She's 28 years old, a graduate student at Cal State University, Northridge, where I teach, and since Oct. 15 she has been locked in Evin Prison near Tehran.
Esha Momeni was working on a documentary about the women's movement in Iran.
"She wanted to show her professors and her American friends how powerful Iranian women are, and that the Taleban are not in power in Iran, to show how much progress Iranian women have made," says her mother, quoted on the blog started up to free Esha, http://www.for-esha.blogspot.com/.
Born in Los Angeles, Esha returned to Tehran as a child with her parents and earned an undergraduate degree at Azad University in Tehran. After a marriage and divorce, she came to Los Angeles to work on a master's degree in mass communications.
Two months ago she flew to Tehran to conduct interviews for her video documentary.
She was within days of returning when she was pulled over for an alleged traffic violation and taken to prison, where she is reportedly being held in solitary confinement. Her videotapes and computer were confiscated.
Life inside Evin Prison was revealed recently in a memoir by Marina Nemat, who was arrested at age 16 in 1982, tortured, and forced into a marriage. She witnessed executions and barely escaped with her life. See Prisoner in Tehran (New York:Free Press, 2007).
Another way to appreciate what Esha is going through is to watch the film Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi or read the graphic novels on which it is based.
Marjane describes being a child during the brutal Islamic Revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini, then living under the new regime, fleeing to Western Europe, and returning to try to live in a Tehran where playing Western music at a party in one's apartment can be cause for arrest.
The For-Esha blog reports, "Amnesty International has recently launched an appeal for Esha's immediate and unconditional release. The public is invited to send letters of appeal to senior figures in the Islamic Republic of Iran" by going to Amnesty's website: http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/MDE13/155/2008/en
For more information, see the LA Times, the Associated Press, Reuters, and other news media.
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