HE BACKED US ON ASSANGE FOR YEARS—NOW HIS DOCUMENTARY TELLS DIFFERENT STORY

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Eugene Jarecki’s new film claims the U.S. spent $6B to destroy Assange and WikiLeaks—he says it’s about all of us.

At the height of WikiLeaks’ power, filmmaker Eugene Jarecki received what he describes as “shattering evidence” of a coordinated international campaign to bring down Julian Assange.

What began as a trickle of revelations grew into an avalanche, forming the basis of The Six Billion Dollar Man: Julian Assange and the Price of Truth, Jarecki’s feature-length documentary that won the L'Œil d'or Grand Prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival, and made him the first ever documentary filmmaker to win a Golden Globe.

“Five years ago, absolutely shattering evidence was provided to me effectively in a brown paper bag,” Jarecki, whose film is now surrounded by Oscars buzz, told Newsweek. “Of what the U.S. had done to destroy Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. And I hadn't known any of it.”

Newsweek reached out to the White House for comment on Friday.

In the film, which adopts the pace of a geopolitical thriller, Jarecki tracks Assange’s journey from digital revolutionary to isolated prisoner—and as of June 2024, a free man.

While the film takes a balanced approach to Assange by drawing attention to the sexual assault allegations he faced in Sweden and flaws in his character, it also claims the U.S. government spent $6 billion funding a campaign aimed at dismantling WikiLeaks and its founder.

In 2020, a London court was told that President Donald Trump would "pardon" Assange if he cooperated with the administration by providing hacking sources. But while Jarecki remains adamant of the $6 billion bounty's legitimacy, there is little reported evidence that such an amount was fed through to the Ecuadorian government directly in exchange for the Latin American country to end Assange's asylum, as part of a longer pressure campaign.

From left: Julian Assange among a crowd; and next to Eugene Jarecki. Credit: DAVID DOLLMANN

However, the Ecuadorian government did receive a significant loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 2019, which is headquartered in and heavily influenced by the U.S. This was not an officially or publicly announced aid package and sparked speculation that it may have been to do with Assange.

“It’s not surprising that they put a $6 billion bounty on his head,” Jarecki said. “It’s not surprising that they set up a Pentagon task force to destroy him, destroy WikiLeaks, and destroy all of our right to the truth.”

The "bounty" was allegedly thought up by the Trump administration to force Ecuador, who had been keeping Assange in asylum, to hand him over.

The Six Billion Dollar Man premiered in Cannes in May, with Assange—free following a 14-year-long battle to evade extradition to the U.S. under espionage charges—appearing on the red carpet.

“He saw it for the first time,” Jarecki said. “I’m told that he really liked it.”

Assange was released after pleading guilty to conspiring to obtain and publicize classified government information.

“I pleaded guilty to journalism,” Assange later said.

Assange launched WikiLeaks in 2006 with the mission of enabling whistleblowers to anonymously release documents of public interest.

It quickly became a global force, publishing war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. diplomatic cables, and classified files from Guantanamo Bay. One of its earliest disclosures, the “Collateral Murder” video, showed a U.S. helicopter firing on unarmed civilians and journalists in Iraq—footage that Assange believed would have remained buried without the platform.

Jarecki’s film, years in the making, features a chorus of voices from inside WikiLeaks and beyond, including human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson and former WikiLeaks team member and later FBI informant, Sigurdur Thordarson.

It neatly splices together archives, surveillance tapes, interviews and even the odd previously unseen clip of Assange dancing, to form what Jarecki calls “a documentary thriller.”

“I didn’t set out to make a thriller,” he said. “It happened to us.

"We were suddenly in a position where countless characters were moving all over the world—with a guy sitting in jail, and everything was about whether he was going to go to America and be sentenced to 175 years.”

Assange, the Avatar

Throughout the film, Assange remains more symbol than central character, which is what Jarecki intended.

“He’s not a main character,” Jarecki said. “There are many heroes in the film...Some who heroically admit to crimes that they’ve committed.”

For Jarecki, the project was ultimately not about Assange—but about the audience.

"It’s about what world [the audience] want to live in and whether they believe that the major governments of the world and the corporations that profit from manipulating public policy should be getting away with what they’re getting away with at public expense," he said.

Viewers are taken inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where Assange spent nearly seven years. He had been granted political asylum in 2012, just a day after the British government threatened to enter the embassy, arrest Assange and extradite him to Sweden.

The film spends much of its run time exploring claims that Ecuador, under pressure from the U.S., accepted $6 billion in funding to send Assange off to the States to face prosecution. Still, it also traced the many eras of WikiLeaks, including Assange's attempt to base it in Sweden.

Reversing the Narrative

Jarecki admits that he once held a more skeptical view of the platform—one informed by official statements.

“I had drunk the Kool-Aid on things that U.S. government propaganda and corporate propaganda had spread about Mr. Assange,” he said. "I learned not only that those things were not true, but I also learned the motivations of the malefactors who spread that information and the darkness of those motivations.”

By the time the film was completed, he considered the story not only his most dangerous but his most meaningful.

“At this moment, that is my favorite film,” Jarecki said. “Because it’s the one that can address the serious crisis we are in."

While Assange’s public image remains polarizing, Jarecki hopes the documentary reframes the debate—not around Assange the man, but around the fundamental issues of secrecy that he fears governments may continue to burry themselves in.

As he puts it: “One doesn’t have to feel good or bad about Julian Assange as a person to recognize that what WikiLeaks did was clearly an effort to make it easier to inform humanity about vitally important things."

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