LONDON — Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks who was released from a British jail late last week, is facing a new challenge: the leak of a 68-page confidential Swedish police report that sheds new light on the allegations of sexual misconduct that led to Mr. Assange’s legal troubles.
The Swedish report traces events over a four-day period in August when Mr. Assange had what he has described as consensual sexual relationships with two Swedish women. Their accounts, which form the basis of an extradition case against Mr. Assange, state that their encounters with him began consensually, but became nonconsensual when he persisted in having unprotected sex with them in defiance of their insistence that he use a condom.
The case has prompted widespread controversy, with supporters of Mr. Assange alleging that he is the victim, and the women are complicit, in an American-inspired vendetta seeking to punish WikiLeaks for posting of hundreds of thousands of secret American documents on the Internet.
The conspiracy, supporters of Mr. Assange have said, hinges on what they have described as an improbable coincidence: that he is facing potential criminal charges just as he is challenging the United States government. These critics have also pointed to possible political manipulation of the Swedish prosecutors office, which had dropped the most serious allegations against Mr. Assange, but later revived them.
But the police report and dozens of interviews in recent months with people in Sweden linked to the case suggest that the Swedish case could be less flawed than Mr. Assange’s supporters have suggested. And interviews with legal experts suggest that it would not be abnormal for such a high-level case to move up the hierarchy of prosecutors, and for those prosecutors to have disagreements over how to apply Sweden’s finely calibrated laws on sexual misconduct.
Still, the police report also provides support for a claim made by Mr. Assange’s supporters that the women involved seemed willing to continue their friendships with Mr. Assange after what they described as sexual misbehavior. The women did not decide to go to the police, the report shows, until they discovered by talking to each other that they had both been sexually involved with him and, by their accounts, had similar experiences.
The British newspaper The Guardian broke the news of the report on Saturday, and quoted extensively from what it said was an unredacted copy. The New York Times later obtained a redacted form of the report from another source in Swedish. It is a preliminary summary of the evidence taken by investigators when they met with the two women and with Mr. Assange, who left Sweden for Britain in early October but subsequently refused to return to Sweden for further questioning.
Mr. Assange has told friends in Britain that he decided not to return after concluding that the Swedish case was being driven by a desire to isolate and punish him for WikiLeaks’ actions in publishing the secret American documents.
The Swedish documents trace the accounts given by the two women of their intimate encounters with Mr. Assange. As previously reported, both women say that Mr. Assange first agreed to use a condom and then refused, in the first instance by continuing with sex after the condom broke and in the second by having sex without using a condom with a woman who was asleep.
Mr. Assange himself has declined to address the women’s accounts directly, both before his Dec. 7 arrest on the Swedish extradition warrant and since he was released from a 10-day period in a London jail on Thursday after posting $310,000 bail. But he has vehemently denied any wrongdoing, and has long insisted he is the victim of a political conspiracy. On Friday, he told the BBC that the case presented in the London courts was “a smear attempt,” and that the impending publication of the Swedish police documents amounted to “another smear attempt.”
Mr. Assange told the BBC that he did not know “precisely who is behind” the “conspiracy” against him, although his supporters have flooded the Internet with charges that the C.I.A. is conspiring to discredit him. But he added, “It’s the case of any organization that’s exposing major powers, and has major opposition, that they will be attacked. Every aspect of their lives will be scrutinized, and this organization is no exception.”
The two women have been referred to in the British courts only as Ms. A and Ms. W. Ms. A, according to the police report and to Swedish friends, is a left-wing activist in her early 30s who was Mr. Assange’s point of contact when he flew to Stockholm from London on Aug. 11 to give a speech at a gathering hosted by the Swedish Association of Christian Social Democrats on Aug. 14. Ms. W., who works in a Stockholm museum, has told friends that she is a strong supporter of WikiLeaks.
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