Opinions are divided about Julian Assange.
The founder of the WikiLeaks platform is now in front of a court in London that should decide on his extradition.
The man who exposed war crimes and corruption is seen by some as the father of modern investigative journalism, who has a large amount of leaked data at his disposal.
For others, he is a traitor, an enemy of the state, an aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin, or even to blame for the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. Or all of them together.
His former associate Daniel Domscheit-Berg, with whom he had a falling out, once said of Assange that he was "so brilliant, so paranoid, so eager for power."
He criticizes that "with his egoism" the WikiLeaks project "was too attached to his controversial personality."
There is certainly genius, just like an expressed ego.
Spiegel magazine quotes Assange: "If you are much smarter than the people around you, you develop a huge ego – and you get the feeling that any problem can be solved with a little thinking."
On the other hand, Assange's alleged paranoia turned out to be well-founded.
Since 2010, Assange has been on the "hunt" list of the US secret services, writes the "Intercept" website, citing secret documents obtained by Edward Snowden.
They document extensive secret service operations.
Their goal is to investigate, stop, or at least harm WikiLeaks.
Accusation of rape
Assange's reputation was badly damaged when he was at the height of his fame.
WikiLeaks became world famous when the video "Collateral Murder" was released in the summer of 2010.
With the publication of documents known as the "Afghan War Diaries", Assange became a recognized figure in journalism.
And then on August 21, 2010, the Swedish newspaper "Ekspresen" published an article about rape allegations against Assange.
They became the basis for a multi-year manhunt against Assange – although an official lawsuit was never filed.
It started after two women came to the police station in Stockholm.
Assange had sex with them during a visit to Stockholm in August 2010.
The women were primarily interested in whether it was possible to oblige Assange to be tested for HIV, because he had unprotected sex with them.
None of them reported violence or threats of violence.
Günter Wallraff, the founder of German investigative journalism, talks to Deutsche Welle (DW) about the campaign against Assange "which calls for murder".
"He was accused of the worst, what can be accused in an enlightened society: of being a rapist."
The accusations against Assange were invented, so that the educator would become a hated person, adds Walraf, referring to the research of Nils Meltzer, the UN special envoy for the problem of torture and cruel punishment.
Meltzer, a sober Swiss professor of international law, speaks Swedish fluently and had access to a large number of original documents.
In an interview with the Swiss daily "Republik", in early 2020, Meltzer made serious accusations against the Swedish authorities for the first time and talked about the political reasons for manipulating the evidentiary materials.
"It worked for years," says Günter Wallraf, adding that it took him a lot of time and explaining to convince his circle of friends and acquaintances to support Assange.
Putin's megaphone?
Criticism due to the alleged closeness with Moscow first started in 2012.
Due to the Swedish request for extradition, which was raised in the meantime, Julian Assange continued his journalistic work first under house arrest, and then in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, which offered him asylum.
A political talk show series called "The World Tomorrow" was created, which Assange recorded with his company "Quick Roll Productions" for the Russian state media house "Russia Today".
The first guest he interviewed via video link was Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Shia Hezbollah in Lebanon.
It was the first international interview of the controversial Hezbollah leader in six years.
Exclusive? Opinions are divided, as is usual when it comes to Assange.
In Germany, criticism poured in. "Spiegel" headline: "Julian Assange failed because of the head of Hezbollah", the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote about the "unsuccessful launch of the information rocket".
The main criticism was that Assange was not critical enough of Nasrallah.
He was criticized by the "New York Times" and "The Guardian".
Guardian journalist Luke Harding described him as a "useful idiot" of Russian propaganda.
On the other hand, in its report, the British BBC focused on Nasrallah's offer to mediate in the Syrian civil war.
A total of twelve episodes were recorded by Assange, with different interlocutors, such as the current Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, the Slovenian philosopher Slovoj Žižek or the left-wing intellectual Noam Chomsky.
Trump's election helper?
In the midst of the 2016 US presidential campaign, WikiLeaks released tens of thousands of Democratic emails, including those of their presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
This did not only harm Clinton in the pre-election race with Donald Trump, but also Julian Assange's reputation, assesses investigative journalist Valraf.
At the same time, the public's interest in that information was crucial: let's say about how the democratic leadership, against all the rules, favored Hillary Clinton in the pre-election race, to the detriment of Bernie Sanders.
Walraf rejects the accusations against Assange because of his closeness to Russia and recalls the documents published by WikiLeaks about Putin and the violation of human rights in Russia.
Andi Miller-Magun, a former spokesman for the "Chaos-Computer-Club" (CCC) association, says that he visited Assange almost every month while he had asylum in the embassy.
Miller-Magun is now the president of the Vau Holland Foundation, which, among other things, advocates freedom of information.
When it comes to the influence of Assange on the American election campaign, and especially on the candidate Hillary Clinton, Miller-Magun talks about "extremely critical discussions about which comments are still in the spirit of journalism and free information and where personal clashes begin."
However, in an interview with DW, Miller-Magoon also shows understanding for Assange: "Hillary Clinton has repeatedly said publicly that he should be killed by drone. She was the foreign minister when Assange published embassy cables, Afghan and Iraqi diaries in 2010. He literally fought for his life so that woman wouldn't become president. He can't be blamed for that."
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