Controversial whistleblower Julian Assange, who is in Britain after being released on bail and awaiting extradition to Sweden to face rape allegations, always kept his personal life under wraps.
Controversial whistleblower Julian Assange, who is in Britain after being released on bail and awaiting extradition to Sweden to face rape allegations, always kept his personal life under wraps.
However, details of his secret private life are now being leaked.
An investigation by Daily Mail throws new light on his formative teenage years - the WikiLeaks founder had an affair with a 16-year-old girl when he was 18 and fathered a boy who is now 20 years old.
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In the late eighties, Assange, his mother and stepbrother were living in a tiny bungalow in Dandenong Ranges, east of Melbourne.
And it was at this time that he developed his obsession with the computers.
"He didn't go out much at all. He spent almost all his time in there with his Commodore computer. He rarely came out of the bedroom," said his former neighbour.
A year after, the 18-year-old Assange met a local girl of 16, with whom he developed a relationship.
Soon after, the couple moved a few miles away to a cottage. It was here his lover became pregnant. Even then he would spend hours on his computer daily, learning to hack into other computers as the web began to spread around the world.
Their son Daniel was born when Assange's girlfriend was 17, but it seems that even the arrival of a child was not enough to drag the fledgling-hacker away from his screen.
"We'd see her walking down to the shops with the baby in a pushchair. She almost always seemed to be alone...," recalled one former resident.
Assange was already a computer hacker in October 1991 when police raided the couple's house in Melbourne. He was charged with a number of offences relating to computer hacking. It was at that point that his girlfriend fled with their baby.
He and his ex-girlfriend spent nine years battling for custody of their son, which ended with a 1999 agreement.
Today, Daniel is 20 and is working for a software design company in Australia. Pictures identified as him on the Internet show he has a strong resemblance to his father.
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