Australians rally in support of Assange in Sydney. Credit:AFP The facts of the case have become known by now. Assange had undertaken a speaking tour of Sweden, partly organised by a left Christian activist, Anna Ardin, an officer with the Social Democratic Party's ''Brotherhood'' faction. Also attending was 26-year-old Sofia Wilen, who became an unofficial photographer of sorts. Assange was staying with Ardin, then he was with Wilen, and then later in the week he went back to a crayfish party at Ardin's place, pausing only to text Wilen. Ardin later threw him out, and at the end of the week, the two women - who did not know each other - had compared notes and gone to Klara police station in Stockholm to inquire about forcing Assange to take an STI test. In the hands of the police, that became a rape and misconduct allegation, dropped and then reinstated within a week. In court, the nature of those allegations was finally made clear. The Crown Prosecution Service presented the four Swedish Prosecution Service accusations: two were of a specific Swedish crime called ''ofredande'', or misconduct (misleadingly translated as molestation), one being that the defendant ''pushed his erect penis against the complainant's back, thus violating her sexual integrity'', the other for unsafe sex ''against the complainant's explicitly stated wish''. There is one charge of sexual assault, which alleges that Assange had sex with Wilen while she was asleep, and the most serious charge is that he held Ardin down with his body weight, forced her legs open, and had sex with her.

The last accusation would qualify as a reasonable rape charge anywhere, the ''morning glory'' almost nowhere; the other two depend on the detailed nature of the accusation, none of which has seen the light of day - the unsafe sex charge for example, does not allege non-consent, simply an earlier expression of opposition to the practice. Even with later consent, this can still count as a crime in Sweden. By now, the whole story of the encounters - whose non-consensual nature Assange fiercely denies - was circulating around the world, throwing many people, especially those inspired by the WikiLeaks project, into confusion. For 40 years, since the rise of second-wave feminism, it has been an article of progressive faith that a range of older habits of thought concerning rape should be junked. The character and history of the victim, behaviour after the event, the nature of the alleged attacker - all these were to be separated from an assessment of whether a crime had taken place. The social-psychological impossibility of fully lowering this curtain has always been lurking. In this case it has come to the fore. Overwhelmingly this focused on Ardin, who became passionately interested in WikiLeaks, arranging several lectures for Assange and accommodation at her place. On August 10 she tweeted excitedly that her Christian activist group had invited Assange to Sweden and ''han kommer!'' - he will come. The next week, at that crayfish party, she tweeted, ''I'm with the coolest most exciting people in the world.'' That tweet, occurring three days after the alleged rape, would later be deleted from her Twitter feed, though it persisted in the Google cache, and was recirculated. People

I spoke to at Uppsala University, where I studied in 2007, and where Ardin was at one time the student union gender equality officer, largely knew her second-hand, describing her as well-known for extreme, mildly obsessive enthusiasms. None of that would mean anything, but Ardin had also annoyed many people by posting on her blog a seven-step guide to revenge on ex-lovers, which advocated ''the big lie'', and getting the law involved. Gender equality officer at Uppsala University is to Sweden what holding the Norm Smith Medal is to Melburnians: it's not something you traduce. The revenge guide also disappeared from her blog, and was retrieved from the Google cache. Further difficulties are created by the interview that Ardin gave to Aftonbladet daily three days after the police were first contacted. Here she said, ''It is quite wrong that we were afraid of him. He is not violent and I do not feel threatened by him … [The] responsibility for what happened to me and the other girl lies with a man who has a twisted attitude to women and a problem with taking 'no' for an answer.'' Which still alleges sexual assault, but appears to contradict the outlining of the most serious rape charge. Rightly or wrongly, most prosecutors wouldn't proceed, as Stockholm prosecutor Eva Finne decided not to do - although she let accusations of ''ofredande'' stand. But Sweden has an internally entrepreneurial public service culture, and Marianne Ny, a prosecutor attached to a special crime development unit in Gothenburg, on the other side of Sweden, took the case. She had been persuaded to by Claes Borgstrom, a member, like Ardin, of the Social Democratic Party - indeed, an ex-government minister, and gender equality ombudsman. Ny proceeded with the case, the courts permitted Assange to come to London to work on the ''cablegate'' release, and Ny and Assange's lawyers differ over who made it impossible for an interview to take place, such that a European arrest warrant was finally issued.

By the time that came around, the scepticism directed at Ardin and Wilen was no longer confined to the masculinist world of hacking. The event was provoking a full-scale debate within feminism. Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth, wrote a satirical piece asking Interpol to arrest every jerk boyfriend she'd ever had, and Naomi Klein remarked that rape accusations were being used in the same way as women's rights were used to power the Afghan war, while the Swedish group Women Against Rape questioned why this case was getting such fast-track attention. That contradiction was brought to the fore by the suspicion that a right-wing Swedish government, desirous of ending its decades-long neutrality policy, was using the case to detain Assange long enough for extradition to be served. The timing of the warrants - matching key moments in the ''cablegate'' releases, and the involvement of heavy hitters such as Borgstrom in the mix - suggest to many that the women's inquiries, which were never made as charges, have been taken over. Borgstrom told reporters asking about this that the women ''aren't jurists. They don't know what rape is.'' Given that Ardin has written a gender equality manual that is still on the Uppsala University website, one has some doubts. Is it possible that the women are being strong-armed into continuing the case? Ardin's recent tweets include expressions of support for WikiLeaks in its battles with PayPal etc, suggesting she's no Hedda Gabler. But they also have a reference to Bjasta, a town that celebrated a boy who'd raped two local girls who were then shunned. Wilen has disappeared from sight completely. And conspiracy theories flourish on the wilder shores of the Baltic. Did Ardin charge a student with sexual discrimination for ''not looking at me'' while she was giving a lecture? Should we pay attention to her background among right-wing Cuban exiles, her stint in Washington, DC, the military side of her family, her cousin Mattias being a very senior liaison officer between NATO and Swedish forces in Afghanistan? What of Assange? If we don't assess him as any less likely to force sex, by virtue of his leftish politics, do we have the right to go the other way and ponder the deep strain of masculism that runs through his blog/manifesto IQ.ORG - where he effectively dismisses the possibility of women being capable of performing the sort of maths necessary for WikiLeaks-level hacking? We don't know. We're still holding our breath, waiting to see what is said in that faux Scandinavian court next week, while day by day the remorseless drip of cables changes the state, the public and information in the 21st century.