“We are worried,” Stella Assange said on Thursday morning on the 7News breakfast television program. The seven years the Australian spent holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and the five years in the British high-security prison Belmarsh have left their mark.
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“He had to endure these hardships both mentally and physically,” stressed the 40-year-old lawyer. Assange has been constantly confined to four walls for all these years. “This is obviously having a serious impact on his health and we will definitely try to have all the necessary tests carried out to see what his true state is,” Stella Assange continued. The 52-year-old has not yet made any public statements since returning home to Australia on Wednesday evening.
- Video: Julian Assange as a free man
A US court on the Mariana island of Saipan – a US territory in the western Pacific – approved a deal between the Australian and the American judiciary on Wednesday in connection with espionage allegations. Assange is now a free man after 14 years of legal wrangling. From 2010 onwards, Wikileaks published secret material from US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan by whistleblower Chelsea Manning.
Assange had never met his wife in freedom until arriving in Canberra: the relationship between the two only began during his time in the Ecuadorian embassy. In 2022, the couple, who have two children, married in Belmarsh Prison. According to WikiLeaks, Assange was held in solitary confinement in a very small cell for 23 hours a day.
“It will be a process”
Stella Assange went on to say that her husband now wants to spend time with his two young sons. “It will be a process – he was imprisoned and locked up under very harsh conditions. To date, we have not been able to lead a normal family life.” Assange now needs privacy and time: “We will let him decide for himself how he wants to spend his days and his time now.”
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