Interviewees
We were incredibly fortunate to have so many highly insightful, knowledgeable visionaries, thinkers, authors and writers participating in this documentary, as well as those closest to Julian - his family and friends.
Stella Assange is a lawyer and human rights defender. She was born in South Africa, but holds dual Swedish and Spanish citizenship. Throughout her career, she has been an international advocate for human rights, most prominently in the case of her husband - Julian Assange. Stella has been on Assange's legal team since 2011, including during his asylum period in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and his incarceration in Belmarsh Prison.
Tariq Ali is a Pakistani-British political activist, writer, journalist, historian, filmmaker, and public intellectual. He is a member of the editorial committee of the New Left Review and Sin Permiso, and contributes to The Guardian, CounterPunch, and the London Review of Books. He studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Exeter College, Oxford. He is the Editor of ‘In Defence Of Julian Assange’, a book published in 2019.
John Richard Pilger is an Australian journalist, writer, scholar, and documentary filmmaker. He has mainly been based in Britain since 1962. He has also been a visiting professor at Cornell University in New York. Pilger is a strong critic of American, Australian, and British foreign policy, which he considers to be driven by an imperialist and colonialist agenda. Pilger has also criticised his native country's treatment of Indigenous Australians. He first drew international attention for his reports on the Cambodian genocide.
Jill Ellen Stein is an American physician, activist, and political candidate. She was the Green Party's nominee for president of the United States in the 2012, 2016 elections and is a current candidate for the 2024 Presidential Elections.
Stefania Maurizi is an investigative journalist currently contributing to the major Italian daily Il Fatto Quotidiano. She has worked withJulian Assange and WikiLeaks since 2009, teaming up with large teams of international media to investigate WikiLeaks' secret documents and publish revealing stories about them. She has been investigating the Assange case for 13 years through multi-jurisdictional FOIA requests in order to obtain primary information. She recently published a book titled ‘Secret Power: Wikileaks & Its Enemies’.
Rebecca Vincent is an American-British human rights campaigner, who is currently the Director of Campaigns for Reporters Without Borders. Vincent joined Reporters Without Borders in 2016 to open and run its London bureau. Vincent has led the organisation's campaigning in the case of Julian Assange and others. Vincent faced extensive barriers in monitoring extradition proceedings against Julian Assange in London courts. In April 2023, Vincent and Reporters Without Borders' Secretary-General Christophe Deloire were barred access from Belmarsh Prison, where they attempted to visit Assange.
Blending his background in documentaries with journalism, Mark Davis has produced a remarkable range of international reports over the past 18 years. Davis has been awarded Australia’s most prestigious journalism prize, the Walkley’s, five times for his reports. Davis was an eye-witness to the entire preparation of the Afghan War Logs, submitted in 2010 to Wikileaks by the whistle-blower Chelsea Manning. Davis documented the process in a film called ‘Inside Wikileaks’, which showed the Wikileaks editor-in-chief, Julian Assange, working alongside journalists from the New York Times, Guardian & Der Spiegel.
Niraj Lal Dr Niraj (Nij) Lal is a science presenter, energy researcher, and children's author based in Melbourne, Australia. He attended The University of Melbourne with Julian Assange, where they attended some of the same classes. In 2012 Niraj graduated as a Gates Scholar with a PhD in physics from the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, and in 2016 he was named one of the ABC's Top 5 Scientists Under 40.
Suelette Dreyfus is a technology researcher, journalist, and lecturer in the Department of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne, as well as the principal researcher on the impact of digital technologies on whistleblowing as a form of freedom of expression. In 2012 Dreyfus published a book that she Co-Wrote with Julian Assange, Titled: ‘Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier’.
Mary Kostakidis is an Australian journalist. For more than two decades, she was the face of SBS Television and the weeknight presenter of SBS World News Australia, and was the first woman appointed to present a national prime time news bulletin in Australia. Mary Kostakidis has a long-standing interest in social justice and human rights and in 2009 served on the National Human Rights Consultation Committee. In 2010-11 she was chair of the Sydney Peace Foundation and on the second year in that role presented Julian Assange with the Sydney Peace Foundation’s Gold Medal for Peace with Justice.
Gabriel Shipton is a film producer and the brother of WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. He has been involved in productions ranging from low budget feature films and quality television drama series, through to major studio pictures for more than 15 years. His feature-length documentary entitled Ithaka, gained over 600,000 views on ABCiView and toured Australia, the UK, The U.S, Brazil and other regions.. It follows the work of his father, John Shipton, fighting for Julian’s release.
David McBride is a former British Army major and Australian Army lawyer. From 2014 to 2016 McBride became a whilstleblower, providing the Australian Broadcasting Corporation with information about war crimes allegedly committed by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan. The ABC broadcast these details on Australian television in 2017.
Daniel Ellsberg was an American political activist, economist, and United States military analyst. While employed by the RAND Corporation, he precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of U.S. government decision-making in relation to the Vietnam War, to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other newspapers. We were very fortunate to be able to interview Ellsberg for this film in 2022 before he passed away in 2023. Assange has cited Ellsberg as one of the main inspirations for him creating the innovation of Wikileaks as a protection for whistleblowers.
Dean Yates was head of mental health and wellbeing strategy at Reuters, the world's largest news provider, for nearly three years until January 2020. Before that he was a journalist, bureau chief and senior editor at Reuters for more than 22 years. A diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder in early 2016 ended his news career. Dean was later told he had moral injury as well. Dean was a top news editor for Reuters in Asia; bureau chief in Baghdad during which three of his staff were killed in 2007 and a deputy bureau chief in Jerusalem and Jakarta.
Dominique Pradalié was elected President of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) in 2022. Pradalié has worked throughout her career in French public broadcasting, from ORTF to France Télévisions, and she has been editor-in-chief of the nightly news on France 2.
Chris Hedges is an American journalist, author, commentator and Presbyterian minister. In his early career, Hedges worked as a freelance war correspondent in Central America for The Christian Science Monitor, NPR, and Dallas Morning News.
Kristinn Hrafnsson is an Icelandic investigative journalist who has been the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks since 2018. He was the spokesperson for WikiLeaks between 2010 and 2017.
Dr. Pau Pérez-Sales is a psychiatrist and director of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid's Post-Doctoral Degree in Mental Health in Political Violence and Catastrophe. He is affiliated with the Department of Psychiatry Hospital La Paz in Madrid and Director of SiR[a], Centre for research, forensic documentation and rehabilitation of ill-treatment and torture victims.
Jennifer Robinson is an Australian human rights lawyer, a barrister with Doughty Street Chambers in London and an adjunct lecturer in Law at the University of Sydney Law School. She is a long-standing member of the legal team defending Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. Robinson began advising WikiLeaks in October 2010, and she remains a member of his legal team under the direction of Baltasar Garzon. She has defended Assange in the extradition proceedings in London and advised WikiLeaks through the publication of secret American diplomatic cables and the Chelsea Manning proceedings.
George Christensen is journalist, blogger and podcaster and a former Australian politician who was a member of the Australian House of Representatives from 2010 to 2022, as the member of parliament (MP) for the division of Dawson. In Nov 2021 — he introduced a bill to free WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, calling his imprisonment a “disgrace". In feb 2020 he visited Julian in Belmarsh Prison.
David Shoebridge is an Australian politician and former barrister. He is a member of the Australian Greens and was elected to the Senate as the party's lead candidate in New South Wales at the 2022 federal election, in a term beginning on 1 July 2022. He previously served in the New South Wales Legislative Council and on the Woollahra Municipal Council. David is the Greens NSW spokesperson for Forestry, Industrial Relations, Planning and Heritage, Firearms, Justice and Local Government.
Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. is an American environmental lawyer and writer. He is the chairman and founder of Children's Health Defense, an anti-vaccine advocacy group and an independent candidate in the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
John Shipton is an anti-war activist and architect in Sydney, Australia, and the father of Julian Assange. He founded the WikiLeaks Party and was involved in the creation of WikiLeaks. He campaigns and acts as an ambassador for Assange and was featured in the documentary Ithaka, produced by his son Gabriel Shipton.
Sajad Satter Mutashar was an Iraqi civilian who was injured in the U.S. air attack in Al-Amin al-Thaniyah, New Baghdad on the 12th of July 2007. Sajad recovered partly from his injuries, but was sadly killed in a car bomb incident in Baghdad in march 2021.
Ahlam Abdelhussein Tuman is an Iraqi civlian, mother and widow to Saleh Mutashar Tuman who was killed in the U.S. air attack in Al-Amin al-Thaniyah, New Baghdad on the 12th of July 2007.