The Bournification of Julian Assange
The last few months of Julian Assange’s life could make a kick-ass movie: rogue ex-hacker airs Big Powerful Government’s dirty laundry and goes on the run in Europe. What could be a better ending than a government cover-up conspiracy and feminine betrayal, right?
Well, Jason Bourne, he ain’t.
The reality is that a man has been accused of date-rape by two women. That man also happens to be committed to actual government transparency at all costs, having leaked two major sets of government documents to international press in the past year.
We have to resist the urge to think of him as this underdog hero, because really, what we have is just one guy and two acts on either end of the spectrum of human integrity.
When Assange’s date rape charges broke, I’ll admit that I thought it smelled ratty–it was too convenient, the charges too hard to verify–and I wasn’t the only one. Keith Olbermann and Michael Moore have been two of the biggest-name progressives to call bullshit on Assange’s charges. Moore wrote an extensive piece for HuffPo, citing Sweden’s abysmal record of not following up on date-rape charges before now, and publicly declared that he would post money for Assange’s bail.
It felt like good, sexy journalism then–Moore, himself a lover of ‘gotcha’ tactics, digging up the numbers to defend Assange, this silver-haired symbol of Freedom and Truth, against Big Evil Censoring Government.
But that wasn’t really what was going on. Moore didn’t reveal anything about government conspiracies or Assange’s innocence. All it really did was show that we still think that rape is something only committed by villains, that someone we know, like, and even respect, couldn’t possibly rape anyone.
That is an idea that we all have to get over as soon as possible.
It’s hard. I have a brother, and a father, and lots of friends with penises. It would be easy to make the (alarmist) leap to the conviction that all men have a rapist lurking inside them, which I don’t believe is true.
What I do think is true is that when a woman accuses someone of rape, we can’t let our feelings about that person allow us to dismiss it. As Michael Moore later said on Rachel Maddow’s show, “Every woman who claims to have been sexually assaulted or raped has to be, must be, taken seriously. Those charges have to be investigated to the fullest extent possible. For too long, and too many women have been abused in our society, because they were not listened to, and they just got shoved aside.”
Femme fatales and pure heroes only exist in the movies. Real life is much more complicated, and subtle, and nuanced. We need our thinking to reflect that.
