- A bizarre anecdote about Julian Assange claims that he doesn’t use cutlery and instead eats hot food like pudding and baked potatoes with his hands.
- The claim was made by Andrew O’Hagan, a novelist and former ghostwriter for Assange who has since turned into a critic.
- “People in magazine articles say he doesn’t eat, but he had three helpings of lasagne that night and he ate both the baked potato and the jam pudding with his hands,” O’Hagan wrote in 2014.
- Assange was arrested and removed from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on Thursday after Ecuador revoked his asylum.
The strangest anecdote about Julian Assange claims that the WikiLeaks founder doesn’t use cutlery and eats hot food like baked potatoes with his hands.
Andrew O’Hagan, a novelist and former ghostwriter for Assange who has since turned into a critic, published an essay in the London Review of Books in March 2014 about his time with Assange, accusing him of lying.
But it is also filled with bizarre claims about Assange’s habits, including that “he tended to eat pretty much with his hands.”
“People in magazine articles say he doesn’t eat, but he had three helpings of lasagne that night and he ate both the baked potato and the jam pudding with his hands,” O’Hagan wrote.
O'Hagan said he observed this when he was with Assange in 2011 in Norfolk, in eastern England, to talk about the book he was to write about Assange. Assange was confined to the Norfolk house at the time after being arrested on charges of sexual misconduct in Sweden.
The book project later collapsed, and O'Hagan instead wrote "Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography." He has since written "The Secret Life," which examines Assange and two other "outlaws."
In the essay in the London Review of Books, Assange wrote that "the extent of Julian's lying convinced me that he is probably a little mad, sad and bad."
Assange was arrested and removed from Ecuador's London embassy, where he had been living for nearly seven years, on Thursday morning.
Read more: Video shows Julian Assange being forcibly removed from Ecuadorian Embassy after arrest by UK police
Ecuador had revoked his asylum, granted in 2012. Ecuador's president said that "the patience of Ecuador has reached its limit on the behavior of Mr. Assange."
Assange could now face extradition to the US over WikiLeaks' involvement in the release of hundreds of thousands of US military documents.