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Dr. Kylie Moore-Gilbert traveled to Iran in 2018 for an academic conference and left 804 days later, after a ten-year espionage sentence, stints in Evin and Qarchak prisons, and the prisoner swap that finally brought her home. In her conversation on the JPost sits down with... podcast, the Australian-British Middle East scholar revisits how the Revolutionary Guard reduced her to a number, 97029, and tried to trade her freedom for her cooperation as an agent. She refused. What makes the interview unusual is that a woman treated so harshly by the Iranian state speaks with such warmth about ordinary Iranians, and such clarity about the regime that jailed her.
Much of the conversation lives in the gap between those two. Moore-Gilbert describes a prison system where the IRGC keeps valuable captives alive and closely monitored while abandoning inmates in the public wards to a kind of law of the jungle. She lays out the blackmail and recruitment tactics used to turn prisoners into informers, recalls the cellmates she came to regard as sisters, and names one of them, environmental activist Sepideh Kashani, who she says has since been thrown back behind bars. Her account of Iranian women, from the anti-hijab protests that followed the 1979 revolution to the uprisings she has watched from afar, is among the most affecting stretches of the interview. "I just didn't break," she says of her own years inside, and that same defiance runs through the way she talks about the women who remain there.