Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol

This cause had not been one that appealed much to her late father, James Goldsmith, an eccentric right-wing billionaire with a fondness for making libel threats. For some of Assange’s supporters, the series of extradition and bail proceedings brought by Sweden seemed proof of the US conspiracy. Assange’s lawyer Mark Stephens hinted as much afterwards on the steps of the court. Having compared the Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny to the murderous Soviet ogre Lavrentiy Beria, Stephens dismissed the sex allegations as “very thin indeed”. He was subsequently to assert that Assange was being imprisoned in the very same cell once occupied by the 19th-century playwright Oscar Wilde, who had been martyred for his sexuality. The homosexual Wilde was later shipped on to a second prison where he wrote his famous Ballad of Reading Gaol. Stephens said many people believed the charges against Assange to be politically motivated. He also referred to a “honeytrap”, implying that Assange had been set up. Assange himself fulminated about what he called the unseen constellation of interests – personal, domestic and foreign – he felt were driving the case forward ...»