There are no "rape charges". Never were. He's wanted, by order of a single right-wing prosecutor which our intel boys carefully selected, to answer questions about not using a condom once during a threesome - a session be conducted only on a particular spot next to a convenient airport for the US to snatch him up and drag him to a kangaroo trial wherever they care to hold one. If they even bother to charge him. They refuse to ask the questions anywhere but where the US can snatch him. For this he's been in a single room in an embassy for half a decade while the Brits spend millions of pounds to watch the doors, at the behest of the English-speaking intelligence nations little club. The fact that he exposed their crimes seems to be a bit pertinent. They're the charged, and convicted, and yet they have the guns ready to shoot him. No one is waiting for them to leave their holes.
BTW, one of the women has departed this "case" in disgust, because she figured out she's being used by the US. What Assange did, if he did it, was to not use a condom during a night of three-way sex. They said. It's a crime only in that country; nowhere else in the world can this "crime" be charged. And the "crime" isn't rape. Let's put it out there: US intelligence used its NSA superpowers to track down every woman Assange ever slept with, contacted them, and twiggled and wiggled until they found something, somewhere, to start an investigation on territory they could use to grab him. Even then, they had to shop until they found a rightwinger that hated him enough to start the process. Other prosecutors had refused to gin up a crime. Simultaneously they used their widespread network of tame journalists and news companies to spread the "rape" accusation far and wide, to destroy his credibility and blacken his name. And as the HB Gary emails showed, there is software sold by HB Gary and others used by people employed by corporations and the government to set up networks of fake personas to splatter newsgroups such as this with horseshit that they want to promulgate. Truth may just be getting its shoes on while lies run around the world, but now they have paid groups of fake people shooting the truth before it gets out the goddamned door...