Mother of Julian Assange’s Two Children Warns About the WikiLeaks Founder’s Fate

The renowned activist and whistleblower figure Julian Assange will appear at the four-week hearing in Old Bailey on September 7 that will likely determine what his fate will be.

Two courtrooms for proceedings have been set aside. There is a lot about the Assange case that is oversized, including the costs involved, estimated at tens of millions of pounds, and the 175-year sentence he is facing, if a district court judge grants his United States extradition. Outside the court, it is expected that supporters will gather to deliver impassioned speeches, raise up their fists in solidarity while crying out “Free Assange.”

Stella Morris is the most outspoken supporter of the WikiLeaks founder, who is facing 18 charges in the U.S. The charges include violating espionage law and conspiring to hack government computers after the former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning published a series of leaks in 2010. Washington claims these leaks endangered U.S. agents’ lives.

37-year-old Morris is the mother of two children that Assange fathered while he was held up in London’s Ecuadorian embassy. She says Assange will be facing a show trial if he’s extradited to the U.S.

“It is heartbreaking to think that if Julian is extradited and put in a US supermax prison, the boys will never get to know their father and he will never see them grow up,” Stella Morris said.

“It’s not Julian in the prison. It’s the kids that are being deprived of their father. It’s me that’s being deprived.”

The Assange case has drawn opinions from people all over the world, and the stakes reach far beyond one man. Many rightly regard 49-year-old Julian Assange as a hero who exposed serious wrongdoing by the state, including evidence of war crimes and civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan that the public had every right to see. Governments and their defenders have tried to paint him as a reckless leaker who endangered lives, yet no evidence has ever been produced that WikiLeaks’ publications got anyone killed, while the abuses those documents revealed were very real. At its core, what Assange did is what investigative journalists do everywhere: receive truthful information from a source and publish it in the public interest.

Julian Assange with his baby son Gabriel.

Spanish counsel Aitor Martinez, Ecuadorian counsel Carlos Poveda, Julian Assange, Stella Morris-Smith Robertson, barrister Jennifer Robinson.

Jail can be a worse fate than death, and where everyone is found guilty by the state.

If Julian Assange is convicted of the crimes in the U.S., it is expected that he will be locked up behind bars in a prison referred to as “The Alcatraz of the Rockies.”

The inmates at the Supermax prison in Colorado that includes hate preacher Abu Hamza, are living in 7ft by 12ft jail cells for 23 hours of the day.

Amnesty International said the conditions are inhumane. Others described it as a “high-tech version of Hell, designed to shut down all sensory perception”, and a “place worse than the death penalty.” The prison houses 400 inmates and is guarded by gun towers, dogs, and armed patrols.

Mexican drug lord Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman is jailed there, and so is Zacarias Moussaoui who was convicted of conspiracy to kill during the 9/11 attacks.

Assange would face a trial in Virginia. Former CIA officer John Kiriakou exposed its use of waterboarding and was convicted of disclosing the name of another officer in Virginia where the CIA is based. He said, “It’s impossible for Julian to receive a fair trial.”

These courts may show hardly any sympathy for Morris and the children, but she has asked them to consider the bigger picture, saying “Julian’s case has huge repercussions for freedom of expression and freedom of the press. This is an attack on journalism. If he is extradited to the US for publishing inconvenient truths about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, then it will set a precedent and any British journalist or publisher could also be extradited in the future.”

Assange’s lawyers say that because he is charged under the century-old Espionage Act, the Trump administration is setting dangerous precedents.

The law bans government secrets from being published and no protections are offered to the press under the First Amendment that guarantees free speech.

His defense team is basically saying that criminal laws in the U.S. apply abroad but its constitutional protections don’t, which means journalists anywhere on Earth are at risk of being prosecuted by the U.S. if they publish content the U.S. government deems to violate its laws.

The Obama administration had debates over the Espionage Act against Julian Assange but came to the conclusion to decide against it.

But President Trump has been at war with the press that often refers to as “enemy of the people” and doesn’t have a problem with going after the press. The Justice Department under Trump has said the hacked material was published with no regard to the safety of those named in the leaks therefore Assange isn’t defined as being a journalist.

“There have been so many abuses of the legal process throughout the case, including spurious new charges being introduced at the last minute, even though the hearing began in February, and it should be thrown out for that reason alone,” Morris said.

“But there are also fundamental legal reasons why the extradition should be blocked. This is a political act by the Trump government and Julian is accused of a political offense, which is outside the terms of the UK-US extradition treaty.”

“Anyone who cares about freedom of expression and freedom of the press should support Julian’s fight against extradition.”

Others have an opinion that the case reveals the problems of a relationship with the U.S. The Home Secretary “must” process the request but prosecutors in the U.S. are not required to prove their case besides stating there is “reasonable suspicion,” according to the extradition treaty.

John Shipton, Julian Assange’s father, said last night that, “The United Kingdom judiciary’s authority has been usurped by the U.S. Justice Department.”

Update (June 2026): The extradition fight described above ultimately ended not with an extradition, but with a plea deal.

On June 24, 2024, Julian Assange was released from London’s Belmarsh prison after roughly five years there, and on June 26, 2024 he pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified U.S. national defense information, in a U.S. federal court in Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands. The agreement was structured around time already served, allowing him to walk free and return home to Australia, where he reunited with Stella (referred to as Stella Morris in the original article above, now Stella Assange) and their two children. The deal closed the more than decade-long U.S. effort to prosecute him for publishing truthful information in the public interest. Press-freedom organizations greeted his release as a long-overdue victory: Reporters Without Borders called it “a long overdue victory for journalism and press freedom,” while Amnesty International and the Committee to Protect Journalists warned that the conviction itself — making Assange the first publisher convicted under the Espionage Act — leaves a dangerous weapon in prosecutors’ hands that could be turned against any journalist who exposes government wrongdoing. In October 2024, in his first major public appearance since release, Assange told the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe that he had “chosen freedom over unrealizable justice,” adding plainly that “journalism is not a crime, it is a pillar of a free and informed society” and that he had effectively “pleaded guilty to journalism.” His legal team has continued to campaign for a full U.S. presidential pardon, and a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers, including Representatives James McGovern and Thomas Massie, has formally urged that a pardon be granted to send a clear message that newsgathering will not be criminalized. Stella Morris’s 2020 warning, that prosecuting Assange would be an attack on journalism itself, has only been vindicated by how the case ultimately unfolded. For more of our coverage of his organization’s work, see our report on how WikiLeaks published “Spy Files Russia,” exposing the Kremlin’s mass surveillance system. This update does not change any of the facts reported above as they stood in 2020.