I've always found this response interesting - I guess it suggests the character assassination attempts against him worked.
The issues surrounding the alleged rape feel weird to me, it's easy to discredit someone (especially in the United States) by mentioning anything about sex. It seems wrong to target someone soliciting information for media purposes who themselves isn't breaking the law (assuming of course he didn't rape anyone - that's why these kind of allegations are particularly insidious). It kind of reminds me of the Snowden leak about the NSA using web history and porn habits against Islamic fundamentalists to discredit them.
I think he was talking to the media and a lot of his original conversations were clear, articulate and measured. He was building a powerful brand which upset people in the US so he was targeted to get him out of the way - and to cloud search results/stories about him with the rape allegations. If this truly was the intent, it appears to have worked.
I think it's interesting that what drove him to working on this stuff was the fact that his research in the US was retroactively classified (they used to do a lot of this kind of thing with early cryptography patents and research). From what I've read he was frustrated by this and felt it was an improper use of government secrecy.
I'd imagine if the rape allegations really were fabricated in some way (or at least distorted) there would be some fear in facing them - since that's a lot of geopolitical power against you. Seems like a difficult situation.
I guess it suggests the character assassination attempts against him worked.
Plenty of people thought Assange was full of him self well-before the rape accusation (that pionar didn't even mention) or any other supposed character assassination.
It's not particularly hard to get a negative impression of him from his own writings, from his hype-man behavior for Wikileaks, his mercenary approach to selling access to media organizations, or from various first-hand accounts of people that worked with him.
The issues surrounding the alleged rape feel weird to me, it's easy to discredit someone (especially in the United States) by mentioning anything about sex. It seems wrong to target someone soliciting information for media purposes who themselves isn't breaking the law (assuming of course he didn't rape anyone - that's why these kind of allegations are particularly insidious). It kind of reminds me of the Snowden leak about the NSA using web history and porn habits against Islamic fundamentalists to discredit them.
I think he was talking to the media and a lot of his original conversations were clear, articulate and measured. He was building a powerful brand which upset people in the US so he was targeted to get him out of the way - and to cloud search results/stories about him with the rape allegations. If this truly was the intent, it appears to have worked.
I think it's interesting that what drove him to working on this stuff was the fact that his research in the US was retroactively classified (they used to do a lot of this kind of thing with early cryptography patents and research). From what I've read he was frustrated by this and felt it was an improper use of government secrecy.
I'd imagine if the rape allegations really were fabricated in some way (or at least distorted) there would be some fear in facing them - since that's a lot of geopolitical power against you. Seems like a difficult situation.