"Just a funny bugger!"

Gawker publishes Assange’s ‘creepy, lovesick’ emails
Friday, December 17, 2010

Lesley Ciarula Taylor, Staff Reporter

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange outside Ellingham Hall, the home of his friend, journalist Vaughan Smith, in Norfolk, England, December 17, 2010. A series of embarrassing emails from Assange has surfaced on Gawker.com. (Paul Hackett/Reuters)

Days after a hacker attack by Julian Assange supporters, gossip and schadenfreude website Gawker.com has fished out the perfect revenge: the whistleblower’s emails to a teenage girl.

With the unsubtle headline “The Creepy, Lovesick Emails of Julian Assange,” Gawker, run by British journalist Nick Denton, on Friday published eight messages Assange purportedly sent to a 19-year-old after they met at a bar in Melbourne, Australia, in April 2004.

Assange, noted Gawker archly, “has some embarrassing documents in his own past.”

An online activist group called Anonymous earlier this week exposed private contact information for Gawker’s commenters.

The unidentified woman gave the website Assange’s emails, though none of her replies.

Assange, then 33, had walked her home from the bar and emailed her a few days later.

The emails started with a straightforward “I found your company and your kisses very appealing. I want to explore them further. Are you busy Monday night?”

He found out her phone number, which shocked her. “Your reaction to my phone call lacked dignity and stung me,” he wrote. “You seemed above such trivialities.”

Things deteriorated. He persisted, spinning sentences about “the memory of a strange dream” and “the script full of unclosed parentheses.”

She told him to stop calling. It all ended with Assange’s counter-brush-off, laced with bitter dismay that she turned out to be a “committed solipsist.”

Seven years later, she tried to put it in perspective for Gawker: “I don’t think he’s a bad person,” she said. “He’s just a funny bugger.”