Women Accusing WikiLeaks Founder Maintains Charges of Sexual Misconduct | Hacker News Reader

Women Accusing WikiLeaks Founder Maintains Charges of Sexual Misconduct

newsweek.com

It's somewhat implied in Sweden that if you hire Lief Silbersky the defense lawyer, it means you did it and that you stand a good chance of getting away with it.

A detailed, chronological account of the women’s alleged encounters with Assange—which in both cases began with consensual sexual contact but later included what the women claimed was nonconsensual sex, in which Assange didn’t use a condom

I'm confused I thought non-consensual sex was rape, or is there a law in Sweden that says women who regret their sexual encounters can now withdraw consent retroactively?

I think that the main issue was that he didn't use a condom in those additional encounters, which resulted in the withdrawal of consent. One assumes that consent may be offered conditionally, such that consent is withdrawn automatically if the conditions are violated - therefore, one might say "I consent if you use a condom," and once he did not wear a condom the consent was withdrawn.

More pessimistically, in the US, at least, there is no requirement to communicate the withdrawal of consent - during an act, a partner may decide to withdraw consent, and it is withdrawn regardless of whether it is communicated or indicated in any way; combined with the issue of proving whether consent was given or not, this means that retroactively withdrawing consent is trivial. I am not familiar with Swedish law, but I doubt that it fixes these issues - preventing false negatives seems to generally be considered more important than preventing false positives, to most people.

That article, for being so wordy, is remarkably slim on details. If the issue is that he refused to use a condom, then that doesn't constitute rape if they decided to have sex with him anyway. If he actually did force himself on someone without their consent, that's a whole different (and much more serious) issue and he should face the repercussions.

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