Haleh Esfandiari was detained in solitary confinement at Evin Prison in Tehran, Iran for more than 110 days from May 8 to August 21,2007.
19 Facts About Haleh Esfandiari
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Haleh Esfandiari has lived in the United States since 1980, having left Iran with her husband and daughter because of the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
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Haleh Esfandiari met Bakhash in the early 1960s, when both were reporters at the Iranian newspaper Kayhan.
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Haleh Esfandiari was Deputy Secretary General of the Women's Organization of Iran and she was responsible for several museums and art and cultural centers.
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Haleh Esfandiari was a fellow at the Wilson Center from 1995 to 1996.
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Haleh Esfandiari has served as director of the Middle East Program at the Wilson Center since 1997.
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Haleh Esfandiari was involved with the Wilson Center's collaboration with the RAND Corporation's Initiative for Middle Eastern Youth.
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Haleh Esfandiari was a fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy in its first year of fellowship program in 1995.
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Haleh Esfandiari is known to have been close to Faiza Hashemi Rafsanjani, an Iranian politician and a daughter of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former President of Iran.
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Since 2011, Haleh Esfandiari has been a member of the board of the Peace Research Endowment.
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Haleh Esfandiari is the author of the book Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran's Islamic Revolution.
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On December 30,2006, Haleh Esfandiari was robbed at knifepoint by three men while on the way to the airport after visiting her ailing 93-year-old mother in Tehran, Iran, whom she had visited approximately twice per year over the past decade.
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Haleh Esfandiari was one of four dual US-Iranian citizens to be detained by the Iranian government under similar circumstances in 2007, the others being Radio Farda correspondent Parnaz Azima, Ali Shakeri of the Center for Citizen Peacebuilding at the University of California at Irvine, and Kian Tajbakhsh, an Iranian American consultant for the Open Society Institute.
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On May 15,2007, Iranian Judiciary spokesman Ali Reza Jamshidi confirmed that Haleh Esfandiari was being investigated for crimes against national security and that her case was being handled by the Intelligence Ministry.
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On May 21,2007, Iran's state TV announced that the government of Iran had charged Haleh Esfandiari of seeking to topple that nation's ruling Islamic establishment.
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The Ministry of Intelligence said that Haleh Esfandiari had admitted during interrogation that her institute was funded by the Soros Foundation.
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Iran did not immediately confirm that Haleh Esfandiari is being detained.
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On July 16,2007, footage of Haleh Esfandiari appeared for the first time on a program entitled In the Name of Democracy, aired on the Iranian state television channel IRIB.
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Haleh Esfandiari was shown wearing a scarf and speaking in Persian.