As Assange was growing up, his mother became affiliated with an Australian cult run by Ann Hamilton-Byrne. The cult is said to have subjected young children to LSD and other drugs. Tarpley claims that the cult was affiliated with MK-ULTRA. Assange's mother was also a nomad, and Julian attended 37 different schools by the time he was 16.
I've been trying to track this down. Webster Tarpley talks about it in this video, starting at about 26:00.
But, you'll notice that he gives Wikipedia as his only source. The statement currently existing in the
Wikipedia article is this one sentence: "
Christine and Brett Assange divorced about 1979. Christine Assange then became involved with Leif Meynell, also known as Leif Hamilton, a member of Australian cult The Family, with whom she had a son before the couple broke up in 1982." Christine is Julian's mother, and Brett was his stepfather who cared for him from ages 1 through 8.
I haven't searched through all versions of the Wikipedia article, but this same exact sentence was there in 2015, and more or less the same in 2011. The item is sourced to Julian Assange's own (unauthorized) autobiography, and two secondary sources based on that primary source, as per Wikipedia policy. Thus, as far as I can find: if Julian Assange himself hadn't told us about this, we wouldn't know at all.
Accompanying Tarpley's narration, there are pictures of kids in the Hamilton-Byrne cult, with one of the kids circled and identified as the young Julian Assange. But, the images are low resolution and the circled kid could be anybody. It all seems to be a fanciful extrapolation. There's no supporting evidence that I can find.
From Assange's autobiography:
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/julian-assange-we-just-kept-moving-2359423.html
My own father was missing from my life, and only became part of it again when I was grown up. But it meant that Brett Assange was the male figure I related to, the good father. Brett was one of those cool 1970s people who were into guitars and everything that went with the music scene. I've got his name – Assange – an unusual one which comes from Mr Sang, or ah-sang in Cantonese: his great-great-great-grandfather was a Taiwanese pirate. Brett and my mother divorced when I was nine. He had been good to me, and was good in general, but not so good to himself, and the end of their relationship represents the end of a kind of innocence in my life.
My stepfather's place in our family was usurped by a man called Leif Meynell. I remember he had shoulder-length blond hair and was quite good-looking; a high forehead, and the characteristic dimpled white mark of a smallpox injection on his arm. From the darkness at his roots, it was obvious he bleached his hair. And one time I looked in his wallet and saw that all his cards were in different names. He was some sort of musician and played the guitar. But mainly he was a kind of ghost and a threatening mystery to us.
I was opposed to him from the start. Perhaps that's normal, for a boy to resist a man like that, or any man, in fact, who appears to be usurping his father or stepfather. Leif didn't live with us, though my mother must have been besotted with him at first. But whatever her feeling for him was, it didn't last. She would see him off, but he had this ability to turn up and pretend it was otherwise. Eventually, it was a matter of us escaping from him. We would cross the country and only then suffer this sinister realisation that he had found us. He'd suddenly be back in our lives and this grew to be very heavy. He had this brilliant ability to insinuate himself. He punched me in the face once and my nose bled. Another time, I pulled a knife on him, told him to keep back from me; but the relationship with him wasn't about physical abuse. It was about a certain psychological power he sought to have over us.
In 1980, my mother became pregnant by Leif and, seeing the possible impact of my opposition, he tried at first to be reasonable, pointing out that he was now the father of my brother and that my mother wanted him around. "But if you ever don't want me around," he said, "then I'll leave immediately." He wanted to stay with us, and did, for a time, but I was conscious of wanting to look after my mother and the baby.
My mother was in love with Leif. And I was too young to understand what sexual love was all about. I just knew that he wasn't my father and that he was a sinister presence. He tried, again and again, to make the case that I should not reject him and he had this thing with my mother and he was my brother's father and everything. But a time came when I told him I no longer accepted this deal. He had lied to us in a way that I hadn't known adults could lie. I remember he once said all ugly people should be killed. He beat my mother from time to time, and you felt he might be capable of just about anything. I wanted him to leave, as he had promised me he would, but he denied that the conversation had ever happened.
And so we started moving. Nomadism suits some people; it suits some people's situations. We just kept moving because that's what we did: my mother had work in a new town and we would find a house there. Simple as that. Except that the moving in these years, because of Leif, had a degree of hysteria attached, and that, in a sense, took all the simplicity away and replaced it with fear. It would take time for us to understand what the position was, and it was this: Leif Meynell was a member of an Australian cult called The Family. On reflection, I can now see that his obsessional nature derived from that, as well as his egocentricity and his dark sense of control.
The Family was founded by a woman called Anne Hamilton-Byrne in the mid-1960s. It started in the mountains north of Melbourne, where they meditated, had meetings and sessions where they used LSD. The basic notion was that Anne happened to be a reincarnation of Jesus Christ, but with elements of Eastern philosophy thrown in, such that her followers beheld a karmic deity obsessed with cleansing their souls. Anne prophesied the end of the world, arguing, quite comically, though not to her, that only the people in the Dandenong Ranges of mountains east of Melbourne would survive.
Leif Meynell was part of that cult. And everything he did relating to us was informed by his association with The Family. It was so tiring. Just moving all the time. Being on the run. The very last time, we got some intelligence that Leif was drawing close; they told us he was near us in the hills outside Melbourne. My brother and I showed a lot of resistance that final time: we just couldn't bear the idea of grabbing our things again and dashing for the door. As a bribe, my mother and I told my little brother he could take his prized rooster, a Rhode Island Red, a very tall, proud, strong-looking bird, and also an extremely loud one. To match that, I insisted on taking my two-storey beehive. Picture the scene: a by-now hysterical mother and her two children, along with the pride of their menagerie, stuffed into a regular station wagon and heading up the dirt track. On the run, we learnt a little bushcraft. We learnt how to get by on very little money and not enough normality. Being unsettled was our normality and we became good at it.
My mother changed her name. We worked out that Leif must have had contacts within the social security administration – that was how The Family is thought to have worked – so it seemed best to change the names that would be held inside the government computer system. But he was quite a gifted talker and would get friends to supply him with information about our whereabouts and he would always catch up. It was a private investigator who eventually came and told us about his close relationship with the Anne Hamilton-Byrne cult. We were living in Fern Tree Gully, and I was now 16 years old. We'd come to the end of the road. Also, I was feeling almost a man myself and was ready to front-up to him. Masculinity and its discontents could be addressed here, but let's just say I knew I could waste him and he appeared to know it, too. He was lurking round the bounds of the house and I walked over and told him to fuck off. It was the first and the last time, and something in the way I said it ensured that we would never see him again.
The rumor that Julian Assange was in the cult, was repeated in a recent Netflix film. Assange's mother Christine refutes the story, here:
https://www.news.com.au/national/julian-assanges-mother-tells-of-health-fears-for-wikileaks-founder/news-story/9765b55677dfe8ca10507788c03d4303
Events surrounding the massive 2010 data release are portrayed in a new movie, The Fifth Estate, which Ms Assange said repeated two crucial factual inaccuracies that Julian dyed his hair white and was part of a cult as a child.
"Julian has never lived in a cult and his family has never lived in a cult," Ms Assange said.
"I did discuss it with Julian when he was a teenager that someone had mentioned that his brother's father may have been involved with a cult, but it was a speculative comment and it was never proven.
"I was concerned (about it at the time) but it was never proven. And now it's been blown out of all proportion and sensationalised to sell movies and promote articles."
She said her son's hair colour was the result of Irish genes, which were responsible for early-onset grey hair, including "my own stepmother-in-law, who was of Irish descent and went grey at 24".
"When people put inaccuracies into movies and articles about people who are currently living ... it's a form of smearing. And that person then has to live in their world with those inaccuracies about them and their family," Ms Assange said.
