Re: Assange lawyer Jennifer Robinson interviewed on SKY TV (video) Archived Message
Posted by dovetailjoint on April 15, 2019, 1:01 pm, in reply to "Assange lawyer Jennifer Robinson interviewed on SKY TV (video)"
I think Assange's lawyer has a difficult job. She has to, basically, explain to the journalist that everything she thinks she knows about the case... is wrong. This is harder than it appears, and, she has to do it repeatedly during the same interview. This is before she even gets into the controversial part about the 'rape' allegations, which don't automatically mean the same thing in the UK and Sweden. How does one explain what 'minor rape' means in the context of an interview? It's problematic, because denying the claim that Assange raped anybody in Sweden, can be easily twisted into something else, that one is 'soft' on rape in general, because one denies the rape allegation in this particular case. Saying that no rape took place opens one up to the allegation that one is an 'rape apologist.' Trying to explain that the two women didn't accuse Assange of rape when the first went to the police, and that the first person to utter the word 'rape' was a policewoman, not one of the women; and that this is putting very serious words in the mouths of the women, isn't easy, when everyone thinks the women accused Assange of raping them. That the policewoman shouldn't have uttered those words is pretty obvious. That the state prosecutor in Stocklholm, also a woman, looked at the statements and disagreed, with the policewoman and therefore dropped the case... explaining all this to a journalist is hard work. It's like telling them to unlearn everything they've learnt about the case. Assange has, in reality, been put on trial by the media for close to ten years, and it's pretty obvious that they think he's guilty of raping two women and hiding away from justice, otherwise he'd just go to Sweden and defend himself in court. Only the media trial has been very one-sided from day one. One the one side one has Assange and his supporters, on the other the massed ranks of the media. The media trial, trial by journalists, has been grossly unfair, massively biased and staggeringly partial; because the media don't like Assange's politics or his version of journalism, which threatens the current media model and threatens their politics. In reality it's been a huge, relentless, kangaroo court run by journalists, who aren't lawyers, don't care about the truth, are easily manipulated by state actors, and don't have the training or knowledge to analyse the case properly, because journalism is about selling a dramatic story, rather than painstakingly uncovering and weighing the facts like a trial is supposed to do. What's disturbing is that they don't really seem to be aware of this, that they aren't lawyers and they aren't a court of law, and I don't think they even care very much that they don't know.
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