Lady Gaga spent five hours over dinner on Monday with Julian Assange. From MIA providing the soundtrack to his Web series to Oliver Stone and Michael Moore co-authoring a New York Times op-ed, see the WikiLeaks founder’s staunchest celebrity supporters.
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Lady Gaga seems to think he was just born this way. Julian Assange got a visit from Gaga on Monday at the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, where the WikiLeaks founder is holed up as he fights extradition to Sweden. The pop star showed up in a witch’s hat at about 7 p.m. and stayed with Assange for about five hours. The two eventually posed for a snapshot together, which Gaga posted to her littlemonsters.com website with the caption: “No headline.”
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Rapper and singer MIA appears to be the hidden force behind Gaga’s random visit to the hacktivist in London. A day before photos of Gaga and Assange together hit the Web, MIA tweeted at the pop star, “if ur at harrods today, come visit Assange at the Ecuador embassy across the st. im there. ill bring TEA and CAKE.” MIA is a known supporter of the embattled provocateur—she even wrote the theme music for his talk show on Russia Today.
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Unsurprisingly, liberal documentary director Michael Moore has been extra vocal—and generous—with his support for Assange and WikiLeaks. In 2010, Moore posted $20,000 to help bail Assange out of jail and offered his website, servers, and domain names to help keep WikiLeaks going. “WikiLeaks, God bless them, will save lives as a result of their actions,” Moore wrote in a statement on his website. “And any of you who join me in supporting them are committing a true act of patriotism. Period.”
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Moore’s fellow A-list director Oliver Stone also has lent his support to WikiLeaks, co-writing an op-ed in The New York Times with Moore in support of Assange. “We have spent our careers as filmmakers making the case that the news media in the United States often fail to inform Americans about the uglier actions of our own government. We therefore have been deeply grateful for the accomplishments of WikiLeaks, and applaud Ecuador’s decision to grant diplomatic asylum to its founder, Julian Assange, who is now living in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.”
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Along with Michael Moore, director Ken Loach also fronted some of Assange’s bail money—which he then lost last month when Assange violated his bail terms by taking refuge in the Ecuadoran Embassy to avoid being extradited to Sweden, where he would face sexual-assault charges. Offering his thoughts on those assault charges, Loach has said, “... It’s clear that he’s being set up. Clearly the Yanks want to get him back and either imprison him for a long time, or worse. We need a bit of solidarity with someone who has just told us things that we were entitled to know.”
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Earlier this summer, Just Foreign Policy, a civil-liberties advocacy group, addressed a letter to Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa in support of Assange’s request for asylum. Michael Moore, Oliver Stone, Bill Maher, and Naomi Wolf were also among the 10,000 others who signed the letter, which argued that “the ‘crime’ that he has committed is that of practicing journalism.”
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Bill Maher was among those who signed the letter in support of Assange’s asylum. The letter further argued that if Assange were to be extradited to Sweden, he could then be further extradited to the United States, where it was “likely” he could face the death penalty if tried and found guilty.
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Viggo Mortensen’s portrayal of Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings was as heroic as it gets, but Mortensen has more than a few heroes of his own, he revealed in a March op-ed published in The Boston Globe. In it he lists dozens of people he considers his “heroes,” including “Julian Assange and anyone who speaks truth to power, stands up against injustice and cruelty regardless of any consequential risk of ostracism or personal physical danger.”
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Self-proclaimed “feminist activist” and author Naomi Wolf made her support for Assange—even in spite of the sexual-assault claims against him—clear in a post addressed to Interpol. In it she sarcastically praises Interpol for going after “terrorists” like Assange, who dare to do things as innocuous as “text and tweet in the taxi on the way to one of the women’s apartments on a date.” “Thank you again, Interpol,” she wrote. “I know you will now prioritize the global manhunt for 1.3 million guys I have heard similar complaints about personally in the U.S. alone—there is an entire fraternity at the University of Texas you need to arrest immediately.”
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Though it was initially reported that Bianca Jagger, human-rights advocate, style icon, and former wife of Mick Jagger, was among the celebrities who posted bail for Assange, she later refuted that claim in a tweet. She did, however, show up at Assange’s bail hearing in 2010 and expressed worry over the case. “I am very concerned that this case is becoming politicized,” she said at the time. “If there are valid accusations against him then let them be heard. I don’t agree with everything he has done but the most important thing in law is justice, due process, and freedom of expression.”
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