Getty Julian Assange has a son named Daniel Assange.
Daniel Assange, Julian Assange’s son, is a software designer who lives in Australia. He’s the child that the WikiLeaks co-founder had when he was a teenager. However, Assange is very secretive about his family.
Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks co-founder who was arrested in London on April 11, 2019, may have other children throughout the world, too, but that’s never been definitively proven, despite an account claiming such from a friend.
Assange now stands accused in an U.S. indictment of helping Chelsea Manning break a password to obtain classified U.S. documents.
You can see a picture of Assange’s son here. They share a strong resemblance.
Here’s what you need to know about Daniel Assange:
1. Julian Assange Dated Daniel’s Mother When Both Were Teens
GettyJulian Assange.
By some accounts Julian Assange was married once before to ex wife Teresa Assange, who is the mother of Daniel Assange. They were teenage sweethearts. According to AJC, he was 18-years-old when he married, but the marriage didn’t last.
However, Daily Mail reports that the marriage was an unofficial one and some sites, such as the Sydney Morning Herald, say that Daniel’s mother was a 17-year-old girlfriend of Daniel’s who has changed her name and was never identified.
Most sites agree: She was a teenager when they dated, according to Daily Mail. Assange was 18 at the time and living in Australia, where he was born and raised. Julian Assange was born on July 3, 1971, in Townsville, Australia.
Assange has been very secretive about his past over the years, only once referring to this relationship by writing that he dated “an intelligent but introverted 16-year-old.” It’s believed she now has a new name, according to Daily Mail.
2. Assange Distanced From His Family Because of His Notoriety, Reports Say, But His Son Says He Did It to Protect Him
GettyJulian Assange gestures to the media from a police vehicle on his arrival at Westminster Magistrates court on April 11, 2019 in London, England.
There are reports that Assange has distanced from his family. UK Telegraph reports Christine Assange, Julian’s mom, told Australian media that her son “distanced himself from the family for their own safety due to his growing notoriety.”
The blog Crikey, to which Daniel Assange once gave an interview, says he was the subject of a “bitter custody battle between his parents.” Their contact diminished when Julian left Australia, Crikey reported, quoting Daniel as saying, “It was just a general decline of relations. I was getting into my late teenage years, and single father and teenage son don’t mix particularly well in one house.”
However, the son also said he thought the decreased contact was Julian’s way of protecting the boy. “As for him not contacting me following that, it’s probably at least in part an attempt to protect me,” he told Crikey. “If it was known that I was the son and directly involved in some way, there was a likelihood of a direct retaliation, and my father was quite concerned about such things.”
Daniel spoke about his dad to the blog, saying, “His actions as a personal individual and his actions in a grand political sense are completely disconnected things, and they should be considered in that sense.”
3. Daniel Assange Works as a Software Designer in Australia
Julian Assange (Getty)
There’s not a lot known about Daniel Assange, who keeps a pretty low profile despite periodically emerging in an interview such as for the Crikey blog.
However, it is believed that Julian Assange’s son is in his 20s and works as a software designer.
The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper described Daniel as a “software designer from Melbourne” who “had minimal contact with his whistleblower father for three years, yet the pair seem to share many traits and views.”
Daily Mail alleged that Daniel Assange, Assange’s son, lives in Melbourne. New York Magazine once reported that Daniel had a website, but it’s deleted now. According to the magazine, it used to read, “Smart, irreverent, transgressive, condescending. Yup, like father like son, just maybe minus the megalomania.”
4. Daniel Assange Wrote About His Dad on a Twitter Account, Reports Say
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange speaks from the balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy where he continues to seek asylum following an extradition request from Sweden in 2012. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has insisted that Assange’s detention should be brought to an end. (Getty)
UK Telegraph reported in 2010 that Daniel Assange had used a pseudonym on Twitter to ask that his dad be treated fairly.
“Let us do our best to ensure my father is treated fairly and apolitically,” Daniel Assange said on Twitter. “I’m hoping this isn’t just an intermediary step towards his extradition to the US.”
The Twitter account is now deleted, although you can find multiple tweets directed at it from when it was still up.
New York Magazine was one of the sites that reported Daniel Assange was tweeting. Some of the tweets printed by the New Yorker include, “Father declared me a sociopath, mother thinks I’m a monster and this romantic situation is oh-so-very-uncomfortable” and, of his dad, “I think he just has a tendency to follow the path of highest resistance, simply for the sake of defiance.”
5. A Friend Claimed in a Tell-All Book That Assange Has Other Children
Julian Assange
Does Julian Assange have other children in addition to Daniel Assange?
The exact number of Assange’s children and their identities are not known. However, a friend wrote in a tell-all book the claim that Assange has fathered four “love children” over the years.
The friend, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, claimed, according to Daily Mail, “Often I sat in large groups and listened to Julian boast about how many children he had fathered in various parts of the world.”
He also said, Daily Mail reported: “He seemed to enjoy the idea of lots and lots of Julians, one on every continent. Whether he took care of any of these alleged children, or whether they existed at all, was another question.”