Masih Alinejad returned to the headlines after posting an emotional video reacting to the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. “Finally, you’re dead, finally, you’re gone, Ali Khamenei,” she said, her voice breaking. In the same clip, she is seen hugging strangers in New York. For Alinejad, those embraces were not theatrical. They were, as she later explained, acts of survival.Responding to comments about “hugging strangers”, she wrote that when you live in exile and cannot safely hug your own mother, strangers stop feeling like strangers. The people she embraced, she said, saw both joy and grief on her face. “That’s not performance. That’s survival.” She added that America had saved her life three times and that the people around her have become her new family. For Alinejad, developments in Iran are never abstract political events. They are intimate, personal reckonings. When what she calls terror collapses, she wrote, survivors do not mourn it. They breathe. For many across Iran, Syria, Iraq and the wider Middle East, such moments represent accountability.
Born on 11 September 1976 in rural northern Iran, Alinejad began her career as a journalist in 2001, writing for reformist newspapers including Hambastegi and Shargh. As a parliamentary reporter in Tehran, she covered corruption and misconduct among lawmakers, building a reputation for pointed, confrontational reporting.After the disputed 2009 presidential election and the protests that followed, she left Iran. She later studied Communications at Oxford Brookes University and has lived in New York since 2009, becoming a United States citizen in 2019.Alinejad is best known for her campaign against Iran’s compulsory hijab laws. In 2014, she launched My Stealthy Freedom, inviting women to share photographs of themselves without headscarves. The campaign attracted more than one million likes and evolved into related movements such as White Wednesdays and My Camera Is My Weapon. Through these initiatives, she positioned social media as a form of civil resistance.She hosts “Tablet” on Voice of America’s Persian service and has contributed to outlets including IranWire, Radio Farda and The New York Times. In 2021, she co-founded the World Liberty Congress. After the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022, she became one of the prominent voices supporting the Women, Life, Freedom movement. In January 2026, she addressed the United Nations, accusing Iran of committing war crimes.Alinejad married Kambiz Forouzandeh in 2014. Her memoir, The Wind in My Hair, published in 2018, became a bestseller. Over the years, she has received several honours, including the Geneva Summit Prize in 2015, the Moral Courage Award in 2022 and recognition as Time’s Woman of the Year in 2023. The New York Times once described her as “the woman whose hair frightens Iran”.From her early reporting days in Tehran to her life in exile in New York, Masih Alinejad has built a career defined by confrontation with power and advocacy for women’s rights. For her supporters, she is a symbol of defiance. For the Iranian state, she remains an adversary abroad.
