Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen is fighting to free WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and is working with nonprofit, Assange Defense.
“Assange is a very principled person who risked his personal well-being to let everyone know what our country is doing in our name and with our money,” Cohen tells Page Six. “I think that we have a right to know that. He published something that the government didn’t want people to know. And now the government wants to kill the messenger and they are literally doing that.”
Assange, who has been indicted on 17 charges of espionage, is currently being held at London’s Belmarsh prison, which is experiencing a Covid outbreak. He is awaiting a judge’s decision on whether he will be extradited to the US.
Cohen, who says he visited Assange when he was in the Ecuadorian Embassy, tells us, “It’s kind of a question of human rights and a question of freedom of speech and freedom of the press … I think the government is a bunch of old people, kind of like me. They are freaked out about this newfangled internet thing. They are treating him differently because he’s an internet publisher instead of a more traditional newspaper publisher.”
While Ben & Jerry’s just released a flavor honoring Colin Kaepernick, don’t hold your breath for a similar one for Assange; Cohen tells us he is no longer active in that kind of decision making.
Cohen is just one of several high profile voices backing Assange, including Pamela Anderson and Oliver Stone. There has been talk that Trump may pardon Assange.