Day Assange threatened to sue the Guardian

Further evidence that Julian Assange’s relationship with WikiLeaks’ UK partner the Guardian has not been all sweetness and light has emerged in the new issue of Vanity Fair magazine.

The article by Sarah Ellison claims that the Australian, currently on bail awaiting extradition to Sweden over rape allegations, threatened to sue the London paper after it tried to publish the US embassy cables without his say-so.
 
Assange is portrayed as volatile and high-handed in his dealings not only with the Guardian, but with two other ‘partner;’ newspapers, the New York Times and Der Spiegel.
 
Ellison recounts how the Guardian first went into partnership with Assange last summer after tracking him down following the release of the video 'Collateral Murder' by WikiLeaks.
 
After agreeing to publish material along with the New York Times, executives at the Guardian were surprised to learn that Assange had asked the German paper Der Spiegel to join them in publishing leaked documents.
 
He then unilaterally handed the first tranche of classified documents - the so-called Afghan logs - to Channel 4, without consulting his other media partners.
 
Subsequently, the publication of the second round of papers - the Iraq logs - was also delayed when Assange demanded that the material be made available to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism first.
 
Matters came to a head when the US embassy cables – the most recent and most high-profile revelations - were leaked by a former WikiLeaks volunteer to a freelance journalist and subsequently to the Guardian.

At this point, the  Guardian felt it was no longer bound by Assange’s stricture that nothing could be published without his agreement. Having obtained the same material via a different source, it was no longer beholden to the “increasingly erratic” WikiLeaks founder.
 
But after discovering that the paper was about to publish without his consent, Assange stormed into the office of Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger threatening legal action.
 
Peace was eventually restored, and the cables were published in the Guardian and four other papers.

Ellison’s portrait of Assange includes a quote from a New York Times article bemoaning his "nearly delusional grandeur" as well as comments from various sources at the Guardian, including investigations editor David Leigh.

Leigh’s comments suggest that Assange's attitude towards the leaked documents was very different to that of the Guardian.
 
Said Leigh: "We were starting from: 'Here's a document. How much of it shall we print?' Whereas Julian's ideology was, 'I shall dump everything out and then you have to try and persuade me to cross a few things out.' We were coming at it from opposite poles." ·