Gaga pays visit to Assange

Lady Gaga arrives for the UK launch of her new fragrance ‘Fame’ outside Harrods in London yesterday. REUTERS/Suzanne Plunkett

Lady Gaga has spent five hours visiting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in London with the pair sharing a meal during the meeting of modern minds.

With police guarding the door to London’s Ecuadorian embassy, waiting to arrest the 41-year-old Australian, Monday’s visit from the US performer briefly diverted attention from headlines about each party.

A British magistrate has this week ruled that nine supporters of Mr Assange who made a financial commitment to guarantee his bail must cough up a total of STG93,500 after he skipped a legal undertaking and sought refuge in the Latin American consulate.

The Queensland-born secret-leaker entered the embassy in June and was granted asylum by Ecuador in August as part of his bid to avoid extradition to Sweden where he is wanted for questioning on sexual assault allegations.

Gaga, who popped in for dinner after a perfume launch across the road from the embassy at high-end retailer Harrods, has attracted her own unsavoury publicity in recent days after vomiting on stage during a live show in Spain.

The 26-year old, known for her outlandish outfits and controversial song lyrics, entered the embassy about 7pm (local time) on Monday and did not emerge until after midnight.

She later posted a photo of herself with Mr Assange on social networking sites.

While it may seem like an odd pairing, Gaga and Mr Assange do have a connection.

According to US news website The Atlantic, Bradley Manning used Gaga’s music to help him download hundreds of thousands of classified documents from US Army servers, before passing them to WikiLeaks.

One of Manning’s chat logs read:

“I would come in with music on a CD-RW labelled with something like Lady Gaga erase the music then write a compressed split file. No one suspected a thing … I listened and lip-synched to Lady Gaga’s Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history.”

There has been no word on what was on the dinner or discussion menu for Mr Assange and Gaga.