Julian Assange | The Weird World of WikiLeaks | 4
British Scandal
Wondery
4.5 • 6.5K Ratings
🗓️ 12 February 2025
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
If you think your job sucks, spare a thought for Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist James Ball. He spent three months living and working with Julian Assange on the leaks of hundreds of thousands of documents. And he has some tales to tell about the cult-like environment he was thrust into. Like how Assange was a deliberately weird, difficult man with a "pathological need to lie". How Assange’s reaction to learning of a dangerous informer in his ranks was… surprising. And why, ultimately, he thinks WikiLeaks failed as a force for good.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From Wondery, I'm Matt Ford. |
| 0:10.8 | And I'm Alice Levine. |
| 0:12.6 | And this is British Scandal. Alice, I feel like we visited some of the world's finest prisons this series. |
| 0:28.0 | HMP Belmarsh, various American military prisons, and of course the toughest of all. |
| 0:33.3 | Known as the San Quentin of London, the Ecuadorian embassy, where all the world's hardest |
| 0:38.7 | nuts end up. Are you starting to feel institutionalised yet? |
| 0:42.3 | Actually, I'm a bit. There's been a hell of a lot of captivity for a story about freedom. |
| 0:47.1 | There has. But where are you at the end of the series? Is Julian Assange a hero or a villain? |
| 0:53.1 | That is a tricky question to answer, isn't it? |
| 0:54.8 | Because WikiLeaks had an agenda of transparency, |
| 0:58.1 | which feels like something that we should be pursuing, |
| 1:01.1 | and he exposed awful behaviour in various powerful organisations. |
| 1:06.0 | He really brought the world's attention to issues around free speech |
| 1:09.2 | and free access to information. |
| 1:11.4 | But of course, he endangered people. His track record with sources is undeniably bad. |
| 1:17.2 | He refused to answer to sexual assault allegations. And his ego definitely eclipsed |
| 1:22.9 | the cause at various points. And maybe more to the point, he skateboarded inside. |
| 1:28.3 | So I feel like there's a lot to dislike. |
| 1:31.3 | Well, we're going to get to the heart of some of those contradictions today |
| 1:34.3 | by talking to someone who knows Julian Assange and was at the centre of some of the events we've covered this series. |
| 1:39.3 | James Ball is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist |
| 1:43.3 | who was recruited to join WikiLeaks by Julian Assange himself. |
... |
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