Australian architect John Shipton was missing from his son Julian Assange’s life from the time he was three until the WikiLeaks founder was in his 20s — and he gets prickly when asked to elucidate his long absence.
“It’s none of anyone’s business and it’s an invasion of privacy,” Shipton told The Post last week.
But he’s been making up for lost time.
Shipton, 76, who’s a dead ringer for his 51-year-old son, re-entered Julian’s life a couple of years ago to campaign everywhere in the world for his freedom.
Now he features in his other son Gabriel’s latest documentary, “Ithaka,” which details their efforts to pressure the US to drop espionage charges against Assange.
The documentary, screenings, and a speaking tour are the newest chapters within the sprawling saga that began when Assange published Wikileaks in 2010, revealing deeply-held American secrets — in regards to the conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — which shocked the world but infuriated the agencies from which they were leaked.
The documentary shows Shipton and Gabriel, who didn’t meet his half-brother Julian until he was nearly 20, attempting to rally international support in Europe, Mexico, and the US for the liberty of Assange.
“Ithaka” is each a movie about Assange’s legal predicament and a glimpse right into a fractured family.
In his unauthorized biography, published in 2011, Assange says his biological father was “missing” from his childhood in Australia. Assange took his stepfather Brett’s surname when his mother, Christine, married him shortly after splitting from Shipton.
But Christine divorced Brett when Julian was nine and took up with a charismatic but violent musician named Leif Meynell who was a member of “The Family” cult, plunging her circle of relatives into chaos.
The Assanges’ relationships remain complicated.
Assange has a 34-year-old son called Daniel in Australia, and sons Gabriel, six, and Max, 4, along with his once-secret wife Stella Moris Assange.
Conceived within the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he was holed up for years, the boys feature within the documentary visiting him in prison, where he buys them chocolate and reads them stories.
Moris, a lawyer, is a key figure within the fight to free him.
Shipton, who’s said he probably shares the identical Asperger syndrome diagnosis that Assange got in 2020, can also be the daddy of a five-year-old girl named Severine who’s seen briefly within the film, crying when she is shipped home to her mother in Australia for her father to proceed his crusade here and in Europe.
Assange has now spent almost 13 years in some type of captivity. He has been under fire since 2010 when US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning leaked documents about war crimes carried out by the US in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Amongst the various devastating revelations that got here out of the WikiLeaks video and data dumps was footage WikiLeaks dubbed “Collateral Murder“: a classified US military video showing the indiscriminate killing of over a dozen Iraqis in Recent Baghdad, including two Reuters news staffers.
The files were published along side The Guardian, The Recent York Times, and Der Spiegel, whose publishers were never charged for printing the fabric.
Assange took refuge within the embassy in 2012 to avoid arrest on an extradition warrant to Sweden on rape allegations that he at all times denied and since of threats he can be extradited to the US — and Shipton began to go to him there. The allegations were dropped in 2017, but Assange stayed tucked away.
What brought the wrath of the US Department of Justice down on him was the 2017 publication by WikiLeaks of the so-called “Vault 7,” which included intel about highly sensitive CIA hacking tools. An American worker of the CIA has been convicted for passing on the data to WikiLeaks. Vault 7 was the largest leak of agency documents in US history.
In 2021, Yahoo News reported that the CIA had considered kidnapping and even assassinating Assange on the time.
After that, Ecuadorian authorities began to sour on Assange, and it became clear that he was being filmed in his quarters.
He and Moris pitched tents contained in the embassy to maintain their intimate moments private.
Moris, who’s seen within the film welling up in tears and excusing herself for a couple of minutes during a TV interview, says the vibe surrounding Assange got so sinister during that period that she feared she is likely to be killed each time she left the embassy to go home.
After that, Ecuadorian authorities began to sour on Assange, and it became clear that he was being filmed in his quarters. Assange’s team told The Post that the embassy security contractor was bribed and as an alternative began surveillance of Assange, and his visitors including his lawyers, doctors and journalistic partners.
The surveillance tapes were personally transported to the US by the safety contractor who in an email to his employees said: “We now work for the dark side.”
Assange was forced out of the embassy in 2019 and immediately arrested for avoiding the 2012 warrant.
He was sent to maximum-security Belmarsh Prison within the suburbs of London, where Shipton visited him and Assange asked for his help.
Now, having served his sentence for avoiding arrest, Assange is appealing an extradition order to the US where he could face 175 years in prison for his part in leaking American diplomatic cables and Pentagon files in 2010.
Shipton says that his role now is just to get his son “out of the s–t,” not discuss their past.
“How the small print of my adolescence and Julian’s adolescence would assistance is a whole mystery to me,” Shipton said. “Unless there’s a Magic Pudding you may put it in and form of turn it right into a key that opens a door to his cell … it seems to me to be just an invasion of privacy.”
Shipton sees specializing in his son and their relationship in an interview as a distraction from the secrets Wikileaks revealed, just as he sees prosecuting solely Assange as a distraction tactic by the US government.
“That is all a scurrilous try and smash a person’s life and take the main focus away from [the war crimes] he reported,” Shipton said. “You see within the Iraq war files, the Guantanamo Bay war files, and the Afghan war files all elements of impropriety and also you see that the executives who published them still have their indemnity.
“They put the entire concentrate on Julian Assange so we always see Julian and elements of his character and his family but we never have a look at the terrible revelations that … Wiki Leaks showed us.”
Shipton said there have been positive developments. Assange is not any longer kept in his cell for 23 hours a day, as he was during COVID, and he now has his circle of relatives for comfort.
“He has a loyal wife, who attends to his children, and a few of his emotional needs because she still has phone access,” Shipton said. “They’ll speak for 10 minutes, after which wait one other 10 minutes after which speak for 10 minutes again. Also, they will visit. Often Julian will ring me every other day except once I’m in America where my phone doesn’t work. So we can provide him progress reports.”
But Shipton said it’s even higher when people write letters of support to him or when crowds gather outside the jail to call for his release: “This all lifts the guts and keeps the spirit elevated.”
Moris told The Post that Julian makes one of the best out of the prison visits for his or her sons.
“The children sometimes attempt to bring, you realize, a stone or a flower or something like this but they check all the things so you may’t,” Stella said. “And a couple of weeks ago, our eldest tried to smuggle in some flowers that were in his hood. But that didn’t work.”
Like Shipton, she says she has ‘”faith, not hope” that Julian might be released and are available home to his family. Nor does she doubt the life she has chosen with him.
“I don’t have any regrets,” she said. “Because I feel the toughest part in life is finding a life partner. And you realize, I definitely found that. And we now have a commitment to make our life journey together. I attempt to imagine what our life might be like when Julian’s out because I see this case as transitory and I feel sooner or later he might be free and he might be vindicated.”
