Julian Assange, Cat Hater

Bill Keller called him elusive, manipulative and volatile in his recent cover story for the magazine. Now we can add cat hater to Julian Assange’s biography. More negative news about Assange comes from the new book Inside WikiLeaks: My Time With Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website, written by the former WikiLeaks spokesman, Daniel Domscheit-Berg. In an excerpt published by Vanity Fair in February, one of the many accusations Domscheit-Berg makes against Assange is cruelty to cats.

All of which has been refuted by Renata Avila who points out that Domscheit-Berg appears to be on a campaign to smear Assange to promote his own Wikileaks alternative:

I can confidently say that, while visiting Mr Domscheit-Berg in Wiesbaden, I was able to meet and observe his cat. This was immediately after Mr Assange had been staying with him. I myself have a cat and from my observations it was a perfectly normal and healthy cat that, like all cats, enjoyed attention. Mr Domscheit-Berg was too busy to pay him much attention, as he was often on the telephone or on the computer, so I spent quite a bit of time playing with the cat. Mr Domscheit-Berg watched and replied, laughing fondly, that the way I was playing with the cat was “exactly the same way” as Mr Assange had played with the cat the week before. There was absolutely no mention from Mr Domscheit-Berg that the cat had been abused or mistreated in any way by Mr Assange. Therefore, it is very unlikely that a healthy animal, behaving normally and playing with strangers, had any disorder provoked by Mr Assange’s behavior, as suggested by Mr Domscheit-Berg.

I was alarmed by all the private details Domscheit-Berg was disclosing to journalists, irrelevant details that only yellow press or groups hostile to WikiLeaks or Mr Assange would care about. Useful details for someone willing to divert the attention from all the important information disclosed by WikiLeaks’ sources.

Bad journalism, NYT, no cookie for you — via redwolf.newsvine.com