Then They Came For Me

A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity and Survival in Iran

On June 21, 2009, just nine days after Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected in a highly contentious election, the Revolutionary Guards arrested award-winning Canadian-Iranian journalist, playwright and filmmaker, Maziar Bahari, in his mother’s home in Tehran.

For the next 118 days, he remained imprisoned in Iran’s notorious Evin prison, where he was severely beaten, and accused, among other things, of espionage and plotting a velvet revolution. Then They Came For Me is a riveting, on-the-streets account of the contentious elections, and the tale of reporter willing to risk everything to tell a story. But it is also a deeply moving personal story about a family profoundly — and brutally — impacted by Iran’s changing regimes. In 1954, Maziar’s father, a Communist, was imprisoned by the Shah’s secret police and spent two years in prison for the crime of belonging to a treasonous organization. Nearly thirty years later, not long after the Shah’s government was overthrown and the Islamic Republic of Iran was created, Maziar’s sister Maryam spent six years in prison for her involvement with the Communist party.

Bahari’s personal and family story presents a unique overview of the tortured modern history of Iran and his reporting and analysis of the inner workings of the Islamic government give the readers an unprecedented insight into the zeitgeist of modern Iran and the men who run it.