25 Things You Didn’t Know About Julian Assange And WikiLeaks
Julian Assange is one of the most polarizing figures of the 21st century — a man who has been called everything from a crusading journalist to a dangerous criminal, depending on who you ask. His organization, WikiLeaks, fundamentally changed how the world thinks about government secrecy, press freedom, and the power of information. Yet despite years of wall-to-wall media coverage, most people only know the broad strokes of his story.
The truth is far more fascinating. Behind the headlines about leaked cables and embassy standoffs lies a story packed with surprising details — a nomadic Australian childhood, teenage hacking exploits, secret children born in a prison, and a legal saga that stretched across nearly 15 years. Whether you see Assange as a hero or a villain, these 25 things you didn’t know about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks will almost certainly change the way you understand his story.
His Early Life Was Anything But Ordinary
He Was Born in Queensland and Moved Constantly as a Child
Julian Paul Assange was born on July 3, 1971, in Townsville, Queensland, Australia. His mother, Christine Ann Hawkins, was a visual artist, and his biological father, John Shipton, was an anti-war activist. The two never married, and Assange took the surname of his stepfather, Brett Assange, whom his mother married in 1972.
His childhood was nomadic in the extreme. By his own account, he attended around 37 different schools across Australia as his family moved constantly. This restless, peripatetic upbringing shaped his sense of being an outsider — someone who never quite belonged to any single place or institution.
His Stepfather Had Alleged Ties to a Cult
One of the darker chapters of Assange’s childhood involves his mother’s second marriage, after she separated from Brett Assange. She became involved with a musician who was reportedly connected to a group called The Family — a cult led by Anne Hamilton-Byrne that held children in isolated compounds in the Victorian Alps. Assange’s mother eventually fled with him, and the two spent years moving between addresses and, at times, living in hiding.
This experience of being pursued and surveilled — of existing outside mainstream institutions — arguably planted the seeds for his later worldview.
He Taught Himself to Code as a Teenager
By the age of 16, Assange had become a skilled computer programmer, largely self-taught. His interest in computing wasn’t just casual; it was an obsession. He purchased his first modem at 16 and quickly found his way into the underground world of hacking culture.
He was genuinely talented. Within a few years, he had become one of Australia’s most capable hackers — a fact that would eventually attract the attention of law enforcement.
The Hacker Who Started WikiLeaks
He Hacked the US Military as a Teenager Under the Name “Mendax”
Assange operated under the hacker handle “Mendax,” a name derived from a Latin phrase meaning “nobly untruthful.” As part of a hacking group called the International Subversives, he broke into some of the most secure computer networks in the world, including systems at NASA, the US Department of Defense, and Nortel Networks.
In 1991, when he was just 20 years old, Australian federal police raided his home. He was eventually charged with 31 counts of hacking-related offenses. After a prolonged legal process, he pleaded guilty in 1996 to 25 charges and was fined but avoided prison — a judge acknowledged his troubled youth and intellectual curiosity as mitigating factors.
He Co-Wrote a Book on Hacking in 1997
Following his legal troubles, Assange channeled his expertise into writing. In 1997, he co-authored Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier with journalist Suelette Dreyfus. The book documented the international hacker underground of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
It remains a compelling piece of countercultural history — and one that gives you a clear window into how Assange saw the world long before WikiLeaks existed.
He Studied Physics and Mathematics at the University of Melbourne
Assange enrolled at the University of Melbourne to study physics and mathematics, where he excelled academically. However, he grew increasingly frustrated with what he saw as the university’s entanglement with the US military through defense research programs. He eventually left without completing his degree.
This pattern — engaging deeply with institutions before growing disillusioned and departing — would repeat itself throughout his life.
WikiLeaks: The Organization That Shook the World
WikiLeaks Was Founded in 2006 With a Radical Mission
WikiLeaks was officially launched in 2006 with a stated mission to bring important news and information to the public. Its core function was — and remains — to receive and publish classified, censored, or otherwise restricted materials from anonymous sources while protecting those sources from identification.
The organization operates on the principle that radical transparency is a democratic good. Assange has described it as a “scientific journalism” project — publishing primary source documents so that readers can judge the raw evidence for themselves, rather than relying on interpretations from governments or mainstream media.
The Name “WikiLeaks” Was Nearly Something Else
The “wiki” in WikiLeaks was originally intended to signal that the site would function as a collaborative, crowd-edited platform — similar to Wikipedia — where users could annotate and discuss leaked documents. That model was quickly abandoned in favor of a more traditional editorial structure, but the name stuck.
Assange has occasionally expressed ambivalence about this, acknowledging that the “wiki” prefix creates a misleading impression of how the organization actually works.
WikiLeaks Published Over 10 Million Documents in Its First Decade
The sheer volume of material WikiLeaks has released is staggering. By its 10th anniversary in 2016, the organization had published more than 10 million documents and associated analyses. These ranged from secret diplomatic cables and military logs to corporate communications and emails from political figures.
To put that in perspective: no single news organization in history had previously managed to publish that quantity of classified material.
The “Collateral Murder” Video Changed Everything
Perhaps no single WikiLeaks release was more viscerally shocking than the “Collateral Murder” video, published in April 2010. The 38-minute video showed footage from a US Apache helicopter in Baghdad in 2007, during which a group of people — including two Reuters journalists, Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh — were killed.
The footage, which included audio of pilots apparently joking about the casualties, caused international outrage. WikiLeaks released it with minimal redaction and a deliberately provocative title, and the move cemented both the organization’s global profile and its willingness to confront the US military directly.
The Iraq War Logs Were the Largest Military Leak in History
In October 2010, WikiLeaks released 391,832 US military field reports from the Iraq War — the largest military intelligence leak in American history at that point. The documents detailed more than 100,000 deaths in Iraq between 2004 and 2009, including over 60,000 civilians, and revealed evidence of systematic torture by Iraqi forces that US officials had failed to report.
The release was coordinated with major news organizations including The Guardian, Der Spiegel, The New York Times, and Al Jazeera, in what was a landmark moment for collaborative investigative journalism.
The Afghan War Diary Was Released the Same Year
Just months before the Iraq War Logs, in July 2010, WikiLeaks published the Afghan War Diary — 91,731 documents covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010. The files revealed significant discrepancies between official US government accounts of the war and events on the ground, including previously unreported civilian casualties and the existence of a secret US special operations unit tasked with hunting Taliban leaders.
The back-to-back nature of the Afghan and Iraq releases demonstrated that WikiLeaks wasn’t a one-time disruptor. It was operating as a sustained challenge to government secrecy.
The Diplomatic Cables That Embarrassed Governments Worldwide
“Cablegate” Exposed 251,000 US Diplomatic Cables
In November 2010, WikiLeaks began releasing what became known as “Cablegate” — 251,287 classified and sensitive US State Department diplomatic cables from 274 embassies around the world. The cables covered the period from December 1966 to February 2010.
The revelations were extraordinary. Among other things, the cables showed US diplomats had been instructed to collect biometric data on UN officials, revealed candid and sometimes unflattering assessments of foreign leaders by American diplomats, and exposed secret US military operations in countries where America was not officially at war.
World Leaders Were Stunned — and Furious
The Cablegate releases caused diplomatic crises across multiple continents. Saudi Arabia was revealed to have privately urged the US to attack Iran. German Chancellor Angela Merkel was described as “risk-averse and rarely creative.” Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh was shown to have been secretly lying to his own parliament about the source of US airstrikes in his country.
The Russian government — described in the cables as a “virtual mafia state” — was particularly incensed. The damage to US diplomatic relationships around the world was immeasurable, though it was largely repaired over the following years.
The Full Cables Were Later Released Unredacted — By Accident
Here’s a fact that even dedicated followers of the WikiLeaks story often don’t know: in September 2011, the entire unredacted archive of 251,000 diplomatic cables was released online — not by WikiLeaks as a deliberate act, but as a consequence of a password appearing in a book co-authored by Guardian journalists.
The incident caused a serious rift between Assange and his former media partners, particularly The Guardian. WikiLeaks had previously worked with news organizations to redact identifying information to protect individuals mentioned in the cables. The accidental full release compromised many of those protections.
The Legal Battles That Defined His Life
Chelsea Manning Was the Source Behind the Most Explosive Leaks
US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning (then known as Bradley Manning) is the source who provided WikiLeaks with the Collateral Murder video, the Afghan War Diary, the Iraq War Logs, and the Cablegate cables — essentially the entire core of WikiLeaks’ most significant releases.
Manning was arrested in May 2010, convicted in 2013 of multiple offenses under the Espionage Act, and sentenced to 35 years in prison. President Barack Obama commuted her sentence in January 2017, after she had served seven years. Manning described her motivation as wanting the American public to see what was being done in their name.
Sweden Issued an Arrest Warrant for Assange in 2010
In August 2010 — the same year as the major WikiLeaks releases — Swedish authorities issued an arrest warrant for Assange following allegations of sexual assault and rape made by two Swedish women he had met during a visit to Stockholm. Assange denied the allegations, claiming the sex was consensual.
The timing fueled conspiracy theories that the allegations were politically motivated. Swedish prosecutors maintained they were not. The case dragged on for years, with Assange refusing to travel to Sweden for questioning, and Sweden eventually dropping the investigation in November 2019 — citing the statute of limitations, not any finding in Assange’s favor.
He Spent 7 Years in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London
Unable to travel to Sweden without risking extradition, Assange entered the Ecuadorian embassy in London on June 19, 2012, after Ecuador granted him political asylum. He would remain there for 2,487 days — almost seven years — in a small set of rooms in the Knightsbridge district.
During that time, he maintained a skateboard, kept a pet cat named Embassy Cat, held press conferences, conducted interviews, and continued to run WikiLeaks. British police maintained a continuous presence outside the building at a cost that The Guardian estimated exceeded £16 million (approximately $20 million) over the period.
Ecuador Eventually Withdrew His Asylum and Called the Police
Relations between Assange and his Ecuadorian hosts deteriorated significantly after Lenín Moreno replaced Rafael Correa as Ecuador’s president in 2017. Ecuadorian officials complained that Assange had been interfering in the country’s internal affairs and using the embassy as a base for political activity.
On April 11, 2019, Ecuador revoked his asylum and invited British police into the embassy. Assange was physically dragged out of the building by officers and arrested. Images of him — pale, bearded, and clutching a copy of Gore Vidal’s History of the National Security State — were broadcast around the world.
He Faced Up to 175 Years in Prison Under US Charges
Within hours of his arrest by British police, the US Justice Department unsealed an indictment against Assange, charging him with one count of conspiring to hack government computers. A superseding indictment filed in May 2019 added 17 more charges under the Espionage Act of 1917, bringing the total potential sentence to 175 years in prison.
Press freedom organizations including the Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, and the American Civil Liberties Union condemned the Espionage Act charges, arguing that prosecuting a publisher for receiving and publishing classified information would set a dangerous precedent for all journalists.
He Was Held in Belmarsh Prison — the “British Guantanamo”
After his arrest, Assange was held in HM Prison Belmarsh in southeast London, a maximum-security facility that critics have nicknamed “the British Guantanamo” due to the severity of conditions and the nature of its population. He was initially sentenced to 50 weeks in prison for breaching bail conditions when he entered the Ecuadorian embassy.
He remained in Belmarsh throughout the extradition proceedings, which stretched over five years and generated dozens of court hearings across multiple levels of the UK judicial system.
The Personal Life Few People Know
He Has a Son From a Teenage Relationship He Barely Knew
Assange has a son named Daniel, born around 1989 from a relationship when Assange was a teenager. The two were largely estranged for much of Assange’s public life. Daniel later became a privacy advocate in his own right and has spoken publicly about the difficulty of growing up without a present father.
He Fathered Two Children While Living in the Ecuadorian Embassy
One of the most remarkable personal facts about Assange is that he fathered two children while confined to the Ecuadorian embassy. His partner, Stella Moris (now Stella Assange), visited him in the embassy under the guise of being a legal researcher — they kept their relationship secret for years to protect her and the children from media scrutiny.
Their sons, Gabriel and Max, were born in 2017 and 2019 respectively. The existence of the relationship and the children wasn’t revealed publicly until September 2020, when Stella Moris held a press conference to announce that she and Assange planned to marry.
He Married Stella Moris in Belmarsh Prison in March 2022
On March 23, 2022, Julian Assange and Stella Moris were married in a ceremony held inside Belmarsh Prison. The guest list was extremely limited — four guests were permitted — and Assange wore a dark suit while Moris wore a custom gown by Vivienne Westwood.
Westwood, a longtime supporter of Assange’s cause, designed the dress as a statement of solidarity. The ceremony made international headlines and was accompanied by a protest outside the prison gates.
Stella Assange Became His Most Vocal Advocate
After their marriage, Stella Assange became the public face of the campaign for Julian’s freedom. Trained as a lawyer, she traveled globally, lobbied governments, spoke at the United Nations, and gave hundreds of interviews. Her advocacy played a significant role in keeping the case in the public eye during the years of procedural court hearings that might otherwise have faded from attention.
Surprising Facts About WikiLeaks Itself
WikiLeaks Has Published Material on Dozens of Countries — Not Just the US
A common misconception is that WikiLeaks exclusively targets the United States. The organization has published material exposing corruption and wrongdoing in governments across Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Significant releases have involved Kenya, Iceland, Peru, Thailand, and many others.
Assange has consistently maintained that WikiLeaks is an equal-opportunity publisher of suppressed information — though critics argue the volume and impact of releases targeting the US and its allies has been disproportionately large.
WikiLeaks Won Multiple Major Journalism Awards
Despite the controversy surrounding it, WikiLeaks has received significant recognition from the journalism community. In 2008, it won the Economist’s New Media Award. In 2009, Amnesty International named it as a recipient of its Media Award for its coverage of extrajudicial killings in Kenya.
These awards came before the major military leaks that made WikiLeaks globally famous — and they serve as a reminder that the organization had already established credibility as a journalism outlet before the storm broke.
WikiLeaks Inspired a Wave of Secure Leaking Platforms
The WikiLeaks model directly inspired the development of SecureDrop, an open-source whistleblower submission system now used by dozens of major news organizations around the world including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian.
Designed to protect the anonymity of sources even more rigorously than the original WikiLeaks model, SecureDrop was initially developed by the late internet activist Aaron Swartz and journalist Kevin Poulsen, and is now maintained by the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
The End of the Legal Saga — For Now
He Pleaded Guilty in June 2024 and Returned to Australia as a Free Man
After nearly five years in Belmarsh and years of legal battles, the saga reached its conclusion in June 2024. Assange pleaded guilty to one felony count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information under the US Espionage Act, as part of a plea deal with the US Department of Justice.
The deal — which had been negotiated over many months — allowed Assange to receive a sentence of time already served (his five years in Belmarsh), avoiding any US prison time. On June 26, 2024, Assange boarded a plane from the UK and landed in Saipan, in the Northern Mariana Islands (a US territory in the Pacific chosen for its proximity to Australia), where the plea was formally accepted.
He then flew home to Australia — a free man for the first time in over a decade.
His Return to Australia Marked the End of a 14-Year Legal Odyssey
Assange arrived back in Australia on June 26, 2024, landing in Canberra. He was greeted by his wife Stella and his two young sons, in an emotional reunion that was captured by cameras and broadcast around the world. It was the first time he had set foot on Australian soil since 2010.
The Australian government, under Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, had lobbied the Biden administration for his release, with Albanese publicly stating on multiple occasions that “enough is enough.” The resolution was widely seen as a diplomatic achievement for Australia, though it left many of the underlying legal questions about press freedom and the Espionage Act unresolved.
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From a nomadic Australian childhood to a historic plea deal in a US Pacific territory, the story of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks is one of the defining narratives of the information age. Whether you believe he is a heroic truth-teller or a reckless operator who endangered lives, the facts of his story are undeniably extraordinary. It’s precisely the kind of story that rewards deeper exploration — which is exactly why the 25 things you didn’t know about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks only scratch the surface of one of history’s most complex figures.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What did Julian Assange actually plead guilty to?
In June 2024, Assange pleaded guilty to one felony count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information under the US Espionage Act of 1917. As part of the plea agreement, his sentence was considered fulfilled by the five years he had already spent in Belmarsh Prison in the UK.
How long was Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy?
Assange lived in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for approximately seven years — from June 19, 2012, until April 11, 2019. That’s 2,487 days, during which British police maintained a constant presence outside at an estimated cost of over £16 million.
Who provided WikiLeaks with its most famous documents?
Chelsea Manning, a US Army intelligence analyst, is the source behind WikiLeaks’ most significant releases — including the Collateral Murder video, the Afghan War Diary, the Iraq War Logs, and the Cablegate diplomatic cables. Manning was convicted in 2013 and later had her sentence commuted by President Obama in 2017.
Did Julian Assange have children?
Yes. Assange has three known children: a son named Daniel from a teenage relationship, and two sons — Gabriel and Max — born in 2017 and 2019 while he was living in the Ecuadorian embassy with his partner Stella Moris, whom he later married in Belmarsh Prison in 2022.
Is WikiLeaks still operating?
WikiLeaks as an organization still exists, though its activity has been significantly reduced since Assange’s arrest in 2019. The organization has published relatively little new material in recent years, and questions about its future direction remain open following Assange’s release and return to Australia.
Was Julian Assange ever charged with rape?
Swedish authorities issued an arrest warrant for Assange in 2010 related to allegations of sexual assault and rape made by two women in Sweden. Assange denied the allegations. The Swedish investigation was dropped in November 2019 due to the statute of limitations, not due to any finding on the merits of the case. No charges were ever formally filed.