Masih Alinejad

In an operation separate from the Amirov–Omarov network, the DOJ announced in November 2024 that IRGC asset Farhad Shakeri had recruited Carlisle Rivera and Jonathan Loadholt to locate and kill Alinejad for payment. Rivera was sentenced to fifteen years' imprisonment in January 2026 and Loadholt to ten years in May 2026; Shakeri remained at large.

Attribution

Protagonist is the victim

Role of the person profiled

Protagonist is the victim

During the January 2026 demonstrations, Alinejad called on democracies to isolate Tehran politically and stated that, if the regime committed massacres, targeted military action against those issuing the orders would, in her view, be justified. She subsequently repeated her call for targeted strikes against officials responsible for the repression.

State of the evidence

Documented

Legal status — source text

Not applicable

Attribution

Personally implicated

Following the failed kidnapping plot, Iranian officials, according to US prosecutors, recruited members of an Eastern European criminal network from 2022 to assassinate Alinejad in New York. Rafat Amirov and Polad Omarov were found guilty in March 2025 and each sentenced to 25 years' imprisonment in October 2025. An expanded 2024 indictment also targeted members of the Iranian network, including an IRGC general.

State of the evidence

Established by a court

Attribution

Protagonist is the victim

Role of the person profiled

Protagonist is the victim

Masih Alinejad worked under paid contracts for Voice of America's Persian service, a media outlet under the U.S. Agency for Global Media. Public contracting data confirms several contracts, including contracts after 2020. In 2020, Responsible Statecraft criticised several American media outlets for presenting her simply as a journalist or activist without disclosing her financial links to a government broadcaster, particularly when she commented on the Trump administration's policy towards Iran.

State of the evidence

Documented

Legal status — source text

Not applicable

Attribution

Directly implicated

Alinejad was among the founders of the Alliance for Democracy and Freedom in Iran, an opposition coalition formed in 2023 around the "Mahsa Charter" with Reza Pahlavi, Shirin Ebadi, Hamed Esmaeilion and Abdulla Mohtadi, among others. The alliance rapidly fractured: Esmaeilion denounced "undemocratic methods" in criticism largely directed at Pahlavi, after which Alinejad, Ebadi and Mohtadi also left the group, believing that the situation prevented continued solidarity.

State of the evidence

Documented

Legal status — source text

Not applicable

In September 2019, Iranian authorities arrested Masih Alinejad's brother, Alireza Alinejad-Ghomi, and two members of her former husband's family, amid direct pressure against her anti-hijab campaigns. Her brother was subsequently sentenced to eight years' imprisonment in 2020. A 2023 US civil decision found, on the basis of the evidence presented, that he had been detained from 2019 to 2021 and subjected to ill-treatment; that finding is not an Iranian criminal conviction of those responsible.

State of the evidence

Documented

Role of the person profiled

Protagonist is the victim

In 2021, US federal prosecutors indicted several Iranian nationals over a plot to abduct an Iranian journalist and activist in the United States and take her back to Iran. Reuters and American court documents identified the target as Masih Alinejad.

Attribution

Protagonist is the victim

Role of the person profiled

Protagonist is the victim

Alinejad launched the "White Wednesdays" campaign in 2017, inviting Iranian women to publish or send her images challenging compulsory hijab. In July 2019, an Iranian judicial official warned that women sending Alinejad videos or photographs of themselves removing their veils could receive prison sentences of one to ten years, the state describing her as acting for the United States.

State of the evidence

Documented

In February 2019, Alinejad met US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to discuss human rights in Iran. The meeting drew strong criticism from Iranian opposition figures and observers, who accused her of aligning herself with hardliners in the Trump administration, favouring a regime-change strategy and insufficiently condemning the impact of US sanctions on Iranians.

State of the evidence

Documented

Legal status — source text

Not applicable

Attribution

Political responsibility

Following the launch of "My Stealthy Freedom" in 2014, media and officials close to Iran's authorities conducted a smear campaign against Masih Alinejad. An Iranian television report falsely claimed that she had been raped in London in front of her son. Authorities also described her as working for the United States or an "enemy state", rhetoric used to discredit her campaigns against compulsory hijab.

Legal status — source text

Not applicable

Attribution

Directly implicated

As a parliamentary journalist, Alinejad published details from an MP's payslip revealing salary, New Year allowance and bonus. Parliamentarians and conservative media accused her of stealing the document from the MP's locker; guards subsequently denied her access to Parliament.

State of the evidence

Documented

Attribution

Directly implicated