On July 23, women’s rights activists raised the alarm that the actress Nazanin Bahrami had been arrested.
It came shortly after she had signed an 800-strong statement denouncing sexual abuse and violence in the film industry. Actress
Reports have since circulated that Bahrami has been able to call her family, and that she was arrested by one of the morality patrols, not a security agency.
But Iran Wire has now received information to the contrary, and understands Bahrami is being held by the IRGC’s Intelligence Organization (IRGC-IO).
According to eyewitnesses, Bahrami and several of her colleagues were detained at about 11am on Saturday, July 23, in Tehran’s Enghelab Avenue.
Plainclothes agents surrounded the group, took their mobile phones and allowed the others to leave before taking Bahrami to an unknown location. During this exchange, they also filmed her and her companions.
The nature of the calls Bahrami has so far placed to family and friends have led to the suspicion that they are being monitored, or even that she has been made to read from a script.
The Iranian judiciary and security agencies have yet to issue a formal comment on her case.
A source close to the case, who has asked not to be named, told Iran Wire Bahrami is one of at least four people arrested since May this year for “supporting Iranian #MeToo”.
Though the global #MeToo campaign was a grassroots movement involving thousands of individual, mostly female victims of sexual abuse, without leadership, in Iran it is routinely framed by the regime as a foreign contrivance aimed at disrupting order.
The source declined to name the other three detainees, but said of Bahrami’s arrest: “Five male agents and one female were involved.
During interrogations, IRGC operatives pressured Nazanin to confess to having ties to the #MeToo campaign, and in conversations with her family and friends, to deny that she had been taken into custody and blame the morality patrol.”