By Sammie Jones-

Assange was questioned at Equador’s London Embassy last month over the allegations. For the first time the whistle blower has decided to give his account of what happened in August 2010. Assange claims his decision was influenced by a leak of information from the Swedish police.

A transcript of a police interview with the woman was leaked to media in December 2010, but Assange, who claims to have wanted to tell his side of the story since then, kept quiet until now.

It is a bit strange for a whistleblower restricted to Ecuador’s  London embassy  where he has been claiming asylum since June 2012, to keep his side of the story quiet up until now.

“I am now releasing my statement to the public,” Assange said in a letter accompanying the document. “The reason is simple. I want people to know the truth about how abusive this process has been.”

Only last week, the UN’s working group on arbitrary detention rejected an appeal by the UK against its ruling that the Wikileaks founder faced a risk of ”prolonged deprivation in breach of reasonableness, necessity and proportionality”.

Assange’s release of his statement also comes following exclusive access by the Guardian into the details of the sexual encounter that led to his rape allegation.

Assange’s says his bank cards were blocked after his arrival in Sweden in the summer of 2010, following his intense conflict with  the U.S government over his release of  sensitive documents This made him highly dependent on the hospitality of others.

”The woman “appeared to be sympathetic to my plight and also appeared to be romantically interested in me”, Assange told prosecutors investigation the allegation of rape against him. “She was not close to people I was close to, so it seemed that those who meant me harm would be unlikely to try to find me by monitoring her movements.”

She “made it very clear that she wanted to have sexual intercourse” with Assange and placed his hands on her breasts while in a cinema, he continued. “I felt concerned about the intensity of [her] interest and I also deeply loved another woman, which played on my mind and left me emotionally distracted.”

The intensity of her interest made him fear how she might react if she felt he was rejecting her, he said. He claimed he later discovered she had collected dozens of photos of him in the weeks before they met, her Flickr photo account filled with “pages and pages” of photos of Assange.

He reveals that  she wanted him to have a test for sexually transmitted diseases, the statement continues.

“We were in agreement and arranged to meet the following day in the nearby park around lunchtime, when I would have time to get tested. She said she was fine and seemed at ease. You can imagine my disbelief when I woke the next morning to the news that I had been arrested in my absence for ‘rape’ and that police were ‘hunting’ all over Stockholm for me.”

Assange claims that text messages sent by the woman at the time – access to which his lawyers were allowed only briefly and early in the case – show that she was not asleep during the sex.

“I was certain [she] was not asleep. I was also certain she expressly consented to unprotected sex before such intercourse started.” The woman has insisted that a prerequisite of intercourse was that a condom be used.

He claims the texts also show that the woman said at the time she “did not want to put any charges on Julian Assange”, but that “the police were keen on getting their hands on him” and that she was “shocked when they arrested him” because she “only wanted him to take a test”.

In the transcripts, originally seen by the Guardian in 2010, the woman told police she met Assange at a seminar at which he was speaking, and they both went to the cinema  where they kissed in the back row.

Two days later, the woman arranged to meet him and they went to her flat. They started to have sex, she said, but she moved away because Assange had not wanted to wear a condom, and he fell asleep.

Her accuser told police they later had sex at least once when he had “unwillingly” worn a condom, but the following morning, after she had gone to buy breakfast and then climbed back into bed and fallen asleep, she had woken to find him having sex with her without a condom.

The woman then told Assange: “You better not have HIV” and he answered “Of course not,” but “she couldn’t be bothered to tell him one more time because she had been going on about the condom all night. She had never had unprotected sex before.” The statement says that she bought the morning after pill and took an STD test but when she telephoned Assange asking him to be tested he said he didn’t have the time.

If the details of this story is accurate, it is rape. A woman must consent to sex each time, and a man has no right to penetrate her whilst she is asleep without her expressed consent.