Pamela Anderson didn’t shy away from going head-to-head with Meghan McCain while defending WikiLeaks founder Julia Assange against The View co-host’s assertion of being a “cyberterrorist.” The Baywatch star has made no secret of her admiration of Assange over the years, and told the panel that since he was kicked out of the Ecuadorian embassy in which he was claiming refuge and imprisoned on conspiracy charges, his health has taken a turn for the worse.
“It’s devastating that people have fallen for this smear campaign especially in America,” she explained. “I feel like an outsider looking in, looking at how America has embraced all this — this propaganda.”
Videos by PopCulture.com
Saying “the most innocent man in the world” has inspired her own work in activism, McCain chimed in to claim that Assange had been booted from the embassy because he was “defecating everywhere.”
“That’s a smear campaign — that’s not true,” Anderson retorted, asking McCain what she would do if locked in a room for six year.
“Well, I wouldn’t be a cyberterrorist, which he is,” McCain shot back. “He hacked information. His leaks included classified documents that put our national security at risk, our military and the lives of spies and diplomats at risk.”
“How many people have the American government killed innocently and how many has WikiLeaks?” Anderson then asked, earning cheers from the crowd. “The military has put many innocent lives at risk. We have war crimes that need to be punished and they haven’t. The war crimes that he’s exposed, no one’s done anything about it, but they’ve put him in jail to shut him up.”
Although co-host Joy Behar chimed in to say Assange put people “in danger” by not redacting Social Security numbers and other private information, Anderson wasn’t backing down.
“There’s nothing proven that he’s actually put anyone at risk,” she continued. “Theyv’e gone through this over and over again, and I think people like Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning are heroes. And Julian Assange is a publisher.”
Photo credit: The View
