Australian architect John Shipton disappeared from his son Julian Assange’s life from the time he was three until the WikiLeaks founder in his twenties – and he gets nervous when asked to explain his long absence.
“It’s no person’s business and it’s an invasion of privacy,” Shipton told The Post last week.
But it surely makes up for lost time.
Shipton, 76, who’s a dead ringer for his 51-year-old son, re-entered Julian’s life a couple of years ago to fight around the globe for his freedom.
Now he appears in a recent documentary by his second son, Gabriel, “Ithacawhich details their efforts to pressure america to withdraw spy allegations against Assange.
Documentation, screenings and guided tours with lectures are the most recent chapters in an enormous saga that began when Assange released WikiLeaks in 2010, revealing deep-seated American secrets – in regards to the conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – that shocked the world but infuriated the leaked agencies.
The documentary shows Shipton and Gabriel not meeting their half-brother Julian until he was nearly 20, trying to rally international support in Europe, Mexico and america for Assange’s freedom.
“Ithaca” is each a movie about Assange’s legal troubles and a take a look at a broken family.
In his unauthorized biography, published in 2011, Assange says his biological father “disappeared” from his childhood in Australia. Assange took his stepfather Brett’s last name when his mother, Christine, married him shortly after splitting with Shipton.
But Christine divorced Brett when Julian was nine years old and have become involved with a charismatic but brutal musician named Leif Meynell, who was a member of the “Family” cult, plunging her family into chaos.
Assange relations remain complicated.
Assange has a 34-year-old son, Daniel, in Australia, and sons Gabriel, 6, and Max, 4, along with his once secretive wife, Stella Moris Assange.
Conceived within the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he hid for years, the boys appear within the documentary, visiting him in prison, where he buys them chocolate and reads them stories.
Moris, a lawyer, is a key figure within the fight for his release.
shipton, who said they probably share the identical diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome that Assange received in 2020, he can also be the daddy of a five-year-old girl named Severine, who’s briefly seen within the film crying as she is shipped home to her mother in Australia for her father to proceed his crusade here and in Europe .
Assange spent almost 13 years in some type of captivity. It has been under fire since 2010, when U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning leaked documents about U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Amongst the numerous devastating revelations that got here out of WikiLeaks’ video dumps and data was footage that WikiLeaks called “Side Kill“: secret US military video showing the mass killing of a dozen Iraqis in Latest Baghdad, including two Reuters employees.
The files were published in partnership with The Guardian, The Latest York Times and Der Spiegel, whose publishers have never been charged for printing materials.
Assange took refuge within the embassy in 2012 to avoid arrest under an extradition order to Sweden over rape charges he at all times denied and threats of extradition to the US – and Shipton began visiting him there. The fees were dropped in 2017, but Assange remained hidden.
What drew the wrath of the U.S. Department of Justice on him was the publication by WikiLeaks in 2017 of the so-calledVault 7“ which included information on highly sensitive CIA hacking tools. An American CIA worker has been convicted of passing information to WikiLeaks. Vault 7 was the biggest leak of agency documents in US history.
in 2021 Yahoo News reported that the CIA was considering kidnapping and even assassinating Assange on the time.
After this event, the Ecuadorian authorities began to look unpleasantly at Assange, and it became clear that he was being filmed in his quarters.
He and Morris pitched tents on the embassy to keep their intimate moments private.
Moris, who’s seen within the video bursting into tears and apologizing for several minutes during a television interview, says the atmosphere surrounding Assange became so sinister during this era that she feared she is perhaps killed each time she left the embassy . House.
After this event, the Ecuadorian authorities began to look unpleasantly at Assange, and it became clear that he was being filmed in his quarters. Assange’s team told The Post that the embassy’s security contractor was bribed and as a substitute began surveillance of Assange and his guests, including his lawyers, doctors and journalistic partners.
The surveillance tapes were personally transported to the US by a security contractor who said in an email to his employees, “Now we’re working for the dark side.”
Assange was forced out of the embassy in 2019 and promptly arrested for evading a 2012 warrant.
He was sent to Belmarsh Maximum Security Prison on the outskirts of London, where Shipton visited him and Assange asked him for help.
Now, after serving time for evading arrest, Assange is appealing his extradition order to the US, where he faces up to 175 years in prison for his role in leaking US diplomatic cables and Pentagon files in 2010.
Shipton says his role now is just to pull his son out of the opening, not to speak about their past.
“How details of my adolescence and Julian’s adolescence would have helped is an entire mystery to me,” Shipton said. “If there isn’t a magic pudding, you possibly can put it in and switch it right into a key that opens the door to his cell … it just looks as if an invasion of privacy to me.”
Shipton sees the concentrate on his son and their relationship within the interview as a distraction from the secrets exposed by Wikileaks, just as he sees the prosecution of Assange alone as a distraction tactic by the US government.
“That is all a disgusting attempt to spoil an individual’s life and divert attention [the war crimes] reported,” Shipton said. “You see within the Iraq War Files, the Guantanamo Bay War Files and the Afghanistan War Files all the weather of irregularities and also you see that the administrators who published them still have their compensation.
“They put all of the emphasis on Julian Assange, so we keep seeing Julian and elements of his character and his family, but we never take a look at the terrible revelations that … Wiki Leaks showed us.”
Shipton said there have been positive changes. Assange isn’t any longer held in his cell 23 hours a day as he was during COVID and now has his family for comfort.
“He has a faithful wife to handle his children and a few of his emotional needs because he still has access to a phone,” Shipton said. “They will talk for 10 minutes after which wait one other 10 minutes and talk again for 10 minutes. They also can visit. Normally Julian calls me every other day unless I’m in America where my phone doesn’t work. In order that we may give him progress reports.”
But Shipton said it was even higher when people wrote letters of support to him or when crowds gathered outside the prison to call for his release: “It’s all uplifting the center and uplifting the spirit.”
Moris told The Post that Julian makes essentially the most of his sons’ visits to prison.
“Kids sometimes try to usher in, you recognize, a rock or a flower or something, but they check the whole lot, so you possibly can’t,” Stella said. “And a couple of weeks ago, our eldest tried to smuggle some flowers that he had in his hood. But it surely didn’t work.
Like Shipton, he says he has “faith reasonably than hope” that Julian can be released and return home to his family. Nor does she doubt the life she selected with him.
“I do not regret anything,” she said. “Because I feel the toughest a part of life is finding a life partner. And you recognize, I definitely found it. And we have now a commitment to journey through life together. I try to imagine what our life can be like when Julian leaves, because I consider this a brief situation and I feel that at some point he can be free and can be vindicated.