Julian Assange Marries Stella Moris Behind Bars at London Prison

Julian Assange — the WikiLeaks founder alternately celebrated as a courageous whistleblower and reviled by U.S. officials as a traitor of life-or-death secrets and a pawn of foreign governments — was married behind bars inside a high-security prison in southeast London on Wednesday, his organization said on social media.

Assange, 50, wed attorney Stella Moris at the Belmarsh prison where he has been detained in front of "only a handful of friends and family," according to WikiLeaks.

"Their engagement was announced in November 2021 and over months of back and forth with the governor and prison authorities, the couple have been granted permission to marry inside the prison," the Wikileaks statement said, according to CNN. "Only four guests and two witnesses will be allowed to attend the ceremony, as well as two security guards. The guests will have to leave immediately after the event, even though it is being held during normal visiting hours."

"I am very happy and very sad. I love Julian with all my heart, and I wish he were here," Moris, an attorney who was part of Assange's international legal team starting in 2011, said as she cut wedding cake outside the prison gates after their ceremony.

The couple began a romantic relationship in 2015, Reuters reports.

"It's hard to date properly when you're being pursued by powerful states bent on revenge for your work publishing evidence of war crimes, but they met nearly every day in the Embassy and realized how they felt about one another," their wedding website states, adding, "They found love in a hopeless place."

Sarah Saunders, a longtime friend and advocate of Assange's, tells PEOPLE that while the wedding brought a certain kind of joy the context of the nuptials were their own kind of burden.

"It was pretty much a case of [Moris] walking in, getting married, and then walking out again. It was a fairly sanitary kind of process. Obviously, everybody had to have numerous security checks," Saunders says. "Stella herself had to undergo many, many checks. Anyone going into the prison has numerous physical checks. So it's not your normal bride getting ready for her wedding. She was intimately searched."

"And this is all for the wedding of a man who is being held, without charge, in a prison with convicted felons, convicted murders, convicted terrorists," Saunders continues.

Assange has been held at Belmarsh since 2019 as U.S. authorities seek his extradition so he can stand trial on more than a dozen charges under the Espionage Act related to the release of confidential military records and diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks in 2010.

His team has said he is being politically persecuted.

"On a personal note, I feel so sad and disheartened," Saunders tells PEOPLE. "The years roll on, and the kind of support Julian needs has changed over the years. It's sometimes hard to know where you can make a difference."

For the ceremony, Moris wore a lilac satin wedding dress by designer Vivienne Westwood, who has campaigned against Assange's extradition. Her veil was embroidered with the words "valiant" and "relentless" and "free enduring love." According to reports, Assange wore a kilt, also designed by Westwood, who wrote a personal message on the bridal gown.

"You know what we are going through is cruel and inhuman," Moris told supporters gathered outside the prison, according to Reuters. "The love that we have for each other carries us through this situation and any other that will come. He is the most amazing person in the world. He is wonderful and he should be free."

On March 15, a U.K. high court refused Assange's latest appeal in his extradition case, deciding that his application did not raise "an arguable point of law," according to CNN.

Assange and Moris have two children, sons Max and Gabriel, who were born while he spent seven years under asylum inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London while hoping to avoid extradition to Sweden in connection with separate allegations of sexual assault which have since been dropped.

"Today is my wedding day. I will marry the love of my life," Moris wrote in The Guardian Wednesday. "At lunchtime today, I will go through the gates at the most oppressive high security prison in the country and be married to a political prisoner, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange."

Though Moris, her sons with Assange and guests posed for photographers outside the prison gates, wedding images weren't permitted by authorities, according to Moris.

"The prison states that our wedding picture is a security risk because it could end up in social media or the press," she wrote. "How absurd. What kind of security threat could a wedding picture pose?"

In May 2019, the U.S. charged Assange with 17 counts under the Espionage Act. If convicted, the combined maximum sentencing would be 175 years in jail.

Assange has said WikiLeaks publishes information in the name of total transparency.

While some of the revelations of hypocrisy and grave government wrongdoing have been widely praised, the group has also been criticized for releasing damaging emails about Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign which American authorities believe were first stolen by Russians.

Assange has disputed Russia was his source.