When the case was finally wrapped up in 2019, many months before the statute of limitations was reached, a third prosecutor observed simply that "it cannot be assumed that further inquiries will change the evidential situation in any significant manner" (p261).
Couched in lawyerly language, that was an admission that interviewing Assange would not lead to any charges. The preceding nine years had been a legal charade.
But in those intervening years, the illusion of a credible case was so well sustained that major newspapers, including Britain's The Guardian newspaper, repeatedly referred to "rape charges" against Assange, even though he had never been charged with anything.
More significantly, as Melzer keeps pointing out, the allegations against Assange were so clearly unsustainable that the Swedish authorities never sought to seriously investigate them. To do so would have instantly exposed their futility.
Instead, Assange was trapped. For the seven years that he was given asylum in Ecuador's London embassy, Swedish prosecutors refused to follow normal procedures and interview him where he was, in person or via computer, to resolve the case. But the same prosecutors also refused to issue standard reassurances that he would not be extradited onwards to the US, which would have made his asylum in the embassy unnecessary.
In this way, Melzer argues "the rape suspect narrative could be perpetuated indefinitely without ever coming before a court. Publicly, this deliberately manufactured outcome could conveniently be blamed on Assange, by accusing him of having evaded justice" (p254).
Neutrality droppedUltimately, the success of the Swedish case in vilifying Assange derived from the fact that it was driven by a narrative almost impossible to question without appearing to belittle the two women at its centre.
But the rape narrative was not the women's. It was effectively imposed on the case - and on them - by elements within the Swedish establishment, echoed by the Swedish media. Melzer hazards a guess as to why the chance to discredit Assange was seized on so aggressively.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Swedish leaders dropped the country's historic position of neutrality and threw their hand in with the US and the global "war on terror". Stockholm was quickly integrated into the western security and intelligence community (p102).
All of that was put in jeopardy as Assange began eyeing Sweden as a new base for WikiLeaks, attracted by its constitutional protections for publishers.
In fact, he was in Sweden for precisely that reason in the run-up to WikiLeaks' publication of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs. It must have been only too obvious to the Swedish establishment that any move to headquarter WikiLeaks there risked setting Stockholm on a collision course with Washington (p159).
This, Melzer argues, is the context that helps to explain an astonishingly hasty decision by the police to notify the public prosecutor of a rape investigation against Assange minutes after a woman referred to only as "S" first spoke to a police officer in a central Stockholm station.
In fact, S and another woman, "A", had not intended to make any allegation against Assange. After learning he had had sex with them in quick succession, they wanted him to take an HIV test. They thought approaching the police would force his hand (p115). The police had other ideas.
The irregularities in the handling of the case are so numerous, Melzer spends the best part of 100 pages documenting them. The women's testimonies were not recorded, transcribed verbatim, or witnessed by a second officer. They were summarised.
The same, deeply flawed procedure - one that made it impossible to tell whether leading questions influenced their testimony or whether significant information was excluded - was employed during the interviews of witnesses friendly to the women. Assange's interview and those of his allies, by contrast, were recorded and transcribed verbatim (p132).
The reason for the women making their statements - the desire to get an HIV test from Assange - was not mentioned in the police summaries.
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