

Women Accusing WikiLeaks Founder Maintains Charges of Sexual Misconduct - DanielBMarkham
http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/declassified/2010/08/25/lawyer-for-women-accusing-wikileaks-founder-maintains-charges-of-sexual-misconduct.html

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thirdusername
It's somewhat implied in Sweden that if you hire Lief Silbersky the defense
lawyer, it means you did it and that you stand a good chance of getting away
with it.

 _A detailed, chronological account of the women’s alleged encounters with
Assange—which in both cases began with consensual sexual contact but later
included what the women claimed was nonconsensual sex, in which Assange didn’t
use a condom_

I'm confused I thought non-consensual sex was rape, or is there a law in
Sweden that says women who regret their sexual encounters can now withdraw
consent retroactively?

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sorbus
I think that the main issue was that he didn't use a condom in those
additional encounters, which resulted in the withdrawal of consent. One
assumes that consent may be offered conditionally, such that consent is
withdrawn automatically if the conditions are violated - therefore, one might
say "I consent if you use a condom," and once he did not wear a condom the
consent was withdrawn.

More pessimistically, in the US, at least, there is no requirement to
communicate the withdrawal of consent - during an act, a partner may decide to
withdraw consent, and it is withdrawn regardless of whether it is communicated
or indicated in any way; combined with the issue of proving whether consent
was given or not, this means that retroactively withdrawing consent is
trivial. I am not familiar with Swedish law, but I doubt that it fixes these
issues - preventing false negatives seems to generally be considered more
important than preventing false positives, to most people.

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EvanK
That article, for being so wordy, is remarkably slim on details. If the issue
is that he refused to use a condom, then that doesn't constitute rape if they
decided to have sex with him anyway. If he actually did force himself on
someone without their consent, that's a whole different (and much more
serious) issue and he should face the repercussions.

