September 06, 2019
Videos showing two male politicians engaging in sex with women have been posted online to their embarrassment, with many Iranians saying the tapes expose not only the two men but also the hypocrisy of the regime itself.
Neither of the men is a major figure. Both are Reformists.
The first sextape was posted online August 4, according to France24, the international arm of French state broadcasting. The four-minute video, which was clearly filmed with a hidden camera, shows Ali Mohammad Ahmadi — the former governor general of Kohgiluyeh va Boyer Ahmad, a province in southwestern Iran — having sexual relations with a woman.
Local media outlets, said to have close ties to Ahmadi, alleged the politician had been set up by a foreign intelligence agency that wanted to force him to travel to Canada to take part in a television program critical of the Iranian government.
Those same media outlets claimed Ahmadi refused and that the video was leaked as a result. A close associate of Ahmadi swore the woman in the video was his “legitimate wife under Islamic law.” But France 24 said Ahmadi has been married to the same woman for years, and she was definitely not the woman who appeared in the sextape.
Two days later, a second video of Ahmadi with the same woman was posted online. In that eight-minute video, the pair spend most of the time talking and kissing.
Shortly afterwards, Iranian social media users identified the woman as working for an Iranian airline.
Ahmadi was appointed to his post by the government of President Rohani. Ahmadi recently resigned from his position as governor general to start campaigning in the February 2020 legislative elections.
On August 9, another leaked sextape popped up on social media, this time featuring a different politician — Abbas Malekzadeh, the mayor of Sadra, a city of about 100,000 residents in the southern province of Fars. Four days earlier, he had been arrested with three members of the City Council, all accused of corruption.
Unlike the videos of Ahmadi, which looked like they were filmed with a hidden camera, Malekzadeh filmed this video himself. In the video, he stands naked, caressing a naked woman as she talks on the telephone.
In the days following, the woman in the video posted two videos begging social media users to erase the sextape. She says it was filmed three years ago and could “ruin [her] life” as she is now married.
Other photos of Malekzadeh have recently appeared online. In these images, he is seen smoking a hookah with a woman named Zahra Jamali, one of his assistants at the City Council, who was arrested with Malekzadeh August 5.
An Iranian female journalist spoke to France24 about how Iranians have reacted to these sextapes.
“People see these videos as just more proof of government officials’ hypocrisy,” she said. “These men have the right to have sexual relations, of course, and most people don’t really care whom they do it with,… but the men in question are officials of the Islamic Republic, a country with a morality police that arrests people for dating out of wedlock.”
Men in the regime have not been known to suffer much punishment for sexual offenses. In 2007, the prosecutor general announced that Reza Zarei, the chief of police in Tehran, had been arrested in a brothel with six women. He spent four months in prison before being demoted and given early retirement.