by AMELIA GENTLEMAN
Claes Borgström, the lawyer for the two women whose complaints of sexual assault triggered Julian Assange’s arrest, said his clients had been assaulted twice: first physically, before being “sacrificed” to a malevolent online attack. The women were having “a very tough time”, he said.
A wealth of hostile material attacking the two women has appeared on the internet since August, when they took their complaints to the police. Their right to anonymity has been abandoned online, where enraged bloggers have uploaded dossiers of personal photographs, raked through their CVs and tweets, and accused them of orchestrating a CIA-inspired honeytrap operation. These online rumours were a convenient way for Assange to divert suspicion from the actual allegations, the women’s lawyer said.
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