Beaten and tortured: Aussie academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert reveals her Iranian prison nightmare
Kylie Moore-Gilbert reveals how she escaped from one of the world’s most notorious prisons before she was recaptured and punished.
Beaten, drugged and subjected to months of psychological torture, Kylie Moore-Gilbert says she had “nothing left to lose” when she mounted a daring escape across the rooftops of one of the Middle East’s most notorious prisons after being accused of espionage.
The Australian academic has revealed she managed to savour just 20 minutes of freedom during the jailbreak before she was recaptured by her outraged guards and severely punished.
The 33-year-old said she had been at breaking point after having a mental breakdown within a month of being arrested by the intelligence arm of the Islamic Revolution Guard in 2018 and secretly locked away in a prison on the outskirts of Tehran.
Accused of spying on behalf of her Israeli husband, Dr Moore-Gilbert said she was given an unthinkable ultimatum: co-operate with Iran’s powerful secret police and lure him to Tehran for interrogation, or spend the next decade in a squalid cell at a women’s prison widely reputed to be the worst in the world.
“They wanted to recruit me; they wanted me to work for them as a spy,” Dr Moore-Gilbert said in a Sky News interview on Tuesday.
“(I was told) that if I co-operated with them and agreed to become a spy for them, they would free me. I could win my freedom. I could make a deal with them.
“They didn’t want me to recruit (my husband). They wanted me to lure him to Iran so that they could arrest him and get their hands on an extremely high-value (Israeli) hostage. They said to me I have to call him and say, ‘If he comes to Iran and lets them interview him, they will let both of us go’.”
For 804 days in captivity, Dr Moore-Gilbert steadfastly refused the proposition. The Australian reported in November that she was freed after a year-long effort led by the head of the intelligence community, Nick Warner.
It was only when Australian diplomats secured her release last November, she said, that she was hit by the most devastating aspect of her ordeal.
After being repatriated to Canberra, she learned that her husband, Ruslan Hodorov, was having an affair with the very woman enlisted to keep her family abreast of developments in her pursuit for justice: her colleague and PhD supervisor at Melbourne University, Kylie Baxter.
“In a way, it’s been harder for me to process and come to terms with that than it has been what happened to me in Iran,” Dr Moore-Gilbert said.
“I knew that there was a problem at least 12 months before I came home. He had changed and I was upset and disappointed that he wasn’t supporting me to the extent I hoped he would.
“He stopped telling me he loved me over the phone. I understood that something had shifted. I didn’t know about the infidelity or that the other person involved would be who she is.”
A rising star in the field of Gulf studies, Dr Moore-Gilbert had travelled to Iran in August 2018 after being invited to attend a seminar on Shia Islamic studies by the University of Religions and Denominations in Qom, about 140km south of Tehran.
Following the course, she said she stayed on in Iran for about a week to conduct interviews with Bahrainis living in the country as part of a personal research project, only to be arrested by Islamic Revolutionary Guards as she prepared to board her flight home on September 13, 2018.
She said she was taken to a safe house in northern Tehran and interrogated daily for a week before being blindfolded and bundled into a car and transferred to the nearby Evin prison.
“I was thrown into solitary confinement in this max security detention centre controlled by the Revolutionary Guards and it’s essentially a black hole,” she said.
“It’s psychological torture. It’s a two-by-two-metre box. You go completely insane. It is so damaging. By the end of it (I was) a crazy lady. My emotional state was just so volatile. I was basically having a prolonged anxiety attack.”
After nine months in prison, Dr Moore-Gilbert was brought before a judge and tried as an Israeli spy. Although she described the accusations against both her and her husband as “ridiculous”, she said it was evident she would be found guilty from the moment she set foot in court.
“It was a joke, the verdict was predetermined. The judge wasn’t even pretending to be free and impartial,” she said. “Ten years was the maximum penalty for the crime I was charged with, so I was given the maximum sentence.
“It was all behind closed doors, under cover of darkness, conducted secretly and there was nobody to hold them to account.”
At first, Dr Moore-Gilbert responded to the baseless conviction by going on a series of seven hunger strikes — and her defiance soon escalated despite heavy-handed reprisals by her jailers.
“I was beaten up once and forcibly injected with a syringe of tranquilliser against my will,” Dr Moore-Gilbert said.
“I was trying to leak one of my letters that I’d written to the public prosecutor outlining the injustices in my case … and the guard went crazy. She called a male colleague of hers and both of them assaulted me. The biggest thing I did was I managed to escape.
“I’d seen a way to scale the wall and climb up on the roof of the facility, and one day I was just like, ‘You know what? I’m going to do it. I have nothing to lose’. “There were spikes on part of the wall, so I just took some socks with me and put them over my hands and then grabbed onto them, hoping they weren’t too sharp.
“It was pretty effective and I climbed the wall, got up on the roof, disappeared from view (and) walked all the way to the end of the complex.”
As she contemplated climbing down the far side and making for the surrounding residential neighbourhood, she realised the seriousness of the stakes at play. “I didn’t speak the language. I was in a prison uniform. I didn’t have any money and if they caught me (outside the walls) it would’ve been really serious,” she said.
In the end, she decided to protest her incarceration from the roof by screaming: “Azadi! Azadi! Freedom!”
Dr Moore-Gilbert was freed on November 25 last year, in a swap for three Iranian prisoners who had been held in Thailand for a botched Bangkok bomb plot to assassinate Israeli diplomats, and returned home to Australia.
“Right now, I just want to focus on healing, recovery, rest, trying to get a sense of normality back into my life,” she said.
“Just trying to re-establish myself, put down roots again and reconnect with reality and with my freedom and try and get on with it, get on with living my life.”
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