Dissident Spotlight: Masih Alinejad Post-Trial
Iranian women's rights activist Masih Alinejad won her case against the hit men the Iranian regime hired to kill her.
Masih Alinejad has spent her professional career fighting for women’s rights in Iran. Basic freedoms like leaving home when they want or choosing to show their hair in public have been denied Iranian women since the Islamic Revolution.
Alinejad is known for launching My Stealthy Freedom, a Facebook page where Iranian women can post covert pictures of themselves wearing their hair in public instead of the compulsory hijab. Her journalism and activism have supported women across Iran, even from where she has lived in exile.
She has also been snubbed by liberal darling Barack Obama. Alinejad came to the United States in 2009 to interview Obama, but the sudden rise of a promising pro-democracy movement gave the administration cold feet. Obama and Hillary Clinton would later reflect on the snub as a “regret."
Alinejad has become so influential that the Iranian regime has plotted kidnapping and assassination attempts against her. In 2022, the regime hired two hitmen, one from Azerbaijan and the other from Georgia.
On Oct. 29, 2025, both men were sentenced to 25 years in prison for their roles in plotting to assassinate Alinejad at her apartment in New York.
Autocrats Work Together to Silence Dissent
The cooperation between countries to facilitate Iran’s assassination attempt against Alinejad is easy to miss behind the headline.
Dissidents inspire each other. The whole point of human rights work is to guarantee the same protections for people across the world, regardless of the regime they live under.
So, the enemy of one dictator is an enemy to each one of them. The modern era has seen not only a parallel world economy of democracies and autocrats. That same era has encouraged international cooperation to silence dissidents in other countries.
Alinejad constantly sends the message that if the dictators of the world will unite, then so should the champions of democracy. After she won her day in court, she flew to Spain to support one of Venezuela’s most prominent opposition leaders. Her latest battle with the regime is over. That didn’t stop her from swiftly moving onto the next one.