You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast. Mamma Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast is recorded on. Hello Omeya Friedman and the team at Mamma Mea are bringing you over one hundred hours of the best of the best from across our award winning podcasts to give you the hot pod Summer of your dreams.
Here at No Filter, we have selected the very best stories of human resilience, of escaping from colts and tsunamis, of surviving in prison, surviving a landslide, surviving a broken heart, and so much more. Today, I'm bringing you the story of Kylie Moore Gilbert, the Australian academic who spent eight hundred and four days in an Iranian prison. But that, believe it or not, was just the beginning of her story. In the time since we recorded this conversation, Kylie has
remarried a guy called Sami Shah. He's a comedian, and she's given birth to a little girl called Leah. But the road to get to this point in her life, this happy point, has been really long and incredibly rocky. You won't believe this story that she's about to tell you. It was the twelfth of September twenty eighteen. An Australian academic Kylie more Gilbert, was making her way through Tehran's International Airport in Iran. She'd been in Iran for three
weeks for a work trip. She was a lecturer at Melbourne University specializing in Islamic studies, and Kylie had been invited to the country by another university. All in all, she'd had a really great time there. But now she was on her way home, and if she was being honest, she was slightly relieved because for the past twenty four hours, Kylie couldn't help but feel like she was being watched, and she couldn't wait to get home to her husband
and her parents and shake this feeling. She reached into a bag, pulled her passport out, and she was getting ready to check in at the airport after texting her parents to say I'll behind soon, when she felt a tap on the shoulder. What happened next, Well, that's for Kylie to tell you, but it would be eight one hundred and four days until she'd ever see her passport again. From Mom and Me, you're listening to No Filter, a podcast where people like Kylie tell their stories very candidly
and aren't afraid to be vulnerable. My name is Miya Friedman. After being detained and then arrested at the airport, Kylie Moore Gilbert spent eight hundred and four days incarcerated in Tehran's Evin and Quai Chak prisons for espionage, a crime
she never committed. During those two and a half years that she spent in prison, most of it in solitary confinement from the ages of thirty one to almost thirty four, Kylie had no bed, no mattress, no pillow, no tampons, and for some of it no lights and no windows and no toilets. Kylie was completely cut off from the outside world. She was an innocent Australian stuck in a harsh foreign prison with no way of getting home. And she joins me now for a very special episode of
No Filter. Kylie, tell me a little bit about what your life was like before September twenty eighteen when you went to Iran.
I think I was living a pretty regular life really. I am originally from New South Wales. I'd spent several years living overseas, mainly in the UK, but I'd moved back to Australia and moved to Melbourne. I did my PhD at Melbourne UNI, and I was at that time working then as a lecture at Melbourne UNI, lecturing in
Middle East history and politics. I had recently bought a house in the far flng Dandenong Rangers, quite a commute from Melbourne, but you know, as a young person trying to get my foot on the housing ladder, that was the best I could do. I'd recently got married, so I was in my early thirties, and I guess living a pretty regular life, you know, starting off my career,
starting you know, a relationship, buying a house. So I was in that kind of that place, and I thought I was going to Iran for three weeks and that my life would continue in that vein afterwards.
Iran's not somewhere that most people would visit, certainly not for a holiday. But you were going for work. What were you doing there?
So I'd been invited to go to Iran actually by an Iranian university and they were running a program for scholars in my field to learn more about Shia Islam in Iran, and it's the majority religion of Iran. But it's actually a minority sect within Islam more.
Broadly, so I guess.
It was a soft cultural outreach program being run by an Iranian university to try to link themselves more strongly to foreign universities and build research contacts, that kind of thing, And I just thought it would be really interesting. I'd always wanted to visit Iran, and my research wasn't on Iran at all. It wasn't on Shia Islam at all, but I had touched on Shia Islam in other research projects i'd done, so it was sort of relevant to me.
And yeah, I just thought, why not, Like if someone invites you to go to an interesting and exotic foreign location for work, and the university approved my trip and paid for the flights and everything, so why not, Like I thought it would be a good professional opportunity.
The day you would do to flay home, you're arrested at the airport. What are your memories of that day?
I remember the arrest itself quite well, although the day in the lead up to the arrest, I was quite anxious, and I think I was I cottoned on. As you know from the book, I knew that something was wrong before I was arrested. I just never in a million years thought that i'd be on a flight list, banned
from living the country. And I, you know, some men had come to my hotel the day before and asked about me, asked what my room number was, this kind of thing to the receptionist, and he actually told me he gave me heads up about it. So I was already nervous from that, and I thought, Okay, it's good I'm leaving the country. I don't know who these men are or what they want, but I'm flying out anyway, so as long as I avoid them until then, it'll be okay. So I was a little bit highly strung.
I didn't really sleep very much that night the night before my flight, and you know, nobody came up to me during the day or anything. The men didn't come
back to the hotel while I was there. And I went to the airport with all my stuff, checked my baggage in and I was walking to immigration with my passport ready to be stamped, when people who I later learned were the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps i LGC approached me and touched me on the shoulder and took me away to an interrogation room inside the air and told
me I wouldn't be making my flight. So my memory in the lead up was just sort of one of anxiety and being ready to leave the country, saying okay, something, he is not right. It's good that I'm living today. But the actual moment of the arrest itself is quite sharp in my memory. And you know, I was interrogated for several hours in that airport room before being moved elsewhere, and yeah, I remember it quite vividly.
Where were you taken from the airport?
I was first taken to a kind of a safe house, an apartment clearly controlled or owned by the IRGC in northern Tehran. It was clearly used for filming purposes.
The living room of the apartment was.
Set up like a film studio, and I wasn't filmed there, so I'm not sure why. But actually I was allowed to take a nap for an hour amidst all the film paraphernalia.
So I got to see it up close.
So they were clearly using it, I guess, to film
prisoners or false confessions or something like that. It was clearly used for interrogations in other security related purposes, and I was interrogated there overnight without you know, with one hour's sleep at dawn, and after that interrogation, I was you know, almost passed up from fatigue by that point, and I was taken to a hotel also under their control in Tehran, and I was there for one week, interrogated on a daily basis by the same group of people.
What were they asking you, Kylie, Like, what was their accusation?
I think they weren't clear at that point what they were wanting to accuse me of. They were interested in recruiting me as some sort of informa or spire to work for them, because they asked me about it within the first twenty four hours. They kind of informally sounded me out, which was bizarre to me because I had no idea who they were or what was going on,
so I kind of didn't take it seriously. At that point, they had decided I was suspicious and they were just digging to try to figure out why and what they could get on me, so they asked me about absolutely everything. Really, it was when they got into all of my email accounts, and I initially had given them fake passwords or hadn't told them about my primary email address. But in the end they got all of it out, and I gave them the passwords because I didn't really have a.
Choice at that point.
And when they went through my emails, they found messages from people, They found topics or subjects or information that then they were able to expand upon in the interrogation,
and it kind of snowballed from there. But you know, they initially wanted to know about my research, what I was doing in Iran, the research trip I'd taken to Bahrain from my PhD a few years earlier, visits to Israel that i'd made, my ex husband and his links to Israel, even everything even including my family history and what my great grandparents were doing and stuff like that, which I didn't know very much about at all. They were really digging around everywhere they could at that point.
When you were in the hotel and previously in the safe house, and even when you were being interrogated at the airport, what did you think was going to happen?
I had no conception whatsoever that I would be spect to prison. I just like I would not have believed it if had they told me, because I'd done nothing wrong. I thought, Okay, this is a misunderstanding. I will explain to them that I've done nothing wrong. I'll show them that I'm innocent. They'll interrogate me and then they'll let me go in and get back on the plane and fly back to Australia. So I cooperated them at the beginning. I tried to answer their questions because I thought, well,
I've got nothing to hide, I haven't done anything. So you know that when they're finished with me, when they've asked me all the questions they have to ask, they're just going to let me go home. And they were lying to me and telling me that as well, so, especially in the hotel, led me to believe that once I'd cooperated and done everything they needed me to do, then they would actually themselves buy me a ticket and
put me on a plane. So I was naive, and at the beginning that's what I thought would happen.
It was just you alone in a room with up to a dozen men. Were you worried feel safety? Did they hurt you? Were you worried that you would be sexually assaulted?
Yes? I was.
This was one of my first fears.
One of the first times that I felt physically unsafe was when there was a large scrum of men around me and I because I didn't know who they were, they wouldn't tell me who they were. They weren't wearing uniforms, they were.
All playing clothes. I didn't speak fasty.
They were all quite aggressive and hostile in the way they were speaking with one another. And there was somebody who was an appointed translator, but A didn't speak fluent English, but B didn't translate anything other than a direct request of me into English. So I was just bewildered by
what was going on. And there were so many men, and they were quite hostile and aggressive, and I was actually, you know, when they put me in the hotel, I didn't really sleep the first night because I was afraid that one of them would come in and do something to me, or they would come back in the middle of the night, or I later learned actually they were cameras everywhere in that hotel. In my bedroom, they were hidden cameras, so they would have been watching me get undressed,
this kind of thing. I hope there weren't cameras in the showers, but I wouldn't know, so, you know, I definitely had that fear.
You know, these are highly highly.
Religious men that see Western women uncovered. I mean I was wearing a hdehob, but not at all of the level of hitjob that they would advocate. They you know, they would have seen me as fair game maybe, and I was being in the middle, you know, being a scholar of the Middle East. I have encountered these kinds of people before, and I know that often they are quite they can be.
They see Western women as objects.
Of harassment sometimes, and I did feel quite afraid that they would assault me.
You were taken to Evan prison and put into solitary confinement. What was it like physically when you were taken there? And did you know that's where you were going?
No, I had no idea a that I was going to prison and be that happy to put in solitary I actually when they put me in the solitary cell, they'd given me the prison uniform to change into, and I just thought this was like a change room for the uniform. It was so small, like couldn't it didn't even cross my mind I would have to sleep in there.
I literally thought, she's put me.
In the room, close the door, I'm going to get changed, and then she's going to take me to the real cell. It was tiny, It had no window, no natural light. There was just a light on twenty four hours a day in the ceiling, a very bright led sort of thing. No furniture, no stimulation whatsoever, designed to torment you, designed to break you for the interrogation, so complete sort of sensory deprivation you could there was nothing to do whatsoever. The only object in the room was a telephone for
calling the guards. But because I couldn't speak Fasting and they couldn't speak English.
If I called them.
Nothing would happen because I'm saying I need to go to the toilet, and they didn't understand what that meant did so they would just hang up on me.
And so I was just in this horrible box.
Unable to communicate with anyone and not really understanding what was going on.
How did you go to the toilet?
Initially I would bang on the door and they didn't like that. They didn't like any making of noise. So they would come and open the door and I would be sort of toilet toilet and they understood that, and they would take me to the bathroom only when they had time or when they felt like it. So I would be blindfolded as well when I was taken to the bathroom, so that I wouldn't see the hallways or the other rooms.
In the facility.
But that did you know, after a while I had seen everything. But for that first month, I was very heavily blindfolded and escorted by the arm to the toilet and given one square of toilet paper. And if I spent more than sort of thirty seconds in there, they'd bang on the door and yell at me. And you know, going to the toilet was a fraud experience in and of itself.
What about getting a period?
Oh my god, Miah, this was a nightmare, Kylie.
I'm just like, I know, these are such like basic questions, but of course that's it's like your basic dignity was taken away. How did you cope with these very basic needs that you would have had.
Honestly, every female prisoner in there, you can have an hour's long discussion about these things with them. I've heard countless horror stories, like principally, Iran doesn't believe in tampons. It's very difficult to get tampons in Iran because they believe that it takes a woman's virginity. There's all these superstitions about tampons. So the prison guards basically banned tampons because they said only an immoral woman would.
Use such a thing.
And it's actually a very pervasive idea even, you know, with other prisoners I discussed and many of them, especially older ones or ones who hadn't traveled abroad, believed that, you know, no man would want to marry you if you were a single woman, if you'd used tampons for your period.
So they used these terrible, huge.
Fat nappy pads that looked like they belonged like in continents pads for elderly people. This was all we were given for our periods, and actually I had many fights over it because they would give me one at a time.
You know, they wouldn't give me a packet.
They'd come and doll out one every time I and even communicating that that's what I needed when I didn't speak for you know, it was very difficult, it was, and it was a very unhygienic place. The toilets were very very dirty. There was no toilet paper to clean yourself. I wasn't allowed to shower at the beginning except once every three days, So cleaning yourself it was Yeah, it was a nightmare. I mean, I'm not going to go into the gritty details, but it just these feminine hygiene.
Issues were huge until.
It got marginally better when I was allowed to make certain grocery purchases once a month on a shopping list. Maybe after six months or so or seven months of my incarceration, the embassy dropped some cash off at the prison and I was able to make a shopping list that someone would go and purchase and deliver to the prison, one of the IGC guys, not the embassy, And I put on pads, like a Western brand of pads, and a few times that got delivered to me, and that
that was much better. But yeah, we were banned from any cleaning products. So even with that money, we weren't able to buy bleach or bathroom spray or disinfectant because they said, oh, if you'd buy that, you'll drink it and kill yourself and so. And I used to fight them and say, well, you come and put it in there, you sprayed around in them, take it away and I won't touch it.
But just spray it so I can clean the toilet or whatever. But you know, they refused, So this was really difficult.
It was dealing with the sanitary situation, especially, Yeah, when you had your.
Period, when you were in solitary confinement and there were just four walls, what did you literally do every day?
So a lot of the.
Days I was taken to interrogation and I actually wanted to go because even though that was obviously very unpleasant and a very hostile atmosphere normally, and I felt constantly under siege and under attack there in that interrogation room, it was still better than being left alone inside my own head for hours and hours in that room, in
that solid confinement cell. And toward the end of my interrogations, they came less and less frequently, and every weekend there'd be two or three days where I would be just on my own and you wouldn't know when they're coming, so you'd be anticipating that the interrogators might come for you every day, and some days they did, some days they didn't.
So when I was left on.
My own for those days on end where I didn't go anywhere, it was basically like psychological torture, you know, I was The first week was the worst until I developed psychological coping mechanisms.
But I was bouncing off the walls.
My brain was thinking at a million miles an hour over all sorts of subjects. Rapped by guilt, rapped by regret. I should have done this differently, I should have done that differently. Fear about the future, anxiety, worry, it was all rolling through my brain at an intense speed. And you know, I would try and play games with myself. I would try and memorize or recite things that I thought I could memorize, try to remember the lyrics of songs,
try to remember my times tables. But you know, it was really really hard, and a lot of my memories sort of blanked out for like some of that period, I think from the trauma of all because being left alone inside your own head with zero stimulation whatsoever and.
No natural light, no control.
I didn't even have control over my own toothbrush. I didn't even have control over whether I could take a shower or go to the toilet. I had control over nothing whatsoever. It's designed to break you, and it really is very effective. It really really does make you suffer so much.
You mentioned psychological coping mechanisms that you developed.
What were they somehow my brain managed to slow itself down, not for the first couple of weeks, but over time, slowly. After about the two week mark, I kind of started to inhabit this like send you asleep semi awake state, not really meditation. But it wasn't a deliberate thing I was trying to do, Like I'm very bad at meditation, but a few times I tried to meditate, and you know, I just couldn't turn off my brain.
But after about.
Two weeks, I would lie down on the floor because there were no beds or mattresses, with that kind of an itchy blanket over my head to block out the light.
And I wasn't tired enough to sleep, but I would just.
Close my eyes and my memories would become very vivid, and especially my long term memories, so my short term memory completely gone. All prisoners say this that solitary confinement kind of after a while induces a sort of amnesia or Alzheimer's in your short term memory. You know, if you had to asked me, what's what's on my Spotify play list, I wouldn't have been able to tell you, you know, or what movies did I see before I
went to Iran. But I could suddenly like draw on these ultra vivid memories of my childhood, of events that I'd long forgotten or what I'd forgotten in my brain, and then kind of relive them and go through them and inhabit that strange space of kind of half a sleep, half away, half in my memories, trying to forget the present, forget the future, and just sort of live in the past.
And I don't really know.
What that's called, or whether that's a thing or it just happened to me, But that's kind of how I, in a way coped. I just slowed my brain down and lived in the past.
There were almost two parallel tracks. You were living your hell in an Ieranian jail, and your family, your husband, your parents were like what did they think were going on? What were they doing?
At the beginning, they had very little information.
The government didn't really tell them much. I don't think
the government really knew what was going on either. I was able to contact them on a kind of an ad hoc basis via WhatsApp from the interrogations, so you know, when I got arrested the first time at the airport that night, they let me text my family on WhatsApp and say, you know, they made me write some silly excuse like I've decided to extend my trip in Irun to do more research or something, when I'd already told them I checked in for my flight and I was
at the airport, so there's no way they would have believed that. But I guess to show them that I'm okay and I'm alive and some horrible accident hasn't happened. So periodically they were allowing me to, I guess, show proof of life or message my parents or whatever and tell them that I'm still around. I wasn't allowed to say I was in prison, but I'm sure they would have worked that out at some point, and I imagine the government would have worked it out too, and perhaps
have had have told them. I'm not sure, but everybody knew very little. I was allowed to say very little, and my contact with them was just haphazard and to the whims of the interrogators.
Essentially, you were held at Evan in the notorious to A unit for twenty three months, almost two years. How did your mental state change over that time.
I feel like.
I actually became stronger as time went on. I think you have to first perceive the permates of your surroundings.
Where you are, why you're there.
Who's captured you, what's going on, what possibly would happen to you, for example, going to court and getting sentenced to prison, something like that, Whether there could be a diplomatic deal on the offering this kind of thing. Once I perceived the boundaries of what's possible and what's not possible, where I am and y and who captured me, I think I started to understand the rules of the game a little bit better, and I drew strength from that.
I also educated myself through making contact with other prisoners.
Can you talk a little bit about how you made contact with other prisoners.
So they reached out to me. They heard I was there, I heard my.
Voice speaking English to the guards, and the guards not understanding me and speaking back in Persian. I'd scratched some stuff in English on the wall of the outdoor exercise area, and they occasionally scratched a response a word or two back to me. And then I received in the ut exercise area some a small bag of food of nuts and fruits and a small letter written on some toilet paper with a piece of chocolate that they'd scratched onto
the toilet paper. And these were two girls in a cell just opposite mine, actually, but there were two in a cell, not one like me. And then I made contact with their friends in a different cell down the hall. There were three of them at the time, and they all spoke English, and because I didn't speak fastly, they were able to tell me in English who these people were, what the rules were, what they could do to me,
and what they wouldn't do to me. That I should have a hope that my government will get me out, because often the Uranians take people hostage to make deals and to get something in exchange. That I shouldn't make a false confession. That I should stay true and just tell the truth, and you know, not trust them because they weren't trustworthy. They would play me in the end if I trusted them. So I got to understand a lot from these friends, and they really risked themselves to
reach out to me. It was really dangerous for them. They didn't have to do that. They were really good people that wanted to help me. They could hear that I was in distress, they could hear I didn't understand the language. And some of them really became my friends and my sisters.
You went to incredible lengths to communicate with each other. Can you describe some of the ways that you would do that.
We had an air conditioning vent for a period of several months that through this convoluted system of events that we figured out one of the events we had maybe four vents in each cell, won in the toilet or three maybe, and we figured out one of our events connected to one of their events. So and I had to sort of climb the toilet cistern in order to get my head up there and talk through the vent.
But at certain times, on certain guard shifts, we figured out we could communicate through the events without it being discovered.
So every three.
Nights, on certain guard shifts, we would talk for maybe ten minutes, myself and my friend Nilu Faire and Horda who were in a cell next to mine. And this is when you know, we exchanged notes too, but this was where we could, you know, exchange the most information.
We were moved cells many times and that vent situation didn't last, but we desired We devised several different ways of passing notes, and the most successful way, which I actually came up with was we got a pair of pants, prison uniform pants that were spare, you know, because prisoners would come in and then go out, and you wash your clothes and you put them on a rack in
the communal laundry. So when we discovered there was a spare pair of pants on the rack, I stole them, pretending they were mine, and managed to open the seam of the bottom of the trouser maybe one or half a centimeter and roll up a very small note in
a long tube and insert it into that scene. And then we've marked the pants with a small asterisk actually on the waistband to know that these were the note pants, and I would wash them alongside my own uniform, trying to keep the note as dry as possible, and hang them up on the rack in a certain part of the rack is an indication that those pants were a
delivery of a note. And then the other cell would take them, pretending that's their washing that they're taking from the rack, and remove it back to their cell and take the note out and read it. And it was a very complex operation to write the notes in secret away from the camera as well and get them into the pants. But it was actually never discovered, unlike several other methods we had, we were never caught with that one, and we kept it up for months and months.
Some of the things that were considered contraband were pen and paper. I mean that was considered an absolute luxury. But occasionally you got hold of some, didn't you, Like, what did you write these notes with?
So we all had secret pens for a time. One of my friends, Elena, was a master at stealing pains, and she even stole a pen from the judge and it had his name on the side, and it became like a trophy for us, like, how on earth when you recort you go, you put on trial, You've managed
to steal a pen from the judge. And so you know, she would nick them from from various judiciary meetings, from the interrogation one time, even find them from the If the guards had ever left a pen lying around in their area, she would always cause a distraction and managed to steal it. So often the pens would be discovered and confiscated from us. But there was sort of a
network of secret pens going around. I tricked the guards just by lock into a pen I had been given to answer some interrogation questions with I managed to fool the guards into thinking I'd given back when I hadn't.
So I would keep that pen in a number of locations, initially in my underwear and then inside a pipe that was linked to the toilet plumbing in my cell and would write the notes to my friends on the toilet, squatting down where it was a black spot from the camera, and we would write on scraps of packaging, scraps of cardboard, you know, the cardboard of a toilet paper roll, or even toilet paper itself if we didn't have anything else. So we became quite good at stealing and hiding pens.
And even if.
You took the actual thin vessel of the ink out of the plastic pen itself, then it became really really small and thin, and that could be inserted into the hem of a piece of clothing article of clothing and not be discovered as well. So it was harder to write with because it was bendy, but you could do that. I did that a few times to avoid detection.
I Mayor Friedman and you're listening to No Filter with Kylie Moore Gilbert. You mentioned that you were moved from cell to cell quite a lot, so after that initial period of more than a month in that tiny two by two windowless cell. But it was interesting to read that every time you were moved. For someone who's not experienced it, I would have thought, oh, you would have been excited for a change of scene, but you always
felt very, very anxious when you were moved. Can you talk a little bit about that.
Yeah, I think because psychologically you become dependent on that space very quickly. It becomes a comfort. Almost The routine of prison is comforting to you. Anything outside of the routine is scary.
You get into that psychological.
Space where by the end of my four weeks in that extreme solitary confinement box, I had figured out how to manage my brain, and anything outside the routine just terrified. So when I was removed from that cell and brought into a slightly larger one with a TV TV locked on one channel at one high volume, and couldn't turn it off and didn't understand the language, so it actually was worse to have that TV than without. But I guess it was a step up, you know, it was
some sort of reward in a way. I don't know, but I just freaked out. I didn't want to go there. I actually got myself transferred back to my old solitary self for one night before agreeing to move. And it was the suddenness and the unexpectedness of it too. They just rocked up one day and said pack your stuff or pack up, pack up. Your blankets were moving in there, and I just yeah, I couldn't deal with it psychologically because you've become really dependent on that space and on routine.
You just slept on the floor, like was it just a hard floor with a scratchy blanket? Like no pillow, no mattress.
Yep, there was.
I didn't sleep on a mattress for the entire two years and three months in Iran. I didn't have a pillow.
What are they dirty? Your back kylie? Like are you in agony?
My back was okay, but my neck because of the lack of a pillow, I'd put like I folded up a blanket and.
Put it under my head, but it was itchy, bulky, hard.
It felt like I had a brick under my head, you know it really mind, I had a lot of neck pain and neck problems. Other prisoners, though I saw plenty of older women in their sixties, for example, who already had bad backs before they came in, or who were overweight or had various health problems, and just sleeping on the floor like that was agony for them, and they really couldn't do it. They were constantly whimpering and in pain and suffering from it. And it's part of the suffering.
You know.
They treat you like an animal, and it's deliberate. They dehumanize you, and not giving you a proper bed or a pillow or a sheet or a mattress is part of that. Having everything be dirty and unclean is part of that, you know. I was constantly one of my pastimes was to pick other people's hairs out of my blankets. And I would spend hours meticulously going over every inch of my three blankets and pulling black curly hairs and people's head hair and everything out and creating a big.
Ball of them on the floor, you know. And so I think it was deliberate.
They didn't give us clean blankets, They didn't give us betty because they wanted us to suffer. And all of these small humiliations, all of them work together to break up. Same with not being able to shower. There was no logical reason why at the beginning I could only shower every three days very quickly, because I just couldn't deal with it and was having meltdowns over it. In the end, they let me shower every day, but there was no
logical reason for it. It was just to make yourseffer, to humanize you were.
Their little things that you did that were like privately defiant to sort of maintain your dignity.
The first real active defiance I undertook was a hunger strike. Well, I guess you could say it was contacting my friends and other cells and still a pen and hiding it
and everything that was obviously defiant too. But I took the step of going on hunger strike after about four months of my incarceration, and actually it worked and I had my demands fulfilled, and I underwent maybe seven hunger strikes I think, over the time of my incarceration, and that actually felt good because you felt like you were actually doing something. It was one of the only things you could control was whether you ate or not. They couldn't really force you to eat unless they took you
to hospital and force fed you. But they never did that to me, so I felt some measure of control, that I was clawing back some control, and I could make demands and I had some agency and power in doing that. So I think that was really the first proper step of outward, obvious, overt defiance that I took. But I, you know, I'd resisted a lot. I after I knew that I was going to court and they would convict me and give me a prison sentence, because
it was obvious it was just a kangaroocord. It was totally corrupt and a total sham, and that was clear to me from the beginning, and I'd.
Heard stories of others as well.
By that point, I just realized, well, cooperating with them hasn't served me well at all, and I haven't gained anything by being nice and quiet and placating them, So I may as well at least claw back some of my dignity and resist. And I did, and sometimes I shot myself in the foot, and other times I did win concessions for myself, but it gave me a feeling like I was doing something. At least, I wasn't just this passive person sitting back and waiting for others to
rescue me. So it did actually play a big role in my ability to survive Psychologically, I think the idea that I was resisting and I was showing defiance, and I was actually trying to influence my own fate.
What does a hunger strike feel like?
The beginning is the hardest.
That might be a little bit counterintuitive, but I found the first two days the hardest. You do have really
strong pangs of hunger. If I was doing it with other prisoners in my cell who weren't striking and were eating, especially the hot food, you know, it was disgusting, but they'd deliver like a stew or something with rice for lunch, for example, and if the prisoners you know, opened that or the smell would waft throughout the room, and you know, I would often be lying prostrate because I didn't have much energy, and you'd lose blood pressure very quickly, and
I'd be very light headed. But I'd just smell it, and it was almost like the smell was more intense because I was deprived of food myself, and it was quite torturous for me to smell that, you know, that disgusting stew that the other prisoners were getting. But then after a few days, you kind of get used to not eating. If you keep hydrating, you're generally okay for four, five,
six days, okay by you. I always had low blood pressure even before I went to Iran, so my blood pressure would just plummet and I couldn't move.
Even sitting up.
I would just see stars and my head would swim and I would It would take me a really long time to walk to the toilet. For example, I'd walk like an elderly person, hand on the wall to stop myself falling. Everything's very bright, seeing stars. It would be a real mission to get out of bed and move anywhere.
After a few days, and I did a dryer strike once where I didn't I refused water as well, and that was the toughest because after I think I lasted two days after even one day of not drinking or eating.
The headaches that you got.
From dehydration and everything was really painful. Everything was on fire. Your body just was crying out for water. In particular, I lasted forty eight hours without water, and then I was hospitalized and put on a drip, so they put
the intravenous put you know, water backing hydrated me. So that was the hard by far, The longest I'd lasted on a wet hunger strike was about eight or nine days, I think, But by then, I mean I was always hospitalized, and then they're just drip feed vitamins and things into me and I would perk up again. But you know,
it is really tough. But the first few days of the hardest for sure, when your body still I guess has some food in its digestive tract, so it's still digesting and working and doing something, so it's calling out for war, and you have those real pangs of hunger. Then when everything empties out and you're just drinking water, I think it's sort of the pangs and that the pains lessen in a way and you get used to.
It in a way.
All through this time, from the minute that you were detained at the airport, you were being interrogated, and the lead interrogator was an Iranian revolutionary guard called Kazi. Your relationship with him or his relationship with you was so twisted and brutal and intense and complicated. Can you explain how it was and how it developed over those years that you were held.
Yeah, this is really hard for me to sort of articulate because I don't properly even understand it myself. He was sort of more senior than the interrogators in a way. He was the head or responsible for judicial affairs or legal affairs within the Revolutionary Guards intelligence wing intelligence organization, and he was actually one of the main interlocutors of
the Australian government in negotiating my release. So he was quite senior, and I think was linked through family ties to the head of the iogc's intelligence unit, which gave him because it's all very incestuous and mafia like in a way, it's all one big family, and it gave him the ability to act outside.
The rules of his own organization.
In a way.
He broke the rules many times. He kind of did what he wanted and acted with impunity. So even you know, from the first few nights in the hotel, he was telling me things and doing things which.
Were outside of the rules. And he was there on the night of my arrest.
He initially played the good cop role in the hotel, for example, and sort of I think wanted to recruit me. He was trying to recruit me for most of the time I was there, using either.
Carrots or to be a spy for Iran. Yes, even though they were accusing you of being a spy and they convicted you of being a spy for Israel.
Yes, yeah, I mean I think he and they knew I wasn't a spy, but once their organization decided that would be the line they were running and that's what they were going to convict me of, they all just sort of parroted the propaganda from then on. But yeah, so it sort of we had a very like conflict relationship. There's a lot of animosity between us. He had a sort of a classic male ego. He wanted to call
the shots, be in charge, and wanted everybody. I think he was used to getting his way with everything, including among his colleagues. Maybe something about my defiance attracted him in a way I don't know. I would often make jokes and mock him, laugh at him, and I think in a way he liked that because nobody else really had the balls to do it to him, and I didn't really understand who he was or how important he was, and I didn't really care at that point either, so.
That's probably why I was doing it.
So he went through phases of being really, really horrible using sticks instead of carrots, and you know, banning me. I was banned from family calls, embassy, consular visits, everything, banned from everything as a result of one of my acts of defiance. And that was him that instigated that.
Band He went to the judge and got me banned from you know, contacting my family for nine months and banning me from embassy visits is against international law, but they still managed to do that, so, you know, he was responsible for a lot of my suffering, you know, into a But then toward the beginning of twenty twenty, when the situation changed with the negotiations with the Australian government and they gave up on trying to recruit me, he kind of changed his behavior toward me and started
actually flirting with me, courting me, breaking the rules in order to give me favor, to show off, to give me benefits and presence. Immediately organized a birthday party for me. He bought me clothes, he brought me cake, he bought me pizza, you know, developed feelings for.
Me essentially, and I.
I guess, I don't know if I had a choice, but I entered into this dangerous, risky sort of game of trying to toy with his affections and use his in a way weakness for me to my benefit, but without properly understanding the rules of the game and the parameters, and therefore shooting myself in the foot of hell all the time because I just couldn't.
I couldn't play the.
Game where when I didn't have any cards in my hand and I didn't know the rules of the game. So it was a really ye and he there was a lot of emotional abuse I was. I was entirely under his power. I was in solitary confinement under his control, and it was Yeah, it was a really, really difficult situation. I couldn't get out of that I was trying to influence to my benefit.
The word I kept coming back to as I read your account was feisty, and I kept saying while I was reading Kylie, stoppish, stop stop it, stop it. I was so worried for you, And I was just like, don't say that, don't do that, don't mock him, just be a good girl, which I thought was interesting, Like I was like, just play the game to get out of there, but of course what would I know. But also I realized that you never gave up like you never were. I mean, there were times when you had
complete despair, but it didn't last long. And I was wondering if that sense of pushing back and being feisty that was part of how you survived. Was it a choice it was.
I think that's a really good way of looking at it, actually, because I don't know if I'm a feisty person in real life, but I'm actually I am stubborn, and.
I do have a kind of a sense of justice.
I guess, or injustice or you know.
I don't like when.
I'm not somebody who it's easy to bully. So for me, I had had an I was completely fed up with towding the line and doing what they wanted when they constantly broke their promises, shifted the goldposts and essentially fucked me over like they were bullies and I was weak and they were getting what they wanted from my weakness. I had to stand up to them and show them that I was stronger than they thought in order to I guess, establish a red line and not let them
do whatever they wanted to me. So I saw it as it was a survival mechanism in a way. For me. I didn't know how long I would be there for. I wanted to come out with my dignity and tact as well, and it was important to me to stand up to them. And yes, you know, I did have a big mouth at times, and you know, would mock and belittle certain members of them that I knew I would get away with, or joke around with clazizade or whatever.
But that was because I understood I'd probably would get away with it, you know, Like I spoken off fastly by that point. I understood the dynamic between them all by that point, and I.
Just didn't care, Like you just reach a.
Point where you stopped caring. Yeah, I got nothing to lose, you know, And befriending some of them actually was beneficial because I got information out of them. So I probably wasn't very smart. I probably should have just kept my head down, stay quiet, and not got to know any of them and just waited for the government to get
me out. But I wasn't seeing any movement on that front, and because it wasn't in the media for so long, I just I didn't trust that I would be prioritized that anybody really knew what was going on, and so I just thought that was really the only avenue I had left to me.
Because he was so instrumental in the negotiations with the Australian government about your release. Did it occur to you that maybe he was going to stall them so that he could keep you there because he'd become so obsessed with you.
Yeah, it occurred to me too late, you know, once I was already too deep in it to get out, and I actually just didn't think that this person is powerful enough to do that, to get in the way of a diplomatic negotiation. I'm pretty sure that's what happened, but I don't know one hundred percent. But they would
have got me out in the end. But I do believe that I spent a significant period extra in prison because of his infatuation with him and the fact that he didn't really want to make a deal to let me go and so kept putting roadblocks in the way. For the hell of it.
Has he tried to contact you since he got out.
He hasn't contacted me directly. No, I mean that would be he was I believe removed from my case because of this relationship with me. For one of a better words about a couple of months before my release. He was still influencing things, though from behind the scenes, I believe, up until five weeks or four weeks before my release, when he did manage to send me a few messages via other people when I was moved back to Tuay in October or September twenty twenty.
And to be clear, they feel were never required. It was not. It was very much a one way abusive relationship.
Yeah, definitely, but I certainly gave him to believe that there was hope, you know, because I was trying to leverage him for my freedom but also for better conditions in prison, you know, I was. It was for me
a matter of survival. I wanted him on side. I wanted him to be my friend because he was so powerful in there that he could do things like bring me a three tiered chocolate cake with my name iced on it for my birthday, or you know, authorize me to be able to wear my own clothes and not the prison uniform, authorized me to have extra shopping lists, authorized me to go outside the prison for medical treatment to you know, he allowed me to go to an
optometrist in Tehran and choose a pair of glasses because my eyesight was ruined by years of staring at a wall a couple of meters in front of me, so I needed reading glasses and he authorized that, you know, medical treatment, all sorts of things. It was beneficial to me to sort of develop a friendly relationship with him in order to leverage that. So, whilst it wasn't reciprocated, I did, you know, encourage it to a certain extent at certain times because I could see the benefit sometimes.
Another thing that he had control over was when you were occasionally given your phone during interrogations and allowed to either WhatsApp or call your family. And in that early stage your husband Ruslan, when did the phone calls with your now ex husband start to become a little odd and start to give you, you know, cause for confusion.
After the second call I had to him. Ever, actually.
The first call was just out of the blue. He wasn't expecting it, He didn't know where I was. He was very worried about me, and he was himself just a just worried husband wanting information about his wife. But the second time I called, he was distant, he was cold. I had a feeling he wasn't the only person in the room, and he had developed a kind of a
security mindset, and I mean as you would. I mean, you know, he knew that some nefarious group in Iran had arrested me or taken me hostage or something, so of course he would be mindful of security. But I just felt like it wasn't the person I knew that I was talking to. It was someone else, and it was cold and unfeeling, and I just it upset me.
Did you eventually sort of stop speaking and stop contacting each other?
Well, we couldn't, you know, especially because of his links to Israel. Once the first phase was out of the way and they'd got what they wanted or tried out of him. I was not allowed to call him, really because his Ida occasionally would give me a favor and allow me to call him, but I was mainly calling my parents and my sister Belinda on the rare occasion that I was permitted phone calls.
You had a lot of time to think. Did you tell yourself a story about what might have happened?
I certainly theorized a lot about how I came to have been arrested in the first place. I just because I didn't understand all the dynamics, and I still don't completely you know, from getting to know some of the IGC, including Couzizade and others, I was able to piece a few things together about over time, over a number of years, about how I came to have been flagged on their
radar at all. And a guy that I had interviewed prior to my arrest in Iran who wasn't an Iranian, he was a Bahraini for my research, had some sort of involvement with the Revolutionary Guards and had potentially betrayed me, dabbed me in for whatever reason as someone suspicious to them, which what led to them taking an interest in me whilst I was still in Iran for my academic three week trip and led to my so this person but essentially is responsible for my rest.
At one stage, Kuzie said to you, your husband's having an affair, your marriage is over. Did you just think that was just another thing that he was saying to you to try and break you.
Yeah. I didn't really give it much credence at the time because, yeah, as you said, like they would say things to me like that all the time, Like nobody in Australia cares about you. The embassy hasn't even reached out once.
To ask where you are.
They know you're guilty, therefore they're not bothering about bringing you home.
You know, you're a traded to Australia.
Too as well as you know, you know, like the Australians know you work for Israel like and you're an Australian citizens, so they wouldn't care about you.
You know.
They would say all sorts of bullshit to me.
So when they said that about my husband, I'm just like, yeah, whatever, Like I didn't didn't believe it, and I actually laughed at them. I think when they said it, I don't know whether they knew that or not. They could have just been saying that to upset me, and actually it was true, but they didn't know, you know, so either they knew something or they didn't, I'm not sure. But at the time I didn't really believe them.
Had you kind of made peace with yourself in your mind that whatever the reason, your marriage was over while you were still in prison, I.
Wasn't thinking about it a lot, to be honest. The outside world felt so far away. I was really My coping mechanism was to just focus on the here and now, live in the moment and forget the future to get them, like, you know, just not think about my old life, thinking about my family, my job, everything, my relationship.
It upset me a lot.
So I would just sort of numb myself and just live in the here and now and try and focus on various you know, goings on within the two A unit, what my friends were up to, you know, concerning myself with.
The day to day routine.
So, whilst I didn't think about it, I was pretty sure our marriage was over, just because I didn't feel that I was getting the support that I would have wanted from a partner in such a situation that I thought I would have given had it been reversed. So I felt like, well, when I do come home, whenever that may be, I don't think we can come back from this.
After eight hundred and four days, on November the twenty fifth, twenty twenty, you were released. Could you believe it? No?
I also had such a mistrust that it was real that even when it was happening, I had part of my brain was going, don't celebrate yet something could still happen to eff it up, you know, Like you've got out of prison, but you're still in Iranian territory. They can come and pick you up at any moment. They can turn the plane around in the sky as long
as you're still an Iranian airspace and take you straight back. So, you know, the diplomatic deal had fallen through a few times, and I just I didn't want to give myself false hope.
So even when the ambassador came two days earlier and told me two days before my release and said we're going to release you in forty eight hours, Nick Warner, the envoy, who's fantastic, he did so much to help, and the Ambassador Lindall too, you know, he's on his ways in the air, I just didn't believe it, and I thought, okay, this is another time it's going to
fall through. So only at the only when we passed out of her any airspace and landed in Qatar, in Doha, which was our first stop on the way back to Australia, did I actually kind of start to breathe and try to grapple with the fact that I wasn't in a run anymore, that couldn't get me anymore.
That is not the end of my conversation with Kylie. If you are a Muma Mea subscriber, you can hear what happened to Kylie after she got out, and in this subscriber episode, she talks about how her life changed forever, what it was like trying to acclimatize, and what happened when she got back to her house and her marriage, and that part is just unbelievable.
Them together in the street and publish them and that was quite upsetting for me to see, but it is what it is, and you know, I wish them all the best.
Follow the link in the show notes to hear that episode. You can find Kylie's book, The Uncaged Sky. It's brilliant Vira link in our show notes. Our producer is GM moylan, the executive producer is Eliza Ratliffe, and I'm Nea Friedman.
If you're looking for something else to listen to, like and follow all of our Mum and Mea podcasts which are currently bringing you Hot Pod Summer one hundred hours of summer listens, from spicy conversations to incredible stories, fashion beauty, where the friends in your ears over Summer