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Hello and welcome to the Double X Gab Fest for Thursday, December 16th.

I'm Hannah Rosen, the co-editor of Double X. I am here today in the Washington, D.C. studio with Margaret Talbot of the New Yorker. Hello, Margaret. Hi, Hannah. And we have in New Haven joining us, Emily Bazelon, the other editor of Double X. Hi, Emily. Hey, Emily. Hey, guys. So we put out a call for topic requests on our Facebook page and got several excellent requests, and we're

going to take one of them from Mr. J.M. That is, we are going to talk about John Boehner and his

constant propensity to cry. That's going to be our second topic. We're going to start the podcast

today talking about Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder and his rape charges, particularly.

And then we are going to end it with a question of solving the mystery of why you get fewer holiday cards. And does that lead you back to Facebook and have anything to do with Facebook? So let's start by talking about Julian Assange. Margaret, do you want to tell us a little bit about don't start really with the rape charges? Just let's do it a little broad. Okay, why not start with the rape charges? I mean, we all have heard of the WikiLeaks founder. We know what he's famous for, this big dump of diplomacy documents, which have sort of rattled the diplomacy world. And then in comes suddenly these rape charges from Sweden. And what are those all about? First of all, they go back to August. This is when this all started. And by the way, there's a very good account of this on the Reuters.com website by Mark Hosenball, I think formerly of Newsweek or Time. Anyway, that kind of goes through step by step using some redacted documents from the Swedish police. This apparently took place in Sweden. The charges are very ambiguous and not, I think, what most

people would call rape. So they're sex by surprise, which is a very odd term. It is a very odd term. And that is

apparently a term in Swedish law. Yes, exactly. Although it sounds kind of pleasant in a way.

Exactly. Oh, look. Oh, my. Check it out. So I don't think it's actually intended that way, however. Actually, you know, this involves a case of consensual sex in two cases with two women who he met in Sweden, one who was doing publicity for his tour when he went to Sweden to sort of talk about WikiLeaks. And the other woman who came to see him speak, both of whom invited him to their house and both of them agreed that the sex they had was consensual. But at some point, some issue came up in both cases involving whether they should use a condom. And whether he had an STD. They wanted him to get tested for an STD, which he did not want to do.

Third wrinkle is that one of the women also says that he had sex with her while she was

asleep, so I don't think that's quite consensual. That came out in the paper today in

your time. So that was the first reference I'd seen to that. And the first thing I have to say

that sounded, I mean, the first two charges seemed to me like a sort of parody of, you know, it's like if you were a right wing person making fun of how, you know, women deal with rape. It just seemed very preposterous to me as a rape charge. I mean, maybe some other kind of charge, but not a rape charge. So Emily, can you put this in some context of American rape laws? Like what, you know, is there any such equivalent? I know that rape laws are different state to state, but is there anything like this in American rape laws where you could have consensual sex and a condom could break and, you know, you couldn't track the guy down afterwards and somehow, somewhere an investigator would call that rape. Well, I mean, in American law, there is a question about consent and whether you can revoke consent in the middle. And so I suppose you could spin out a theory where if a condom broke, then, and you were saying stop, that that was a revocation of consent. It's not totally clear that that actually happened here. And I think that in general, I mean, I think these charges are right up to the line of what you could possibly imagine being criminal behavior in your kind of most, you know, benefit to the women interpretation of the law. Right, which I assume Swedish law, I mean, it would

seem that Swedish law is much stricter, but even so this would fall into the third category, their

least severe category of rape. And also, there was quite a bit of question, even among the

Swedish prosecutors, about whether to even proceed with an investigation. Because when the two

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