Julian Assange’s lawyer says he secretly fathered two kids with her while hiding in Ecuadorian embassy
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange secretly fathered two children with one of his lawyers while he was staying at the Ecuadorean embassy in London, reports state.
Assange, 48, in 2015, reportedly began a relationship with a South-African born lawyer, Stella Morris, in the embassy when he was fighting extradition to the United States.
Assange is wanted in the US on espionage charges for leaking thousands of US intelligence documents. He was recently transferred to a high-security prison in England last year.
Morris, 37, while talking to the Daily Mail on April 11, revealed that their first son, Gabriel, was born in 2017, while their second son, Max, was born last year in 2019. Both of them are British citizens.
She revealed that both the births were filmed with a GoPro camera and the footage was sent to Assange so he could witness it too. The outlet reported that the couple managed to keep their relationship and the birth of their children secret from the Ecuadorean staff and diplomats who had given Assange refuge at the embassy for nearly seven years.
The lawyer told the outlet that she was looking to marry the Wikileaks founder, "I love Julian deeply, and I am looking forward to marrying him." Morris also revealed that British rapper M.I.A. is a godmother to the children.
The couple reportedly met in London in 2011 over a cup of tea when her friend Jennifer Robinson, who was working with Assange, introduced the two.
Morris reportedly helped defend Assange against the 2010 rape allegations in Sweden as she spoke Swedish fluently, having spent time in the country as a child. The charges against Assange, in that case, were later dropped. Reports state that by the time their first child was born, Assange was already in the embassy for nearly four years.
"At the beginning, it was a working relationship. I was in the embassy every day and Julian became a friend," she said. "Over the years he went from being a person I enjoyed seeing to the man I wanted to see most in the world. His public image is not what I fell in love with, it’s the real person behind it."
The couple, at the time, had planned to marry in the embassy and Assange had picked out a diamond ring online. The pair became engaged in 2017.
"At the time that we started trying for a baby, it seemed that life was set to change for the better for Julian," she said, adding that he has met both the children, although the elders had to be sneaked into the embassy when he was just one week old to be introduced to his father. A friend reportedly carried the baby inside, pretending it was hers.
The couple reportedly believes that the US intelligence operatives had attempted to steal the DNA from one of Gabriel's diaper after becoming suspicious that Assange was his father.
Morris now fears that she will never see him again because he might contract the deadly novel coronavirus in prison. "I am now terrified I will not see him alive again,” she said. “Julian has been fiercely protective of me and has done his best to shield me from the nightmares of his life," she told the outlet. "I have lived quietly and privately, raising Gabriel and Max on my own and longing for the day we could be together as a family. Now I have to speak out because I can see his life is on the brink.”