> The narrative presented in that post also ignores the fact that after the initial investigation, the case was dropped - it was only reinstated because the legal representative of the women involved asked that it be reviewed
the post says
> · After an arrest warrant was issued a senior prosecutor named Eva Finne pulled rank and canceled it, dropping the matter completely on August 25th saying the evidence “disclosed no crime at all.”
> · Out of the blue it was restarted again on the 29th, this time by another prosecutor named Marianne Ny.
your first claim in the quoted sentence is that the post ignores that the case was dropped. it does not ignore it; it explicitly describes the case being dropped, explaining how and why. indeed, a large fraction of the post is devoted to discussing these facts from different angles
your second claim is that the case was only reinstated on the request of 'the legal representative of the women involved'. the post does not rebut this so much as it flatly denies it; that's not surprising, since it's a claim i haven't heard before, so possibly she hadn't heard of it either
additionally, in the context of replying to a link to this post, your perfectly objectively correct lead-in text
> She described being in a situation where she was unable to give consent, and where Assange acted in a way that violated her previous expression of consent (in that she'd expressly only agreed to sex if he wore a condom, and in this case he didn't).
implies that caitlin johnstone, the author of the post that you were presumably commenting on, believed or at least suggested that the alleged situation would not amount to a crime, if it had happened. the point of view you are implicitly imputing to her is one that she vehemently disclaims at length in the linked post. for example, she writes:
> I see a lot of well-meaning Assange defenders using some very weak and unhelpful arguments against this smear, suggesting for example that having unprotected sex without the woman’s permission shouldn’t qualify as sexual assault or that if AA had been assaulted she would necessarily have conducted herself differently afterward. Any line of argumentation like that is going to look very cringey to people like myself who believe rape culture is a ubiquitous societal illness that needs to be rolled back far beyond the conventional understanding of rape as a stranger in a dark alley forcibly penetrating some man’s wife or daughter at knifepoint. Don’t try to justify what Assange is accused of having done, just point out that there’s no actual evidence that he is guilty and that very powerful people have clearly been pulling some strings behind the scenes of this narrative.
> it does not ignore it; it explicitly describes the case being dropped, explaining how and why
It discusses it in a manner unrelated to the agency of the women involved, ignoring the fact that they were involved in it being reinstated. I should have associated the two clauses there more closely to make it clearer what I was objecting to.
> implies that caitlin johnstone, the author of the post that you were presumably commenting on, believed or at least suggested that the alleged situation would not amount to rape, if it had happened
This was intended to be in reference to the observation that initially nobody asserted that they'd been raped. Rape isn't defined by whether someone believes they've been raped, and there's evidence that many people who will disclose that they've been subject to all the elements of rape will refuse to describe it as such. A victim failing to describe it as rape doesn't give you a significant amount of information.
