Ninety-nine lashes and a prison sentence awaited Zar Amir Ebrahimi in 2008 when she decided to flee Iran.
Ebrahimi’s only crime was sex. A videotape made privately with her then-partner had two years earlier been leaked by someone else, and spread widely. Ebrahimi, then a well-known TV star in Iran, was charged with having sexual relations outside wedlock. She was ostracized and harassed, her friends and coworkers interrogated.
