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He’s soft-spoken, occasionally prickly, given to frustration at people’s insistence on questions like “how do you feel”, and unerringly direct. When a journalist from NBC asks if he thinks Julian was naive at times, he replies, “Expecting states to obey their own laws is hardly naive”.
John was out of his son’s life from the time he was three until his mid-20s, and there’s a sense that while he believes utterly in the principle at stake he’s also making amends. But it comes at an enormous cost: at 76, he has a five-year-old daughter back in Australia, and the year he’s spent in London fighting for his boy is time he will never get back with his girl.
Lawyer Moris, meanwhile, has two kids of her own with Assange. They’ve had fleeting moments together in the embassy, but the statue unveiling, she says through tears, is the first time she’s seen him in three dimensions since a judge ruled against his extradition 10 months earlier.
The basis of that verdict wasn’t that the US had no grounds to pursue Assange for receiving and publishing information, the bedrock of journalism (it’s notable that he alone is facing espionage charges, not any of the mastheads who co-published). It was that his mental health was so fragile that he would likely end up dead at his own hand if extradition were ordered.
Assange remains in prison, the US appealing the verdict, and the central issue remains live: both a human being and press freedoms are under assault. Whatever mixed feelings people have about Assange shouldn’t obscure that fact.
Nils Melzer, UN special rapporteur on torture, puts it perfectly when he admits that when Assange’s team reached out to him his first instinct was to ignore them. “I think all of us had [such prejudices] at some point,” he says, “because this is the public narrative that has been spread in the media for 10 years, and no one has been able to see why this has been done.”
Julian Assange leaving Southwark Court in 2019.Credit:Getty Images
Assange “never wanted it to be him” in the spotlight, Melzer claims. “It was about the States and their war crimes and their corruption. That’s what he wanted to put the spotlight on, and he did, and that’s what made them angry. And they put the spotlight on him.”
In its own small way, Lawrence’s film – with its stirring soundtrack by Brian Eno, no less – is an attempt to turn that light back where it belongs. Here’s hoping it’s not too late.