For the past four years, Julian Assange—the founder and editor-in-chief of Wikileaks—has been cooped up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, fearing extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges would eventually lead to an espionage trial in the US for leaking classified government secrets.
Still, despite the controversy and clandestine work Assange is often involved in, wanted hackers need to eat, too. According to the Associated Press, Pamela Anderson of Baywatch fame brought Assange a vegan meal over the weekend, though the Australian computer programmer apparently wasn’t too pleased with the food.
“He said I tortured him with bringing him vegan food,” Anderson said jokingly in an interview. “I really believe in him and think he’s a good person, and I’m concerned about his health, his family, and I just hope that by some miracle he’s set free."
So far, all of these details are reported facts—Anderson really could be seen bring two Pret a Manger bags into the Ecuadorian Embassy over the weekend—but it wasn’t long before the story took a sharp turn into the realm of conspiracy theories and paranoia.
According to Mashable, users on Reddit and Twitter started accusing Anderson of poisoning Assange after WikiLeaks sent out a series of “cryptic tweets” on Sunday night. Essentially, people speculated that Assange had been poisoned by Anderson's sandwich, and that the strange series of letters and numbers tweeted by the Wikileaks account was a "dead man's switch"—a fail safe that would go into effect in the event of Assange’s passing.
From there, things escalated quickly. Unsurprisingly, presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's name was often dragged into the fray for some inexplicable reason.
On Monday, Wikileaks claimed that Assange’s Internet connection was intentionally cut “by a state party,” and that the organization had “activated the appropriate contingency plans."
[via Mashable]