As fresh snow erases the traces of Friday's scrum of camera crews from the elegant lawns of a Georgian mansion in East Anglia, inside Ellingham Hall Julian Assange is considering his next move.

Transformed from cyber celebrity into household name, Assange – the man who kicked a diplomatic hornet's nest across the globe – is carrying an extraordinary weight of controversy and opprobrium on his narrow shoulders.

Assange faces a whole new debate this weekend over his personal conduct, after the allegations made by two women in Sweden, who accuse him of sexual misconduct and rape, were published in their fullest form in the Guardian. An increasingly diverse cast of characters are forming unlikely coalitions over the case across ideological divides.

The accounts of the two women have led Stockholm authorities to request the extradition of Assange so that he can be questioned by a prosecutor. That request led to Assange spending nine days on remand in Wandsworth prison – a controversial decision by the courts, which was overturned on Tuesday when he was given £240,000 bail. He was released on Thursday after the high court dismissed an appeal from prosecutors against the bail decision.

A condition of his bail was that he reside at Ellingham Hall, the estate of former British Army officer and journalist Vaughan Smith, who offered bed and board as "an act of principle".

Dismissed by his supporters as a smear campaign, the case against Assange now threatens to move from a sideshow to overwhelm the main act – the work he has done in his public life as editor of WikiLeaks. In part, Assange, 39, who has become a figurehead for whistleblowers, can blame this on supporters who have pressed accolades on the man rather than the cause, and who range from left wing historians, feminists and human rights campaigners to misogynist right wing bloggers and a porn baron.

Today Larry Flynt, the founder of American sex magazine Hustler, announced that he would give $50,000 (£32,000) to the Assange defence fund, calling him a "hero" who deserved a "ticker-tape parade". Flynt's support was not for WikiLeaks itself, but because he thought the rape charges a nonsense.

Assange has been called "the new Jason Bourne" by Jemima Khan, the "Ned Kelly of the Cyber Age" by members of the press in his native Australia and a libertine 007 by those who note his fondness for martinis.

On the other side, Republican US senators have lined up behind the Democrat secretary of state Hillary Clinton to condemn him. Sarah Palin claims that he is "an anti-American operative with blood on his hands" that America should pursue "with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaida and Taliban leaders." George Packer of the New Yorker magazine, called Assange "megalomaniacal" and Vanity Fair's Christopher Hitchens called him "a middle man and peddler who resents the civilisation that nurtured him". There have been disturbing calls from both Republicans and Democrats for him to be assassinated.

Smith agreed there was a "risk" of the allegations against Assange overshadowing WikiLeaks' revelations. "When a friend of mine looks me in the eye and tells me they are not guilty I tend to believe them," he said. "One has to remember that conviction rates are amazingly low, and I suppose if one had to stand back away from this – and I say this without trying to diminish claims of any form of crime of this nature – but if one takes enough distance one might observe that perhaps it is something of a distraction," he told the Observer. "When, as I believe, he is determined to be innocent one might look on this and ask: was this in the interests of it all?"

It is now nearly three weeks since Assange and his WikiLeaks team began disseminating secret US state department cables to internet users and newspaper readers around the world, who were in turns fascinated and appalled. The cables have revealed wrong-doing, international double-dealing, espionage, plots, bitchiness, bad behaviour and scandal in the political, military and business worlds. Within a torrent of 250,000 documents was information on how world leaders lied and connived on everything from the direction of the conflict in Afghanistan to spying at the UN and Saudi Arabia's push to have the US bomb Iran.

The WikiLeaks campaign of reveal and be damned has splintered opinion on both left and right. The US government was furious, and is expected to take some kind of legal action. Already pressure may have been exerted as large financial institutions including PayPal, MasterCard and Visa – and today the Bank of America – have refused to do business with WikiLeaks, cutting it from donors.

But after Assange's period in jail last week, the focus was switching. In today's Guardian editorial, the newspaper explained why it had chosen to publish the sexual misconduct allegations in detail: "It is unusual for a sex-offence case to be presented outside of the judicial process in such a manner, but then it is unheard of for a defendant, his legal team and supporters to so vehemently and publicly attack women at the heart of a rape case."

The paper is reflecting a growing discomfort among many, in both camps, at the widespread vilification – and naming – of the two alleged victims on websites and blogs, and also of the kind of language being used by people including Assange's own lawyer Mark Stephens who referred to the allegation as a "honeytrap" .

"I have never heard the like. Legal representatives do not and should not stand on the steps outside a court of law and make such comments about their clients, it is neither right nor fitting," said one outraged barrister. "It is certainly in my view deeply unprofessional."

It's understood that several high- profile Assange supporters have been shown what they understand to be translations of texts and emails to help persuade them Assange is not guilty of rape.

Human rights campaigner Bianca Jagger has directed her Twitter followers to a blog suggesting that one of the women had links to an anti-Castro Cuban group. She insisted to the Observer that she had been in court and taken great care over her analysis of the charges, and believed in Assange's innocence. Michael Moore, the US film-maker, has suggested Sweden does not always pursue rape allegations. He has offered money towards the bail surety. Others have been suggesting that Assange has fallen foul to a pact between jealous female groupies. A range of deeply misogynistic blog posts have blamed "feminists", despite insistence from people close to Assange that there is no conspiracy.

A new campaign called "talkaboutit" has been started online by Swedish women to defend the accusers from the extraordinary verbal attacks being made after Johanna Koljonen, of the Swedish thinktank Lacrimosa, wrote passionately this week in favour of justice being seen to take its course. But many young activists in the UK see a conspiracy with the power of the US at its heart.

Jim Cranshaw, 29, a campaigner with the UK Uncuts movement said that a commonly held view among young activists was that the allegations against Assange amounted to a witchhunt by the US. "The majority of my peers are deeply sceptical about the whole process. He is wanted by the most powerful country in the world and the timing of the allegations, the extradition attempts, it all seems too convenient.

"The CIA has used sex offence allegations in the past because it makes people dislike you even if you win the case, as with Castro. However there is a view that if a woman makes allegations like these then they have to be taken seriously.

"There seems to be a lot of political pressure to get him to America and to possibly kill him."

It is a view shared by members of Anonymous, a group of hackers directing cyber attacks against companies that have withdrawn their support for WikiLeaks. Most have chosen to ignore the content of the sexual allegations, believing that the claims are part of a conspiracy.

But a colleague of Assange in Stockholm, who knows both women, said that Sweden was pursuing a "normal police investigation" and said that while WikiLeaks' enemies may exploit the case, "it's not the CIA sending a woman in a short skirt". UK author Joan Smith told the Observer that there was a disturbing "Polanski" effect among people who didn't know Assange.

"It's like Julian and the WikiLeaks – a new boy band, that's turned into a phenomenon of celebrity. But people who assert the innocence of a man they have never met are on dangerous ground. It's that rush to judgement which is so extraordinary.

"Sexual manners and sexual conduct come in for careful consideration in Sweden and on the whole I rather approve."

Others showed similar reservations. WikiLeaks supporter, the historian Tariq Ali, said that it was possible to separate Assange the man and the allegations from the cables. "WikiLeaks is an organisation and he [Julian] is one of them. So I am very glad he is out and all that, but WikiLeaks would go on even without him and that is important to stress." Investigative journalist John Pilger believes it is necessary to defend Assange. "He is an innocent man until proven otherwise," he said. "It is clear that in Sweden the presumption of innocence has been publicly torn up by those whose duty was to safeguard it. This has encouraged a vicious campaign in the US, including incitement to murder Assange, and secret planning to stitch him up as some sort of terrorist."

Such views are being rejected in Sweden, where a counter campaign is now building among those who don't see the US hand in these allegations.

Claes Borgström, the lawyer for the two women, is calling on Assange to return to answer the allegations. Now it is for a fresh prosecutor, Marianne Ny, a specialist in sex crime, to decide if the evidence would stand in court, and for that she wants to question Assange.

A Swedish senior civil servant, who asked not to be named, dismissed allegations of a plot and insisted that Swedes are capable of seeing the advantages of WikiLeaks, in terms of debate about freedom of expression, while conceding that Assange may have unsavoury morals between the sheets.

But like many, he conceded that the case has been handled clumsily. "The fact that one prosecutor dismissed the charges against Assange and another picked them up afterwards, makes the case look fishy. The prosecuting authorities should have acted more expeditiously and speedily.''

• This article was amended on 20 December 2010. The original referred to Claus Borgström, Marianne Nye and Johanna Palmstom. These names have been corrected.