The Unauthorized Autobiography of Julian Assange
Perpetual shit-show Julian Assange has notched another screw-up in his long list of self-undermining failures: The much-vaunted memoir, for which he received a $1.5 million advance, and wherein he was to lay out for once and for all a defense against the malicious attacks leveled at him from all sides, is going to be published tomorrow against his will because he is an impossible human being.
This was predictable. Virtually everyone Assange has worked with—the New York Times, the Guardian, Icelandic politician Birgitta Jonsdottir, former spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg, the unnamed "architect" of Wikileaks' digital infrastructure—has ended up disillusioned, disgusted, and emotionally exhausted after trying to partner with the squirrely man-child. And that's exactly what happened with Canongate, the Scottish publishing house that purchased the book last December, according to the Independent:
At the time Mr. Assange trumpeted the deal, saying he hoped his book would become "one of the unifying documents of our generation" which would explain his "global struggle to force a new relationship between the people and their governments."
But the relationship soured soon after the first draft of the manuscript was delivered to him in late March, prompting Mr Assange to pull the plug on the deal declaring, according to those present, that "all memoir is prostitution." For the publishers his complaints came out of the blue. Only a week earlier he had posed for a photo shoot and cleared the portrait that now graces the book's front cover.
Sources have told The Independent that the WikiLeaks founder was increasingly uncomfortable about how the book contained too many personal biographical details and read less like a political manifesto than he had hoped for. On 7 June he informed Canongate that he wanted to cancel his contract. Mr O'Hagan, meanwhile, became increasingly uncomfortable about the furore over book and asked for his name to be kept off the memoir. The result is a memoir ostensibly written by the WikiLeaks founder entitled: "Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography".
Canongate had already paid out roughly $790,000 to Assange by the time he tried to pull out, and since he wasn't offering to pay it back, it maintains that it still has the right to publish. Portions will be serialized in the Independent beginning tomorrow.
The book reportedly contains a chapter explaining, for the first time, Assange's side of the rape allegations pending against him in Sweden. It turns out that the girls were just mad because he wasn't returning his phone calls, and at the same time were intelligence agents plotting to bring him down in a honeytrap.
The international situation had me in its grip, and although I had spent time with these women, I wasn't paying enough attention to them, or ringing them back, or able to step out of the zone that came down with all these threats and statements against me in America. One of my mistakes was to expect them to understand this? I wasn't a reliable boyfriend, or even a very courteous sleeping partner, and this began to figure. Unless, of course, the agenda had been rigged from the start.
This will be an insufferable book.
[Image via Getty.]