My view on the rape thing is mostly in line with what I believe to be the facts of the case and I strongly believe Assange should stand trial and if found guilty should be serve time. However, I find a lot of the machinations around the whole rape case to be extremely suspect but if the facts are what they are <i>and</i> there was no weight given to who committed the alleged crime rather than what the alleged crime was when the case was re-opened then I think he should be able to get a fair trial with proper discovery and with the women that made the allegations in the first place as the witnesses, even a semblance of a show or sham trial will cause a real problem in the longer term and any extradition to the USA afterwards would prove Assange was right all along and will cause serious diplomatic damage as well as cost the UK, USA and Sweden significant goodwill.<p>If convicted he should not get time off for time spent in the embassy, that&#x27;s not the same as time spent in a Swedish jail. He <i>should</i> however get the guarantee that he&#x27;s not going to be extradited to the US no matter what, that seems like a &#x27;free&#x27; thing for Sweden and would do a lot of good in terms of moving this case forward, which especially for the women would seem to me to be of prime importance.<p>Finally, Assange will likely <i>also</i> end up having to stand trial for skipping bail in the UK.<p>But all that has absolutely nothing to do - I hope, at least - with Wikileaks and what it has done for us all and I for one am quite grateful to Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, Julian Assange and whoever else had a hand in removing some of the veil around all that is ugly and that makes our world into the relatively bad place that it continues to be.<p>If it takes &#x27;flawed&#x27; people to get us there, then so be it.<p>As for Strauss-Kahn or Julian Assange, when it comes to their public and their private affairs (and crimes) there should be no difference in how they are treated, fame should not be a free pass for misbehavior.<p>There are lots of things that don&#x27;t sit right with me about how the Swedes handled this case, for instance in other cases they actually have gone abroad to interview suspects, higher priority crimes never made it to the same level of international police activity, it is relatively unheard of that someone at that level of responsibility would personally get involved to re-open a case, the fact that the womens actions totally contradict their public statements at the time and so on so I have no way of knowing what is the truth but I do know there is <i>some</i> truth to the allegations and I feel that guys that are jerks to women at this level should definitely not be given a free pass.<p>Personally I have no idea what could drive a man like Assange to do stuff like this, maybe that&#x27;s what fame will do to you. See also: Bill Cosby and a bunch of British TV characters, Roman Polanski and so on. It seems as if at some point in time something in their psyche switched and they thought they could get away with anything (and some of them actually did get away, sadly).