Having been released on £275,000 bail on Thursday, he was driven to a ten-bedroom mansion called Ellingham Hall, where he will spend Christmas as a guest of Vaughan Smith - a former captain in the Grenadier Guards who is a supporter of Assange's WikiLeaks website.
But the great irony of Assange's life is that even as the website's release of thousands of secret documents has placed him at the centre of a firestorm of controversy over citizens' right to know, he has remained fanatically secretive about his own past.
Today, a Mail investigation throws fascinating new light on his formative teenage years: how an affair with a 16-year-old girl produced his only child, and how, at just 20 years old, he was caught with secret Pentagon passwords on his computer.
What emerges is that his early life could hardly be further removed from the luxurious surroundings in which he finds himself today.
Raised by his mother Christine - who flew into London from Australia to see him this month - he had lived in 37 towns by the time he was 14, receiving much of his education at home. Assange was thus marked out as a loner from an early age.
The identity of his father remains a mystery, but it has been established that his mother was effectively on the run from a former lover who had turned into something of a stalker.
In the late Eighties, by the time he was 16 or 17, Julian, his mother and stepbrother - fathered by a musician - found themselves living in a tiny cement bungalow in the foothills of the Dandenong Ranges, east of Melbourne. It was a peaceful setting for a young man learning how to use his first computer. Bellbirds sang in the trees and sheep grazed in the surrounding rolling hills.
When the Mail visited the property, we discovered that the current landlady - who lives in a house next to the tiny single-storey property - was also there more than 20 years ago, while Assange was developing his obsession with computers. 'He didn't go out much at all,' she said. 'He spent almost all his time in there with his Commodore computer. He rarely came out of the bedroom.'
Julian, his stepbrother and mother remained in their ramshackle home for about a year, but at that point 18-year-old Julian met a local girl of 16, with whom he struck up a relationship.
Soon after, the couple moved a few miles away to a cottage which had been separated into two flats. Today, it lies empty and dilapidated, its garden overflowing with weeds.
This was the home where Assange's lover became pregnant. Even then he would spend hours on his computer daily, learning to hack into other computers as the web began to spread around the world.
Their son Daniel was born when Assange's girlfriend was 17, but it seems that even the arrival of a child was not enough to drag the fledgling-hacker away from his screen. As one former resident recalls: 'We'd see her walking down to the shops with the baby in a pushchair. She almost always seemed to be alone.
'You'd see her at the local launderette washing the baby's clothes, but it was a pretty rare occasion to see her and her boyfriend out together with the baby.'
A year or two later, the couple moved to a rented house in Melbourne, 25 miles away. It was there, in October 1991, that their relationship suffered a shattering blow after Assange was raided by the police.
He was caught red-handed with the tools of his burgeoning hacker's trade - a £350 Amiga 500 computer and more than a dozen discs filled with the access codes of websites.
Police also found details of hundreds of stolen passwords for networks around the world - along with the dates when he obtained them. Among them were passwords for the U.S. Air Force 7th Command Group in the Pentagon.
He was charged with a number of offences relating to computer hacking. For the mother of his child, it was the final straw - she fled with the baby.
Though the couple had gone through what they described as an 'unofficial marriage', Assange has remained deeply secretive about the mother of his child. The only time he has alluded to her was when he helped write a 1997 book called Underground: Tales Of Hacking, Madness And Obsession On The Electronic Frontier.
In it, he describes his girlfriend as 'an intelligent but introverted 16-year-old' whom he met through a friend. After she left him, he fell into a depression so severe that it led to him going in and out of a Melbourne hospital for six months.
It was not until five years after the police raid that the case again him was finalised. Pleading guilty to 24 charges, he was fined the equivalent of about £900 and placed on a good behaviour bond.
County Court Judge Leslie Ross said at the time he believed Assange had hacked into computer systems purely to empower himself, and not for any personal gain. But he warned that if Assange had not had such a disrupted childhood he would have gone to jail for up to ten years.
The judge told Assange he acknowledged the 'unstable personal background that you have had to endure and the nomadic existence that your mother and yourself were forced to follow, and also the personal disruption that occurred within your household.'
The judge added: 'These offences could only have been committed by an intelligent individual, and you now have this black mark against your name. If there is any repetition of this behaviour, I would have thought your chances of avoiding a jail sentence would be very slim.'
Despite those stern words, Assange told the judge: 'Your honour, I feel a great misjustice has been done and I would like to record the fact that you have been misled by the prosecution.'
After Assange separated from the mother of his child, the pair embarked on a nine-year custody battle over their son, which was not settled until 1999.
The agreement effectively meant that Daniel's continued upbringing would be his mother's responsibility. (Some have suggested that it was the stress of this custody fight that turned Assange's hair white.)
The process prompted Assange and his mother to form Parent Inquiry Into Child Protection, an activist group which seeks to gain access to legal records related to child custody issues.
While little is known of Assange's activities in the years that followed, from 2003 to 2006 he studied physics and mathematics at Melbourne University before helping to set up WikiLeaks in 2006.
So where is the woman who perhaps knows Julian Assange better than any other?
'She's done very well at keeping her identity a secret,' says a former associate of the couple, who admitted that even he did not know who Assange's former lover really is.
'What we do know is that after leaving Julian she took up with someone else, married and had a new name.'
Today, their son Daniel, 20 - who has been in hiding in Australia in recent weeks - works for a software design company. Pictures identified as him on the internet show he has a strong resemblance to his father.
While he has not talked about his mother in detail, he has given a clue that they now have a troubled relationship in a note left on Twitter. It simply said: 'Mother thinks I'm a monster.'
The media's focus this week may be on the troubling details of the sex charges Julian Assange faces in Sweden. But it's fascinating to discover how his first romance came to such an unhappy end - not that you'll be reading about it on WikiLeaks any time soon.
Source : kompas
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
The Secret Son Assange Fathered with A Girl of 17
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