Stella Assange: 'it's too late for Navalny, but it's not too late for my husband Julian'

Stella Assange — human rights campaigner, wife of the incarcerated WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and mother of his two youngest children — is sitting on the stage where her husband first leaked the Afghan war logs in 2010, telling me about her latest dream. She’s standing in an airport, having just missed her flight to Assange’s hometown of Melbourne, and looks back to see what the commotion behind her is about. There’s a man on the floor and she realises it’s Assange, her partner of the last 13 years and the man at the centre of this week’s freedom-of-information wars after a crucial final attempt at blocking his extradition to the US.

‘He’s convulsing and foaming at the mouth,’ she tells me, visibly disturbed by the details of this particular dream, which woke her at 3am (she’s started writing her dreams down, so she can discuss the details with Assange when he makes his 10-minute morning phone call from HMP Belmarsh, the maximum security prison in south-east London where he has been locked up since 2019). 

‘The people around him aren’t helping; they’re kind of just standing by,’ she continues. ‘I run back to help him and I’m wearing a model of Dr Marten boots that came out a few years ago called the Assange, and my shoelace snags.