Kylie Moore-Gilbert to reveal her Iran jail ‘nightmare’ with Sky News Australia and Melissa Doyle

After being freed from an Iranian jail, Kylie Moore-Gilbert has revealed how she survived while being held captive for 804 days.

Exclusive: Australian abduction victim Kylie Moore-Gilbert says her terrifying, two-year imprisonment in a notorious Iranian jail was her worst “nightmare.”

The University of Melbourne lecturer in Islamic Studies, who was snatched by the Revolutionary Guard in 2018 and held captive and brutalised for an agonising 804 days, has told her extraordinary survival story to TV presenter Melissa Doyle, in a Sky News Australia world exclusive.

The scoop — which airs at 7pm AEDT on Tuesday, March 9 — marks the return of Doyle to TV screens after she cut ties with Channel 7 last year.

In their interview the stoic and graceful Dr Moore-Gilbert says she convinced herself she would be found and freed, despite days and months of despair, recounting her daily mantra: “I am free, no matter what you do to me, I am still free.”

The 33-year-old was held in Tehran’s Evin Prison — nicknamed “Evin University” for the number of intellectual and political prisoners held there. “That place is my nightmare,” she says.

And the horror began before even reaching the prison. She reveals that from the moment she was captured, on her way to the airport for a flight home, “the feeling I had in my gut was ‘I am in deep trouble’.’’

In a wide-ranging interview, where nothing about her ordeal was “off limits,” the heroic Australian said while she somehow found the strength to survive her prison term, returning to find her Russian-Israeli husband of four years, Ruslan Hodorov, had been having an affair with her colleague and PhD supervisor, Dr Kylie Baxter, was a new betrayal she had to overcome.

Melissa Doyle and Kylie Moore-Gilbert. Picture: Sky News Australia

Dr Moore-Gilbert, who was accused of being a spy because of her husband’s heritage, is expected to file for divorce.

Former Sunrise co-host and Sunday Night anchor Doyle was entrusted with the interview by Dr Moore-Gilbert — the presenter’s first sit-down since leaving Seven after 25 years.

“She trusted me as a journalist, and she trusted the Sky News to make sure that we treated her story with dignity and the grace that she is conducting herself with,” Doyle said.

In harrowing detail, Dr Moore-Gilbert recalls the suffocating detail of her prison cell, where she was held for more than two years, including seven months in solitary confinement.

“It’s like a box that she was in,” Doyle told News Corp Australia, “It was so tiny and it had a boarded-up window. She goes into detail about what it felt like and what it was like and how she survived … her mental strength through it, to keep going, to stay alive and the thoughts that she had of her future.”

While Dr Moore-Gilbert was freed last November after a prisoner exchange was negotiated by the Federal Government, her personal torment continues, Doyle said.

“I feel like she hasn’t fully processed it yet and she acknowledges that she hasn’t dealt with a lot of it in her mind. I almost feel as though she’s sort of put it in a box and she’s come home and she’s got so many other things to deal with,” Doyle explained, adding “one thing at a time. At one point she talks about how she almost feels like she’s sort of watching somebody else. That what she’s going through is like watching herself in a movie.”

* Escape From Iran: Kylie Moore-Gilbert airs 7pm AEDT on Tuesday, March 9 exclusive to Sky News. Watch Sky News on Foxtel and Sky News on WIN.