WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange risks turning from a popular hero into an L. Ron Hubbard figure, tolerating only “blinkered, cultish devotion”,
said one his former backers Jemima Khan. Claiming Assange had alienated his supporters, Khan, associate editor of the New Statesman, wrote for the weekly British magazine that Assange’s anti-secrecy organisation was now “guilty of the same obfuscation and misinformation as those it sought to expose”. She compared the Australian to US science-fiction author Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology.