{"id":199591,"date":"2025-12-19T05:14:19","date_gmt":"2025-12-19T05:14:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/199591\/"},"modified":"2025-12-19T05:14:19","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T05:14:19","slug":"julian-assange-documentary-is-one-of-the-most-chilling-films-of-2025-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/199591\/","title":{"rendered":"Julian Assange documentary is one of the most chilling films of 2025 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Six Billion Dollar Man <\/p>\n<p>\ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d7 <\/p>\n<p>Director:  Eugene Jarecki <\/p>\n<p>Cert: None<\/p>\n<p>Genre: Documentary<\/p>\n<p>Starring: Featuring Julian Assange, Stella Assange, Jennifer Robinson, Pamela Anderson, Edward Snowden, Rafael Correa<\/p>\n<p>Running Time: 2 hrs 9 mins<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Eugene Jarecki\u2019s The Six Billion Dollar Man may be the most chilling film of 2025, not simply because of the notoriety of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/julian-assange\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer nofollow noopener\" title=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/julian-assange\/\">Julian Assange<\/a>, its subject, but also as a clinical expos\u00e9 of the elaborate machinery of state power, media hostility and private opportunism. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Assange remains a spectral presence throughout, more talked about than seen. The director uses that space to explore a bigger story: the vast, interconnected system that made his destruction a priority. The results are as rigorous as they are alarming.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Inevitably, the film revisits the familiar contours of Assange\u2019s rise: WikiLeaks\u2019 early shots across the bow, from the \u201ccollateral murder\u201d video to the vast diplomatic-cable leak that briefly placed him at the apex of global transparency activism. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Jarecki digs deep, excavating evidence and testimonies that suggest just how ruthlessly forces on both sides of the Atlantic sought to neutralise him.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">A key revelation concerns the Swedish rape allegations in 2010. The documentary presents anonymised interviews and contemporaneous text messages from the women involved, indicating that neither accused Assange of rape and that both were alarmed by the direction police were nudging their statements. What was long whispered emerges in documented form: this appears to have been a case shaped as much by political utility as by fact.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Even more harrowing is what happened after Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London. Jarecki tracks how UC Global, the Spanish security firm contracted to protect him, instead transformed his refuge into a surveillance trap. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">A former employee, the documentary\u2019s own Deep Throat, describes sex tapes, discussions of poisoning, and a pipeline of embassy footage uploaded to an American IP address housed in the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas (an establishment coincidentally owned by the Trump megadonor Sheldon Adelson).<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Alarmingly, Sigurdur \u201cSiggi\u201d Thordarson, the US indictment\u2019s star witness \u2013 a convicted paedophile and hacker \u2013 blithely admits on camera that he fabricated key claims about Assange instructing him to hack Iceland\u2019s parliamentary systems. Pressed by Jarecki, he shrugs: he \u201ccan\u2019t remember\u201d.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">If Jarecki\u2019s portrait is unabashedly sympathetic, its implications are nonetheless bracing. Even if the 12 years he spent in confinement doesn\u2019t bother you, the apparatuses used to pursue him will give you the heebie-jeebies.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">In cinemas from Friday, December 19th<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Six Billion Dollar Man \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d7 Director: Eugene Jarecki Cert: None Genre: Documentary Starring:&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":199592,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[93,61,60,97222],"class_list":["post-199591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-julian-assange"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199591\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/199592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}