February 15, 2019
Jason Rezaian, having gained back the weight he lost in Evin Prison, is now promoting his new book, “Prisoner,” about the harrowing time he spent in Evin.
He makes clear in the book that, while he was under constant psychological pressure, he was never physically beaten and had no nails pulled out or electric prods put to his genitals, as so many prisoners in Evin have reported.
Rezaian was born in the United States to an Iranian father and a white Midwestern mother. Like many kids in the Iranian diaspora, he became used to straddling two warring cultural identities, particularly growing up with the frictions of the hostage crisis.
“I’ve always felt that you can be an American of any kind of background, and that’s going to be more or less supported by the American masses,” Rezaian told the HuffPost in an interview. “I don’t think the same is true of a hyphenated Iranian. I think that the people of Iran that I encountered on a daily basis in all the years that I lived there accepted me as somehow Iranian … but somehow not.”
In 2014, armed security agents of the regime collared Rezaian in the parking garage of his Tehran apartment and arrested him and his wife, Yeganeh Salehi. He admits that his Farsi wasn’t quite good enough to understand when his captor told him he was being arrested.
His imprisonment began with 49 days of solitary confinement, which he describes as a “living grave,” and ended only after 544 days—one hundred days mire than the US diplomats taken in the 1979 US embassy seizure.
In his book, he describes a lingering sense of shame and love for Iran.
Rezaian tells how his father, a rug salesman in San Francisco, gave a $1,000 rug to each of the freed US Embassy hostages, with a certificate that essentially said, “As an American, I welcome you home — and as an Iranian, I’m so sorry for all that you endured in my home country.”
Rezaian says his desire to reflect the reality of people in Iran — away from the narrative presented by Western media and the Islamic Republic itself — was one of the motivating factors for moving there as a freelance reporter in the late 2000s.
“I thought I had an opportunity to go there and tell a more nuanced story of this place. It’s a massive country, 80 million people. And frankly, the Islamic Republic has done a better job of anybody at creating a negative image of its country and its people,” he said, referring to the “Death to America” rallies held regularly. “But I thought to myself, ‘If I can go there and I can spend some time there, I can tell a more complete picture’.”
As to what the outside world can do about Iran, he said, “I think that if you don’t believe that people are malleable and if you don’t believe that people can grow and can change and can be re-educated — or educated, in this case — then you would be much more inclined to believe that there’s no hope and we just have to do whatever we can to topple the current situation.”
He has filed a lawsuit against Iran for damages of $1 billion — a move he said he undertook in part to deter the country from imprisoning journalists and hostages again. Despite his treatment by the Iranian government, he is critical of the Trump Administration’s dismantling of the nuclear deal.
Rezaian is adamant that Iran’s future should be determined by the Iranian people. “I like to believe that there’s always some hope. It’s what got me through a year and a half in prison and other difficult things in my life,” he said. “I was somebody who often, for a long time, promoted the notion of people-to-people contact between Iran and the United States. I still promote that. But I can’t advise people to go to Iran anymore.”
