They came to kill me. I knew it could happen one day—but not here. Not in New York.
It was the afternoon of July 28, 2022. I was at home in Brooklyn, on a Zoom call with Garry Kasparov, the Russian chess grandmaster turned Kremlin opponent, and Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo López. We were discussing the launch of the World Liberty Congress—a global alliance of dissidents challenging authoritarian regimes.
What I didn’t know was that just outside my brownstone, pacing the porch like a caged tiger, was 27-year-old Khalid Mehdiyev—a foot soldier for the Thieves-in-Law, the ruthless Russian mafia network (made infamous by Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises). The Islamic Republic of Iran had offered half a million dollars to eliminate me—a naturalized American citizen since 2019, an Iranian-born journalist, and a vocal critic of the Islamic Republic. He was there to collect.
The plan was simple, bloody: Wait for me to step outside my front door, then shoot me in the face. Mehdiyev had been parked on my street for days, casing the house. He’d already sent photographs and videos of my home to his handlers Rafat Amirov and Polad Omarov. Inside his car, he had an AK-47-style assault rifle, two high-capacity magazines, and at least 66 rounds of ammunition—a “war machine,” he called it in encrypted messages. He also had a black ski mask and over $1,100 in cash.
The conspiracy was out of a Hollywood screenplay. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which is designated by the U.S. as a terrorist organization, had sent targeting materials—photos, my address, even images of the inside of my house—to Amirov in Iran, who passed them to Omarov, based in Georgia. Omarov then relayed them to Mehdiyev, who had been living in Yonkers and working at a pizzeria.
Mehdiyev reported from outside my home on July 24: “At the crime scene.” Three days later, his handlers were pressing him to finish the job. “This matter will be over today,” he wrote. “I told them to make a birthday present for me.”
On the day of the attempted assassination, Mehdiyev filmed himself from behind the wheel, rifle beside him, and sent the video with a chilling message: “We are ready.” Amirov sent back a photo—an interior shot of my home. “This is the house where she stays,” they wrote.
What saved me? Were there too many neighbors in the street? Did I have too many meetings? For whatever reason, eventually, he gave up for the day and drove off—frustrated, empty-handed. Then he ran a stop sign. Whether it was criminal hubris or a careless mistake, it’s what brought him down—and, ultimately, saved my life. When police pulled him over, they found the loaded assault rifle on the back seat, as well as the cash and the ski mask.
Within hours of Mehdiyev’s arrest, my husband, Kambiz, and I were rushed into emergency protective custody. We were stashed in an obscure hotel, flanked by FBI agents sleeping in the suite next door. I was no stranger to personal threats: plots to kidnap me, intimidate me, silence me. But this was different. This wasn’t a warning.
Iwas born in a small rural village in northern Iran, where the roads turned to mud after the rain and our world smelled of rice fields and diesel fumes. My father was a rice farmer, but he sold vegetables on the side of the road to make ends meet. For the first decade of my life, we didn’t have running water in our house.
Every morning at school, we were required to chant, “Death to America.” It became a ritual, no different from brushing your teeth or tying your shoes. Death to America. We shouted it with the shrill innocence of children who didn’t understand what they were saying, only that silence meant trouble.
My earliest political memory wasn’t of protest but of obedience—of watching the clerics on state television, their fists clenched, warning women that showing a strand of hair meant they’d be strung up by that very hair and burned in hell for eternity. I believed them. Every girl did.
And yet, somewhere inside me, something refused to stay quiet.
By my teenage years, I had found my way into a student study group. We read banned books. We shared photocopied articles. We painted slogans on the walls of government buildings in the dead of night. It was exhilarating. It felt like freedom, or at least the possibility of freedom.
The regime didn’t take kindly to these modest acts of dissent. I was arrested for the first time in 1996 when I was 19 years old. There was no trial to speak of. Just a judge, a five-minute hearing, and a sentence: three years, suspended. What saved me wasn’t the mercy of the Islamic Republic. It was the fetus growing inside me. I was pregnant, and they didn’t want the optics of jailing an expectant mother. Others weren’t so lucky. One friend was hanged.
After my release, I became a journalist. I started writing for reformist newspapers, covering the Majlis, Iran’s parliament, and exposing the corruption of its members. I was one of the few women allowed in those chambers, and I made it count. I revealed how MPs took cash payments in exchange for votes, how they funneled state funds into private accounts.
I wrote weekly columns criticizing then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, mocking his delusions and his denial of the Holocaust. One piece compared his populist handouts to treats a trainer gives to his dolphin. That line earned me a protest outside the newspaper’s office and a summons from Saeed Mortazavi, Tehran’s infamous prosecutor—the same man who ordered the arrest of Iranian Canadian journalist Zahra Kazemi, who was raped and beaten to death while in custody in Evin prison.
Mortazavi interrogated me for a week before releasing me. This man represented everything that was wrong with the system, and now I was on his radar.
Still, at the time, I believed that if we pushed hard enough, the system might bend. I wrote books. I gave speeches. I held on to hope. But 2009 shattered all of that. That year, Ahmadinejad was running for reelection and millions of Iranians went to the polls to vote him out. The atmosphere in Tehran and throughout Iran was electric. The reformists seemed poised to win. Then Ahmadinejad claimed victory, much to the shock of much of the nation, who to this day believe that the election was stolen.
I was supposed to fly to Washington to interview President Obama around that time. I had thought we were at a turning point for my country. I delayed my trip because I wanted to cover the election. But as the day approached, I was warned by the Iranian security services to leave the country. During the election journalists were not welcome. My car was then vandalized. It had become clear that my safety was no longer guaranteed in Iran.
So I left. Not because I wanted to, but because staying would have meant being forced into silence or worse. By leaving I could continue to agitate, to bear witness from abroad. But in the case of dissident journalists, I would learn, the regime doesn’t recognize borders.
I started a new life in exile. Using my camera and social media, I documented the stories of 56 victims of the 2009 crackdown, interviewing the families of those who had been murdered, tortured, or disappeared by the regime. I helped connect them to one another, transforming private grief into public resistance.
I settled in Brooklyn, and for a time, I tried to convince myself that this was temporary. That perhaps, if I kept speaking out, calling the regime what it truly was, a brutal theocracy terrified of its own women, something would change, and I would go home. But over the years, I became, without quite realizing it, one of the regime’s most wanted dissidents abroad.
Sometime in late 2020, two FBI agents came to our home in Brooklyn and whisked my husband and me to their offices in downtown Manhattan. They led us into a conference room where a group of agents and prosecutors from the Southern District of New York were waiting. For a brief moment, I feared the worst—that I was about to be arrested and deported to Iran.
After the introductions, one agent got straight to the point: “You are being followed by the Iranian government,” he said. “They really hate you.” I tried to keep the mood light. “Tell us something we don’t know,” I said. “I know they follow my programs. They send me hate messages all the time.” But then the agent added something that sent a shiver down my spine. “There is someone here in the U.S., in New York, who is following you and sending photographs and videos of you to the Intelligence Ministry in Iran.”
The agents wouldn’t tell us how they had discovered the photos or uncovered the plot against me. A few days later, they moved us to a safe house on Long Island. Because of the COVID pandemic, we were able to work remotely without raising suspicion about our sudden disappearance. For months, we lived a secret life—pretending everything was normal, while constantly looking over our shoulders and wondering whom we could trust. For security reasons, we were relocated multiple times.
It was only much later, in 2021, when prosecutors filed indictments against a cadre of Iranian intelligence agents, that I learned the full scope of the plot to kidnap me on American soil. The Iranians had hired a private investigator to track my every move—filming me hourly, gauging my mood as I walked through Brooklyn, mapping my home and daily routines. The plan was to bundle me into a speedboat, smuggle me to Venezuela—a close ally of Tehran—and from there, extradite me to Iran. It sounded like something out of a bad political thriller. But as preposterous as it seemed, I knew better. The Islamic Republic had pulled off elaborate kidnappings before.
This wasn’t rogue behavior. It was state-sponsored. The Islamic Republic had approved a covert abduction on U.S. soil. Then they approved my assassination.
A month after Mehdiyev was arrested, I traveled to Washington to meet with a senior government official at the White House. The invitation came amid attempts at resuming nuclear negotiations with Iran. I accepted the invitation not to be polite, but because I needed to speak plainly.
The official didn’t sugarcoat the situation. “The Islamic Republic doesn’t like being embarrassed,” he told me. “They are stubborn and determined, and they may try to get you again.” He said it flatly, almost as a matter of fact. I asked him how the United States could negotiate with a regime that had just sent assassins after an American citizen on American soil. He shrugged. “The United States has its long-term interests and we have a different view than yours,” he said. It was a dismissive answer, one that left me chilled.
The administration framed the plot against me as a law enforcement matter, not a political one. It was clear that my case was an inconvenience—one that complicated the quiet diplomacy they still hoped to conduct with Tehran. But I had no illusions: The regime doesn’t respond to good faith or reason. Only to pressure.
Then, last November, around the time of the American presidential election, I got yet another call from the FBI, this time to inform me that they had disrupted another plot and made two arrests. The would-be assassins were American career criminals with lengthy rap sheets.
According to a new indictment, Farhad Shakeri, a Tehran-based operative for the IRGC, had recruited Carlisle “Pop” Rivera and Jonathon Loadholt to track and kill me. They even attended one of my speaking engagements at Fairfield University in Connecticut, which was ultimately canceled for security reasons. But the plot didn’t end with me. Investigators also discovered that Shakeri had been directed to assassinate President-elect Donald Trump in November 2024. That’s how far the regime is willing to go, targeting anyone they see as a threat, no matter how powerful, no matter how protected.
In March 2025, I entered a federal courtroom in lower Manhattan from a side door. I walked past Amirov and Omarov, the two men who had enlisted Mehdiyev to kill me at my home. I prayed I wouldn’t stumble as I made my way to the witness box. My hands felt like blocks of ice. My heart was pounding. But I stared straight at the defendants to show that I wasn’t afraid.
Amirov wore a gray suit. Either it was one size too small or perhaps he had gained weight in jail. He exuded malice. He had been looking for work, according to prosecutors, when the Revolutionary Guard found him and hired him to kill me. Omarov, in a beige sweater and brown pants, kept his eyes fixed on me while I spoke.
As I testified, my mind traveled back to Iran, my homeland and my childhood. I thought of those frightening scenes we were made to watch on television. I thought about that hideous chant: “Death to America.” Now here I was, under oath in an American courtroom, facing down the men who had tried to silence me on behalf of that very regime.
Mehdiyev, who pleaded guilty to attempted murder and illegal possession of a firearm, as well as a litany of other charges, had turned government’s witness. His testimony was damning. Despite his cooperation with authorities, he remains subject to a minimum sentence of 15 years in prison.
Two days after I gave my testimony, on the 24th floor of the Manhattan federal courthouse, the jury returned its verdict. It took them only three hours. Guilty on all counts. The two men who had plotted to murder me would spend many years behind bars.
I got the news while I was in my car, driving through my neighborhood. It hit me all at once—a feeling of justice, survival, relief. I wanted to scream. I jumped out of the car and grabbed the first person I saw. “My killers were found guilty,” I told him.
“Well, good for you,” the man replied, startled.
Then, completely unrehearsed, something burst out of me. It was a reaction so spontaneous it caught even me by surprise. I shouted, at the top of my lungs: “I love you, America!”
I had been brainwashed to hate this country, but now I’m thankful. Thankful for the justice system. Thankful for the rule of law. Thankful for the agents who protected me and for the prosecutors who pursued the case. Thankful to be alive.
The Islamic Republic has money. It has hitmen. It has allies in high places. But Iranians have something stronger: thousands of witnesses to its cruelty. We have the memory of every young woman who ever asked to live free and was punished for it.
I will keep speaking until the day no girl in Iran has to choose between her life and her hair. Until the day the Islamic Republic is remembered not for what it destroyed, but for the generation that rose up and said: Enough.
