I married Julian Assange in prison. Now I’m fighting to FREE HIM

• Published date: 02 April 2023

As Stella Assange knows, the story she shares with her husband, the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, sounds more like fiction than fact, a wild tale of data cloudbursts, sexual abuse allegations and an assassination plot dreamt up at CIA HQ in Virginia. Some mornings, though, life must in practice nearer resemble a remorseless grind — and for them both: he in his bleak high-security prison in southeast London, she in almost her fifth year of trying to get him out of it

Consider this morning. Her trip from her home in West London to HMP Belmarsh has taken an hour and a quarter by train and bus. On arrival, her fingerprints were taken and her bags locked away. She was issued with a visitor’s pass and her prints were checked again before she passed through an X-ray machine. At this point, she was told to go back to the beginning because she was wearing a hoodie. She made it through again, was magnetically scanned for weapons and patted down for drugs. They also checked inside her mouth, behind her ears and in her hair. Then it was across a yard to the prison proper where her credentials were checked again and a dog sniffed her.

The Assanges meet in a huge hall, observed by guards from a floor above. She is allocated one of the 40 tables — each contains a recording device — and there at last she and Julian embrace and for an hour or so talk, holding hands across the desk. She does all this on average twice a week. Often she takes their two boys, Gabriel, 5, and Max, 4, who sit on their father’s lap or run off to the play area. Today it was just the two of them. Does her heart leap when she spots him?

“I mean, it’s like getting re-energised and finding some sanity. Even if it’s just an hour, it makes a big difference,” she says in an American accent acquired during her days at an international school in Lesotho in Southern Africa.

Daylight, they used to say of government corruption, is the best disinfectant. I wonder if Assange, that great disinfector of state malfeasance, has a window in his cell. He does, and he feeds birds from it. People, she says, think he lives surrounded by computers, but the world’s ultimate cyber-citizen is actually a nature lover who grew up in the Australian countryside before the family settled in Melbourne.

“We talk about what kind of place we want to live in when this is over, and I don’t know where it will be but I imagine that it will be somewhere with easy access to the outdoors,” Stella says.

Nature is her hinterland too, I say, since, although her family was also nomadic, she spent much of her childhood in Africa.

“Yes,” she agrees, “and it’s important for the kids. If it weren’t for the situation right now, we’d probably be living in the countryside.”

When does she think they might get this life they are promising themselves? “Well, the nature of this is that it’s so uncertain. It could be next month. It could be three years. Or it could be never. That’s what you have to work with, but you do need a vision to stay sane. You need to work towards something.”

Something such as her wedding, I suppose, which took place in Belmarsh before a registrar and a Catholic priest almost exactly a year ago, Stella in a wedding dress designed by the late Vivienne Westwood, a fierce Assange fan. “That was a lovely day and a lovely dress,” she says, and stops as if to remember the occasion. “I mean, you know, we enjoy each other’s company.”

And suddenly, blazing in front of me, is a dazzling, involuntary grin I had really not been expecting.

Having negotiated the less onerous security protocols at the Times building near London Bridge, she is talking to me on our top floor from where you cannot quite make out Belmarsh. She is 40, a short woman with a brain as big as her smile and a vivid but precise turn of phrase, befitting a lawyer who was once part of Assange’s defence team. She will often stop, and for quite a while, to consider what is the best answer to a question, but the answer when it comes tends to be a good one.

In the early days of their romance, she had never imagined Assange would be jailed. Assange was far from a free man even then, however. In 2012 he had lost a legal fight to avoid extradition to...