After multiple legal battles lasting more than a decade, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has reached a tentative deal to plead guilty to a single felony charge for his role in obtaining and publishing classified military and diplomatic documents.

The tentative deal, made public in a court filing on Monday, appears to end a saga that saw the hacker-turned-whistleblower becoming a global celebrity as he revealed government secrets. Assange was later accused of sexual crimes as well as espionage, and ended up spending years hiding in an embassy and jailed in a high-security prison.

Here’s a timeline of the key moments in Assange’s life.

1. 1971: Born in Australia, Assange learned to hack from a young age

Assange was born on July 3, 1971, in Queensland, Australia. He and his mother, the visual artist Christine Ann Hawkins, moved frequently. Hawkins met Assange’s biological father, John Shipton, at an anti-Vietnam war protest, though their relationship ended before Assange was born.

Hawkins rented an apartment across from an electronics store. There, a teenaged Assange began tinkering with a Commodore 64 and learning how to code.

As a teenager and in his early 20s, Assange became a skilled and prolific hacker, known in Australia’s hacking community as Mendax. In 1996, Assange pleaded guilty to 24 counts of hacking in Melbourne’s Victoria County Court. Though the judge characterized the alleged crimes as “quite serious,” he also said Assange was motivated by “intellectual inquisitiveness” rather than malice. Assange was ultimately fined and released.

2. 2006: Assange founds the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks

Assange co-founded the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks in a bid to create a platform that would allow leaked documents to be published safely online.

The organization gained widespread attention in 2010 for leaks about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in the process making Assange himself internationally famous. One leak from the time, dubbed “Collateral Murder” by WikiLeaks, showed a 2007 incident in which a dozen people, including two employees of the news agency Reuters, were fatally shot from a U.S. Army helicopter.

Chelsea Manning, a former U.S. soldier who had leaked hundreds of thousands of documents to WikiLeaks, was arrested in 2010. Manning was convicted at a court-martial in 2013 and sentenced to 35 years. President Barack Obama commuted her sentence in 2017.

3. 2012: Arrest warrants led to years of hiding in London’s Ecuadorian Embassy

In November 2010, Swedish authorities issued an international arrest warrant for Assange in connection with allegations of sexual assault lodged against him by two women. The two women said the relationships had started consensually, but that Assange had later acted against their wishes by tampering with a condom during sex with one woman, and having unprotected sex with another while she was sleeping.

Though he denied the allegations, Assange initially cooperated with British police on the matter. The Australian said that the accusations were a pretext for him to be extradited to the United States due to his work on WikiLeaks.

Assange staged a long legal battle, taking the case to Britain’s Supreme Court. After exhausting his legal options, he entered the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in June and refused to leave. Ecuador granted him political asylum in August, but he was unable to leave the building as he would face arrest by British police guarding it around the clock.

Assange remained in the embassy for years, though his behavior grew more erratic over time, frustrating his hosts and eventually leading to the revocation of his asylum status. Ecuadorian officials accused Assange of skateboarding and playing soccer inside the embassy, and behaving rudely toward staff. After Assange adopted a cat, Ecuador considered revoking his right to own a pet, alleging that he was not caring for the animal.

Ecuadorian officials also said Assange and his lawyers had expressed their belief that embassy staff was spying on the whistleblower, including on behalf of the U.S. government. The accusation strained relations between the guest and the host country.

4. 2016: WikiLeaks published material stolen from the Democratic National Committee

In July and October of 2016, while Assange was living in the Ecuadorian Embassy, WikiLeaks published material that had been stolen from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.

The material, which was interpreted as being beneficial to the eventual winner of the election, Donald Trump, was believed to have been stolen by Russia-backed hackers. An investigation of the allegations of Russian electoral interference by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III did not publicly release any evidence of direct links between Russia and WikiLeaks.

During his campaign for president and after he was elected, Trump praised WikiLeaks for disclosing documents that hurt Hillary Clinton and her campaign. During one rally in Pennsylvania, the then-candidate declared: “WikiLeaks, I love WikiLeaks!”

Later, after Assange was arrested in London, Trump said: “I know nothing about WikiLeaks. It’s not my thing.”

5. 2019: Assange is arrested by British police on behalf of the United States

Swedish prosecutors dropped their investigation into Assange in 2019, saying that the time that had passed since the alleged incidents, coupled with the low likelihood of Assange ever ending up in Sweden, made the case too difficult to see through.

In April 2019, Ecuador withdrew Assange’s asylum status. Announcing the move, the country’s then-foreign minister cited issues ranging from their guest’s hygiene to accusations that Assange had meddled in Ecuador’s dealings with other countries. He also said that Assange suffered from health issues that could not adequately be addressed on the grounds of the embassy. The country’s president at the time, Lenín Moreno, had previously called the whistleblower an “inherited problem” and a “nuisance.”

British police arrested the hacker in Ecuador’s embassy, saying they had done so “on behalf of the United States,” and charged him with breaching his bail conditions.

Assange was separately charged in the United States with conspiring with Manning in 2010 to illegally obtain classified documents relating to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as hundreds of thousands of State Department cables. U.S. government lawyers have argued that these disclosures endangered the lives of informants working with the United States.

Federal prosecutors wanted Assange to stand trial in the United States for alleged violations of the Espionage Act of 1917. The combined 18 charges could have resulted in a 175-year prison sentence.

After that, Assange was held in Belmarsh Prison in London. In 2021, a British court ruled in Assange’s favor regarding his request to not be extradited, but that ruling was later successfully appealed by the U.S. government. In May 2024, a London court decided that Assange could appeal the U.S. extradition order, extending the legal saga further.

Adam Taylor, Miriam Berger, Maite Fernández Simon, Karla Adam and Grace Moon contributed to this report.