A Man Without a Country
August 21, 2017
By Raffi Khatchadourian
... As Anderson left, Assange asked me, "Have you met my cat?" It darted past us.
"Is this the one with the Twitter account?" I said.
"It is," he said. "It’s Michi, which is Ecuadorian for 'cat.' " The animal’s name was in flux, he explained. "When Castro died, we started calling it Cat-stro." Assange had told the tabloids that the cat was a gift from his children. (He has several, some of whom live in France, under assumed names.) But someone who knows him well told me a different story: "Julian stared at the cat for about half an hour, trying to figure out how it could be useful, and then came up with this: Yeah, let’s say it’s from my children. For a time, he said it didn’t have a name because there was a competition in Ecuador, with schoolchildren, on what to name him. Everything is P.R. — everything" ...
"It can’t be public," Assange said, his tone sharpening. "There cannot be an image of Julian Assange looking at himself in a painting. That’s madness — absolute madness. That image is much worse for me than the painting is positive. Understand?" After much discussion, someone suggested that the two men be photographed together, with the canvas turned toward a wall, and Assange assented. "I think it’s not too bad," he said. "And it’s O.K. that my character is broader a bit, as someone who appreciates art" ...
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/21/julian-assange-a-man-without-a-country
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