any disease or pregnancy it's irrelevant. My point is they still behaved like they consented to the
sex which is what rape is actually about, not condoms.
This falls into the trap that rape must be violent to be rape. One poster that is no longer on the board posted her experience where a male friend stayed the night. He came into her room, got into her bed, got on top of her and had sex with her. She just lay stunned and scared of what he'd do if she resisted. She didn't know what to do, so pretended she was asleep and let him do it. I doubt that many posters here would not call that a rape, and yet there was no violence or threat of violence involved. In fact it isn't a lot different to what Assange is alleged to have done.
This one is different because they consented to sex. That one is strange, I don't know what to say other than I wonder if there's information missing? I'd say that man raped her on that information alone, however in this case the similar instance was after an episode of consensual sex and she wasn't actually asleep and responded immediately to it.
Except that you aren't restoring the context, you are projecting your own opinions on how people should act and behave onto others and then when they don't match your expectations you claim they can't be telling the truth.
Point being the story doesn't match the circumstances. Otherwise we end up in a situation where at any time in the future someone can decide past sex was rape, that can't work. People fall out and get pissed at each other, happens all the time, allowing such a life-destroying charge to be leveled without considering the context of the encounter and whether the story is reasonable is too easily abused.
As to the wiki sources, they exclusively quote the defence. Personally I don't trust the defence in this case because they haven't told the truth numerous times in the case. The Chief Justice even took the unusual step of stating that one of the defence lawyers had deliberately attempted to mislead the courts by lying to the defence witnesses and the court itself, actions that got him censured. When we know that the defence has lied in court and used witnesses to mislead and have been caught out doing it, why should we trust anything they claim without evidence to back it up?
There's also the original
police report. That's what I'm going off of, and don't think it's inaccurate. Just what happened in court with the lawyer is immaterial to the evidence of
what happened, which is what I'm mostly interested in. I suspect so far there's more indications of a...motivated...prosecution in this case, which might also explain how the censure came about, though that could also be him falling on his sword for his client due to the unusual nature of his client, what people people have said about him, and the sorts of organizations he pissed off. Dunno for sure, but that part seems of little consequence in light of the charges and the evidence mustered for it.
This has nothing to do with "Sweden's condom fetish", it has to do with Assange being told "no sex without a condom", and then blatantly and deliberately ignoring it and violating two women's rights.
One he didn't 'violate' in that way, he acceded to her wishes, the other consented to it verbally in saying he better not have HIV, which he didn't. As for being roused that way beforehand, what I was trying to get at in my last post was if she didn't want to take the chance of getting touched by his pee-pee then getting in bed naked with him was a poor strategy! It could have happened by
accident (not in this case but otherwise) and certainly don't not constitute a charge that could ruin his life.
This is totally irrelevant. Whether or not they contracted a disease or got pregnant doesn't negate whether he forced unprotected sex on them against their will.
He didn't force anything, and it wasn't against either woman's will as they described it
at the time. Quite frankly that whole 'broken condom' accusation and her description of it makes Anna sound a few fries short of a Happy Meal. The condom was there, she kept checking! She sees a pool, she's
thinks harder on it, later on she
freaks! She says she saved the condom and the bedsheets! (did she BTW?) It gets even stranger when described by her friend.
The evidence currently is that they aren't pretending.
The evidence of the charge of rape is a pretense at best in my view.
No it's not, what part of "no" do you not understand?
The part where the both said 'yes' and acted like it afterward, until deciding well after the fact they didn't like him, perhaps especially that he was seeing both of them.
How about the fact he had already been told that he was not to have sex with her without using a condom? What part of no do you not understand here? Secondly, waking someone up "the 'very best way'" might be fine in a stable relationship where the rules of the relationship have been defined and are known to each other. But this was a one night stand. Assange had no way of knowing whether she wanted to be woken up by him having sex with her or not and by doing so he forced himself on her whether or not she objected to that action after the fact. This is exactly what non-consensual sex is, where one person determines to have sex with the other without permission to do so.
This was a session where he at first disappointed her, then they had sex twice more, then with her resting but responsive he tried again. As a matter of fact she did consent, she inquired and then said he better not have HIV, she did not
object which is what she had to do for it to be
against her will. The way she describes the encounter(s) he wanted to do it his way that once and she did. There's no reason for anyone to think there's an ironclad contract (though I hear some think they'd better if they have sex in Sweden!) for this conditional, anymore than if she'd said 'you better call me in the morning' and he doesn't. That would make him a creep, but not a rapist in countries that respect the human rights of
all. That includes jerks and creeps too. If he wanted to try something they hadn't before and she doesn't object during
consensual sex that's not
rape as far as I'm concerned. Incidentally, he
did demur when asked by Anna in the other encounter, despite her dramatic retelling of it, thus there's every reason to think he would have in this case with Sonya had she insisted.
Try looking for claims that they were working for the CIA and other things.
Thank you but I missed those. I'd rather maintain the illusion our intelligence agencies are a trifle more competent than that and if they'd set him up they damn well would have done a better job of it!
Baloney and utter hogwash. Assange is only a victim of his own making. He could have stopped this whole charade from the word go by cooperating with the Swedish authorities. he knew the allegations against him, and as soon as it became clear that the Prosecutors were taking it seriously, he fled the country. You want to talk actions, Assange's are not the actions of an innocent man.
Assange may not be an innocent man, but he's not a rapist. As for why he might freak, well, when you piss off that many people who hunt people down and kill them in the movies (and sometimes the papers!) then you might get a trifle paranoid.
Actually don't bother to look up the smears against them, just read your own post. "They can't have been raped because they didn't act like I think they should have so instead they are abusers out to destroy him." Disgusting.
No,
skepticism. They didn't describe rape, they didn't act like they
had been raped until well afterward when they got talking with each other and friends, and their actions might well have destroyed his life and put him in prison. They are certainly not beyond reproach, they make a mockery of
real rape victims in my view.
Really, name a laws that he has broken via Wikileaks? I'll give you some time to think on that one, you can get back to me when you figure it out.
I don't understand what law he
could have broken, however reading what some said and a report an Afghan leader might have died and others endangered he might fall under
someone's idea of
Inter arma enim silent leges and we're not the only one he pissed off. I'm not saying that's
good, or that I would support such a thing, or even that I think that it would happen, I'm just saying there's groups of people I wouldn't ever try to piss off and it looks like he went
ala carte!
Lots of things get people killed. In this case the US already has the person responsible.
I'll repeat it again because it obviously hasn't sunk in. The actions that Assange is accused of would be considered a criminal action in any first world country, including the UK, Australia, New Zealand, the US, France, Germany, and so on. This has nothing to do with the Swedes being ridiculous, it has to do with Assange not being willing to take no for an answer and so pushing his desires onto two women anyway regardless of what they wanted and told him.
That's not what they described to the police. Anna's 'broken condom' is absurd and in no way illegal, her story doesn't incriminate him of anything more than sleeping with a very strange woman, and actually suggests he
wouldn't do what you suggest. The other one she actually wasn't asleep by her own admission and while I did find
this which shows you correct about the UK, I also found that the President of Ecuador who said those charges wouldn't be illegal in Latin America and the laws of
California suggest that there's no special conditional for condoms, (in this regard--request to use a condom cannot also be the only factor in consent) and according to
this Germany's law says that even if she was sleeping it wouldn't have actually been rape, but something else. I could find nothing on condoms.
What I find most interesting is that according to that judgement from Britain, that they didn't actually have any law in this matter, they actually cobbled it together quite curiously in the case of the condom. Apparently you can have sex with a prostitute and not pay her and that conditional doesn't withdraw consent; one can deceive another on the basis of whether they have a STD and that doesn't withdraw consent, but they went and compared it to a case of
coercion which really has nothing to do with this case.
Interestingly enough they withheld the conditional statement on her part regarding HIV and also chose to separate the sessions so that the one where she was half-asleep wasn't part of the consent of previous sessions. It's almost like they went out of their way to try to say it was rape under British law, to the extent they had to make it up on the go under rather curious standards. I wonder if Britons realize that extrapolation they did would imply that if one was told once that a condom was necessary, that a future encounter without one
even if the other did not object and in fact suggested consent that could net the 'offender' a lifetime (whatever that amounts to) in prison? I'm wondering if that would actually hold in a real trial in Britain and if they were instead kinda looking for reasons to legitimize the Swedish charge to wash their hands of it?
I don't have anything invested in this case. Originally I thought that Assange was a prick but hadn't done anything criminal. Investigating the case and watching his actions has changed my mind on that. He has a case to answer and he is doing everything to avoid it and making up CT to do so. This is what I take offence to, that such CTs with zero evidence can be so readily swallowed by people without their thinking about it, and in doing so, they are prepared to allow an alleged rapist escape justice. Consider how you would feel if one of these women was your sister...
Here's the thing about the CT: I don't think it has anything to do with what the charges, but after reviewing even further I can understand why he and others might. I got to looking around, and without putting too fine a point on it, he may have given certain states the reason to believe he'd compromised their security and these would be states who (for good reason)
take that very seriously and have been known to act...proactively in the matter. I'm not saying that they would, and I see no evidence that they did, but by doing something like that I can understand how he might interpret these charges as being trumped up somehow against him. I do think it's a coincidence though.
I underlined the important part here. Quite frankly I disagree with your evaluation of the situation and have explained why at length above. If you discard your preset beliefs in certain Myths and do the research you might be surprised at what you find and may even change your mind. Isn't the what we are supposed to do as Skeptics?
I'm aware that certainly not everyone will react the same to different situations. However when someone's behavior suggests something unusual for a victim of an accusation of such a weighty charge of rape with many other indications of another scenario that counts for something too. When it happens to dovetail nicely with the contrived nature of the accusation--which just happens to be currently in vogue culturally and there's even evidence of a willingness to do so--and fits with the reputation of the (revived) prosecution whose own methods are frankly dubious (that EAW is a dishonest representation of the facts in my opinion) I think the credibility of the charge is strained to the breaking point.
It's not just the one thing, it's the combination of factors that suggests something quite different than Assange being a rapist, and these two not victims but two women becoming displeased with someone after sex and his other activities and choosing to have him punished. The years in prison he might get not to mention even if he is exonerated the strain and stress he's gone through and the perhaps irreversible damage to his reputation are far more damage than either of these two suffered in the course of their willingly having sex with him--in one case numerous times--and that's what is
was until this contrived consent accusation was devised.
I don't find it funny at all. Seriously. Anyone that suggests that women should not have the right to determine if they will only have sex with a condom and if that right is violated then they should just suck it up and take it is seriously disgusting and a rape apologist in my view. To suggest that they should be prosecuted for having that right violated, sorry, now that is offensive.
I'm thinking 'rape apologist' won't have a particularly long shelf-life, it's too ridiculous a formulation.
In this case I feel it's also absurd to pretend that the one who might be suffering most because of that
consensual sex is either Anna and Sophia. For one thing, read through their statements again to police, and those of their friends. It wasn't really the condoms that bothered them, it was
lots of things which they described in detail which pissed them off about Julian Assange. They found out their hero not only had feet of clay, his spit stank too! So he's the one who's living like a caged animal, who might well be traumatized by the experience of being a worldwide object of scorn and who may face prison time or a life of hiding--I'm thinking that can weigh on a person's mind.
Big picture here: who is the actual injured party? Does this chest-thumping over this contrived lack of consent possibly justify an accusation that could be made over basically
any sex in this day and age? If there were consequences due to that condom disuse in Sonya's case there was other recourse outside making a mockery of the concept of rape, and in this case, like the
vast majority of instances nothing happened except they had sex
one time like human beings did for the vast majority of our existence. Allowing someone to use that to potentially destroy and certainly injure another when she did not object and even implied consent which suggests it wasn't
that big a deal to her, and certainly cannot be a rational reason to pretend he needs any more punishment than that which he's received already, and if this
ridiculous mockery of actual rape has spread to Britain on the wings of the 'outraged' I sure as hell hope it doesn't end up here. I'm hoping that's just a hand-washing, after all this isn't their problem.
Lemme put it this way: if there is
ever to be a case where someone who had sex and was accused of rape is to be found innocent this is the canary in the coal mine in my view. The
sex was consensual, the condom-less part was not forced, threatened, coerced and being as she responded she was not incapacitated. One can also note that it was reasonable for him to
expect consent being as she actually
did, not only by not objecting but by suggesting that if he didn't have HIV that she'd allow it, then didn't make the accusation until later in the week after he'd lived there a while and then offered a whole litany of
other reasons not related to the sex that she disliked about him--which is a big clue I think as to the
real reason she claimed to be raped, which she had to be talked into by the prosecutor as I recall. The other one is frankly beyond absurd and I think in a just universe that sort of accusation should be firmly discouraged.
