Julian Assange secretly fathered two children while living inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London, his partner has revealed.
Stella Morris says she has been in a relationship with the Wikileaks founder since 2015 and has been raising their two young sons on her own.
She spoke out amid fears over the spread of Covid-19 in Belmarsh Prison.
He has been held there since being dragged from the Ecuadorean embassy a year ago.
The 48-year-old Australian is now seeking bail amid concerns over his health.
Ms. Morris, a South African-born lawyer, told The Mail on Sunday she was revealing their union for he first time because his “life is on the brink” and she does not believe he would “survive infection with coronavirus.”
In a video posted on Wikileaks’ YouTube account, she says she met Assange in 2011 when she joined his legal team.
He took refuge in the embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden over a sexual assault case that has since been dropped.
He is also fighting extradition to the United States on espionage charges.
Ms Morris says she visited him in the embassy almost every day and “got to know Julian very well”. The couple fell in love in 2015 and got engaged two years later.
She told the Mail on Sunday that Assange had watched both boys being born via video link and they had visited their father at the embassy.
Three-year-old Gabriel and one-year-old Max speak to their father via video calls, she says.
“Forming a family was a deliberate decision to break down those walls around him and imagine a life beyond that prison,” she says in the Wikileaks YouTube video.
