WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has resumed posting on X after an eight-year personal absence and revealed that he and his wife, Stella, are expecting their third child in October.

By yourNEWS Media Newsroom.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has returned to X after an eight-year absence from the social media platform, using his renewed online presence to announce that he and his wife, Stella Assange, are expecting another child.

Assange, 55, reappeared on the platform earlier this month with a brief message: “I’m back.”

His return follows more than a decade dominated by asylum, imprisonment and extradition proceedings that largely removed him from ordinary public life before a 2024 plea agreement with U.S. prosecutors allowed him to return to Australia.

Assange subsequently responded to a Polymarket post that described him as having been absent from X for two years. He clarified that his personal absence had lasted eight years.

His most personal announcement came Monday, when he shared a post from his wife revealing that she is pregnant.

Assange added “#OctoberSurprise” to the post, despite the announcement arriving while it was still September.

The child will be the couple’s third together. Assange and Stella already have two sons, Gabriel and Max, who were conceived while Assange was living inside Ecuador’s embassy in London.

The pregnancy announcement comes more than two years after Assange returned to Australia following the resolution of his long-running U.S. criminal case.

Assange spent nearly seven years inside Ecuador’s London embassy after entering the diplomatic compound in 2012 while fighting extradition to Sweden and fearing eventual extradition to the United States.

British police arrested him in 2019 after Ecuador withdrew his asylum. He then spent more than five years at London’s high-security Belmarsh prison while contesting U.S. efforts to extradite him.

His legal troubles were closely connected to WikiLeaks’ publication of classified U.S. government material.

WikiLeaks became internationally prominent after publishing hundreds of thousands of classified documents concerning the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with U.S. diplomatic cables.

The organization later published Democratic National Committee emails during the 2016 presidential campaign and, in 2017, released a collection of CIA documents known as Vault 7 that detailed government cyber capabilities.

The U.S. case against Assange ultimately centered on his involvement in obtaining and disclosing classified national-defense information.

In June 2024, Assange reached an agreement with the Justice Department under which he pleaded guilty to one felony count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified national-defense documents in violation of the Espionage Act.

The agreement ended his years-long extradition fight.

Assange appeared before a federal judge in Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands on June 26, 2024, rather than traveling to the continental United States. The location was chosen in part because of its proximity to Australia and Assange’s opposition to entering the mainland United States.

He was sentenced to 62 months, with credit for the 62 months he had already spent imprisoned in Britain while fighting extradition, allowing him to leave court a free man and return to Australia.

The plea agreement also prohibits Assange from entering the United States without permission.

Assange’s prosecution generated an international debate that lasted years.

U.S. prosecutors argued that his conduct went beyond conventional journalism and involved conspiring to obtain and publish classified national-defense information. Supporters of Assange countered that prosecuting a publisher under the Espionage Act created dangerous implications for investigative journalism and press freedom.

Stella Assange, a lawyer who became involved in his legal case before the two married, was one of the most visible advocates for his release.

The couple married inside Belmarsh prison in 2022 while Assange continued fighting extradition.

His eventual return to Australia in 2024 brought an end to a legal battle that had stretched across approximately 14 years, including his years inside Ecuador’s embassy and his imprisonment in Britain.

Since then, Assange has maintained a comparatively low public profile.

His September return to X therefore marked one of his most direct reentries into public communication since regaining his freedom.

Recent reporting confirms that he and Stella are now expecting their third child in October.

The announcement also gave Assange’s return to social media an unexpectedly personal focus.

After years in which his public identity was dominated by WikiLeaks, extradition proceedings, imprisonment and debates over government secrecy, one of his first major messages back on the platform was simply news that his family is growing.

Original article