Lecture - Prisoner: 544 Days in Evin Prison

TUESDAY May 28, 2019—10:00 AM—Jason Rezaian

Prisoner: 544 Days in Evin Prison

When Washington Post Tehran Bureau Chief Jason Rezaian and his wife, Yeganeh Selehi, were picked up by Iranian police, he thought it must be a mistake. Then he was locked up in Iran’s notorious Evin prison.  Rezaian’s guards told him nobody had asked about him. Nobody was trying get him get out. He was a spy for the CIA, they said, and he had been abandoned. Rezaian was accused of espionage, put on trial, convicted and-after 544 days-released out of the blue at the same time as the Iran nuclear deal was announced. Rezaian’s story is one-part farce to nine-parts terror.

Jason Rezaian grew up in California, the son of Iranian immigrants. He is the author of Prisoner: My 544 Days in an Iranian Prison-Solitary Confinement, a Sham Trial, High-Stakes Diplomacy and the Extraordinary Efforts It Took to Get Me Out. After spending a year at Harvard as a Nieman Fellow, he is now a Global Opinions writer for The Washington Post. 

More information: https://www.olli-dc.org/may_2019_lecture_series