The Unlikely Activist

Eva Vermandel

Jemima Khan in the sitting room of her Fulham house, which she decorated herself.

Jemima Khan may live the grand life of an English aristocrat, but behind the famous boyfriends and the important hair is a serious political journalist and a budding documentary film producer. Her latest project? Taking on WikiLeaks.

The address is unremarkable and the street unexciting, but to slip past the nondescript front gate is to enter an alternative universe, a leafy enclave of secluded houses smack in the center of southwest London. This is where Jemima Khan lives, in a house with soaring ceilings that used to be a factory for old-style taxi carriages.

It was a shock to find this little slice of privilege within a shout of the bustling, thrusting Chelsea soccer stadium; it was a different sort of shock to meet Khan, who presents her own misleading facade. Wearing skinny jeans and a large letter-sweater-style cardigan, she was all long slender legs, glossy flowing hair, radiant English skin and articulate charm. She offered tea, apologized for the state of her dog-distressed cushions, took off her boots, curled up on the sofa next to Brian — the dog in question — and tossed out a barrage of questions meant to disarm and deflect.

She prefers to be interviewer rather than interviewee, she said apologetically, particularly in light of how mean-spirited the British papers can be about someone with her background, and how they can twist words into different meanings. “I haven’t done any interviews for quite a while,” Khan said. “I am naturally quite an open person, and I always end up saying too much.”

But she has made an exception in the service of “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks,” a film about the online antisecrecy group and its founder, Julian Assange, that was directed by Alex Gibney (“Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer“) and of which Khan is an executive producer. Khan has been involved with Assange’s case since he was arrested in December 2010, and she helped post bail for him, but the movie examines him and his work with a cool dispassion.

Khan and Grant: Dimitrios Kambouris/WireImage; Khan and Janklow: Dave M. Benett/Getty Images; Khan and Imran: Mian Khursheed/Reuters/Corbis.

Clockwise, from top left: Jemima, with her brothers Zac and Ben and her mother, Lady Annabel Goldsmith, at Ormeley Lodge, their London home, in 1983; with Hugh Grant in 2007; with Luke Janklow in 2010; at the beach as a young girl with her father, Jimmy Goldsmith, brother Zac and her mother;  with her former husband Imran Khan in 2002.

As she talks about her own work, Khan realizes there is a bit of a perception problem, a slight disconnect — her charmed upbringing and potentially frivolous existence at odds with, as becomes increasingly clear, the serious-minded, hyper-busy reality of her working life.

The tabloids persist in calling her “socialite Jemima Khan,” as if that were an official title, like “doctor,” and Khan, 39, has indeed appeared often in the party-photos sections of glossy magazines and Web sites. Her father was the late financier Sir Jimmy Goldsmith; her mother is Lady Annabel Goldsmith, a legendarily charming hostess whose first husband, Mark Birley, named Annabel’s nightclub after her. The two had 10 children between them; Jimmy Goldsmith was an inveterate keeper of mistresses (in fact, Annabel was his mistress before she became his wife) who fathered children with four different women. Life around the dinner table was complicated, noisy and filled with vociferous debate about the issues of the day.

Khan was a serious student, “which is why I don’t understand why my children have to be coerced and virtually waterboarded into doing their revision,” she said, laughing, using the British expression for “studying.” But at 19 she dropped out of college to marry the Pakistani playboy/cricket star-turned-politician Imran Khan, who exuded charm and exoticism. It was a bit of a shock for everyone.

“A born-again Muslim twice my age who lived in Lahore and wanted to be in Pakistani politics isn’t any father’s idea of a perfect son-in-law for their teenage daughter,” Khan said wryly. “But they both married against their parents’ wishes and eloped,” she added, of her parents, “so they weren’t exactly in a position to intervene.”

Marry she did. She moved with her new husband to Pakistan, learned Urdu, had two sons and threw herself into political and social causes, becoming a public figure in her own right, her every outfit and utterance dissected and obsessed over. The couple divorced after nine years, growing apart but remaining good friends, whereupon Khan returned to London and embarked on a passionate romance with the actor Hugh Grant. (She remains good friends with him, too, as well as with the literary agent Luke Janklow, another recent ex, she said, adding that she is happily single now.)

Along the way, Khan somehow pulled off the neat trick of reinventing herself from Hello! magazine stalwart to serious person consumed by serious issues. She went back to school, finished her undergraduate degree and then studied modern trends in Islam at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. Now she is associate editor of the political magazine New Statesman, for which she writes fluent and incisive political profiles, and is Vanity Fair’s European editor at large. She has also written an article about polygamy for New Statesman and presented a BBC radio program on the subject in Britain. In her spare time, if that is the right way to describe it, she finished a screenplay about a young, hapless-in-love British woman whose exasperated mother turns to her Pakistani neighbors to help organize an arranged marriage for her.

That is her first foray away from nonfiction. “I am completely aware that it is a massive cliché to be working on my screenplay, but at least it was commissioned,” Khan said cheerfully. “It could be crap, but I am going to get it done.”

Eva Vermandel

Khan at her writing desk in the house’s sitting room.

“We Steal Secrets,” which was released last month, examines the complicated case of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. It also examines in fascinating detail the equally complicated and possibly more interesting, because it is so shocking, case of Bradley Manning, the troubled, sexually confused Army intelligence analyst whose leaking of secret American diplomatic and policy documents to WikiLeaks led to his arrest three years ago. (He is currently awaiting trial.) As for Assange, the movie dissects all his contradictions, examining him as hero and villain, as an advocate of openness and transparency who is also a deeply secretive, possibly paranoid control freak — an ultimately unknowable person.

Khan’s connection to the movie came because she was an admirer from afar of WikiLeaks and, for a time, a high-profile supporter of Assange’s in Britain. “There was a lot of stuff coming out about Pakistan, which confirmed suspicions I had about the sort of double-dealing of the government,” she said of the WikiLeaks material. And more simply, “I don’t like lies,” she explained. “WikiLeaks exposed the most dangerous lies of all, which are those that are told to us by elected governments.”

She was drawn into Assange’s odd, charismatic orbit after the British authorities placed him in solitary confinement while he fought extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted on charges of sexually assaulting two former WikiLeaks volunteers. Along with other sympathizers, Khan helped post his bail, which ran to the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But then several things happened. Working with Gibney on his WikiLeaks documentary, Khan served as his liaison to Assange and was sucked further and further into the morass of Assange’s suspicious, conspiracy-theory-suffused mind. Assange at first seemed amenable to an interview on camera, but became increasingly, maddeningly obstructive, finally heaping so many conditions and demands that negotiations over the terms completely broke down.

Then Assange suddenly jumped bail — Khan and the other supporters lost their money — and dramatically sought political asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy, around the corner from Harrods, where he has remained, confined to a small studio, since last June.

He has never responded to Khan’s e-mails asking him to explain his legal situation, she says, and she said her agreement to help post bail was never meant to allow him to avoid facing the charges in Sweden, but merely to get him out of prison while he prepared a legal case and continued his WikiLeaks work. She has not spoken to him since June of last year.

Khan recently wrote an elegant article for New Statesmen about her evolving feelings — admiration turned to disillusionment — toward Assange. While claiming to support the notion of a just society “based upon truth,” she wrote, WikiLeaks has in fact “been guilty of the same obfuscation and misinformation as those it sought to expose, while its supporters are expected to follow, unquestioningly, in blinkered, cultish devotion.”

Assange’s supporters have denounced “We Steal Secrets,” saying that its examination of the sex charges against Assange amounts to irrelevant sensationalism. On the contrary, Khan said, Gibney actually unearthed a great many details about Assange’s past that he ended up not putting in the movie. “Alex is an ethical, scrupulous person, and I think he decided that it was not relevant to the story, and the Swedish case absolutely was,” she said. Meanwhile, Khan is starting work with Gibney on another documentary, about drone warfare.

So please do not say she is a socialite. “There are plenty of things that you can call me, even if they are not flattering, but socialite, I think, is incorrect,” she said. Nor should anyone assume that growing up with money has somehow made her feel entitled. On the contrary, Khan said, as the interview wound down, it has cemented her hunger for doing something meaningful. “I know people in similar situations who haven’t really worked or who have sort of squandered their money,” she said. “The result is, I suspect, just massively low self-esteem and an unfulfilled life.”

She led the way to the door, through the courtyard, and back to that nondescript gate, discussing why there was a huge hole in the ceiling of her entryway. (It has to do with a shared plumbing connection with a nearby house, and the unwise tendency in that house, apparently, to flush baby wipes down the toilet.) The next day, she sent an e-mail clarifying her position. “I didn’t mean to suggest that I am not very lucky,” Khan wrote. “I just meant that it’s easy to become indolent, entitled and to lose a sense of purpose if you don’t have to work.” She finished: “In my experience, being busy and working hard is the key to sanity/happiness.”

Looking again to nature as its muse, the Brazilian jewelry house H. Stern follows up the space-influenced Copernicus collection with its Iris collection, which draws its shapes from the sea. Rounded seashells, curved octopus arms and spherical sea urchins take form in gold earrings and rings. The standout piece in the series is a rose-gold bracelet, backed with noble gold (H. Stern’s unique blend of 18-karat yellow gold and 18-karat white gold) and covered in cognac-colored diamonds, that evokes the motion of crashing waves.

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