Masoumeh "Masih" Alinejad-Ghomikolayi (; born September 11, 1976), is an Iranian-American journalist, author, and political activist. Alinejad worked as a presenter/producer at Voice of America Persian News Network, a correspondent for Radio Farda, a frequent contributor for Manoto television, and a contributing editor for IranWire. Alinejad focuses on criticism of the status of human rights in Iran, especially women's rights. Time magazine named her one of its 2023 Women of the Year honorees.
Alinejad lives in exile in New York City. She has won several awards, including the 2015 Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy women's rights award, the Omid Journalism Award from the Mehdi Semsar Foundation, and a "Highly Commended" AIB Media Excellence Award. She released a memoir in 2018 titled The Wind in My Hair that deals with her experiences growing up in Iran, where she writes girls "are raised to keep their heads low, to be unobtrusive as possible, and to be meek".
According to U.S. prosecutors, she has been the target of a kidnapping plot and multiple assassination plots by the Iranian government. In 2019, Alinejad sued the Iranian government in a U.S. federal court for harassment against her and her family.
Early life and journalism career in Iran Alinejad was born as Masoumeh Alinejad, but uses the first name "Masih" (Persian for "anointed" or "Messiah").
Alinejad wrote in her memoir that she got her start in journalism with the help of Marjan Sheikholeslami. She began her journalism career in 2001 with the local daily Hambastegi, and then worked for the Iranian Labour News Agency (ILNA). Other publications such as Shargh, Bahar, Vaghaye Ettefaghiye, Ham-Mihan, and Etemad, have also published her work. During the sixth and seventh parliaments, Alinejad was a parliamentary reporter. In 2005, she wrote an article suggesting that while government ministers had claimed they received pay cuts, they were actually receiving considerable sums of money as "bonuses" for everything from serving religious duties to ringing in the New Year. The article generated controversy, and led to her dismissal as a parliamentary reporter.
In 2008, Alinejad wrote a critical piece in Etemad, called "Song of the Dolphins", in which she compared Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's followers to hungry dolphins that beg for food. Some supporters of Ahmadinejad expressed their sense of outrage and offense, eventually forcing the director of the newspaper Mehdi Karroubi, himself a relatively popular and very powerful establishment politician and cleric, to publicly apologize.
In the summer of 2009, during her stay in the United States, Alinejad tried to get an interview with Barack Obama; however, her request was refised, although she had been granted a temporary visa on that very basis. When her visa expired, she was forced to return to the United Kingdom. While in the United States, she participated in some Iranian anti-government protests, and delivered a speech in San Francisco, where she said, addressing the authorities of Iran, "We have trembled for thirty years, now it is your turn to tremble." Her interview with Voice of America was shown together with parts of the videos she had made, called "A Storm of Fresh Air". In 2010, she and a group of Iranian writers and intellectuals established the "IranNeda" foundation. After the presidential election in Iran in 2009, she published a novel called A Green Date. Alinejad graduated from Oxford Brookes University with a degree in Communications Studies.
Career
Opposition to the Iranian government
In 2014, Alinejad launched My Stealthy Freedom (also known as Stealthy Freedoms of Iranian Women), a Facebook page that invites Iranian women to post pictures of themselves without a hijab. The page quickly attracted international attention, and garnered hundreds of thousands of likes. In 2015, the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy awarded her its women's rights prize for "giving a voice to the voiceless and stirring the conscience of humanity to support the struggle of Iranian women for basic human rights, freedom, and equality".
On June 13, 2022, she was awarded the American Jewish Committee's Moral Courage Award for her criticism of the Iranian government and advocacy on behalf of dissidents.
Alinejad has said she is not opposed to the hijab per se, but believes it should be a matter of personal choice. In Iran, women who appear in public without a hijab risk being arrested, imprisoned, and fined.
Journalism Masih Alinejad wrote in her book: "Marjan Sheikholeslami, the head of the political department of Hambastegi newspaper agreed to take me under her wing." Since 2015, Alinejad has hosted a weekly 15-minute primetime show called Tablet for Voice of America's Persian Language Service. "With original video from inside Iran, Tablet profiles ordinary citizens and connects them with Americans through short interviews on common themes illustrating both similar and different experiences. The program also has a weekly "timeline report", tracing the development of issues such as the international women's rights movement and relations between Washington and Tehran", the press release states.
In July 2019, Iranian authorities warned the public that anyone sending videos to Alinejad faced up to 10 years in prison. Musa Ghazanfarabadi, the head of Tehran's Revolutionary Court, told Fars News that those sharing protest videos with Alinejad could be imprisoned for up to a decade under laws relating to cooperating with an enemy of the state.
Anti-compulsory hijab campaign
Alinejad has been critical of Iranian laws making it illegal for women not to wear a hijab outside the home, but also making the broader point that in the current historical and political context – in previous decades it wasn't required or common in Iran and many other Muslim-majority countries – describing it as the most visible symbol of oppression, Journalist Kim Ghattas has described Alinejad as "spearheading" the campaign against the mandatory veil in Iran even from her residence in Brooklyn.
From 2012 to 2019, Alinejad created and promoted multiple campaigns including #WhiteWednesdays, #MyCameraIsMyWeapon, #MyPenIsMyWeapon, #MenWithHijab tomovement against mandatory hijab in Iran.
Some feminists have supported Alinejad's campaign because, in their view, the Islamic veil is the most visible example of women's oppression in Muslim-majority societies. However, postcolonial feminists criticized the campaign for invoking the old "Orientalist cultural imagination" in the West, which was based on stereotypes of oppressed women in the Orient who need to be liberated by adopting Western ideals. Islamic feminists, meanwhile, viewed this effort as bolstering the rising wave of Islamophobia in Europe and the United States, which portrays Islam as a misogynist religion.
Alinejad rejects accusations of Islamophobia while claiming that it is religious laws (Sharia) that scare her; she asserts that religious fanaticism is the primary cause of Islamophobia. Speaking about hijab during a debate with Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour on CNN, Alinejad said: "It's important if you care about human rights, women's rights, you cannot use the same tool which is the most visible symbol of oppression in the Middle East and say that this is a sign of resistance [in the United States]."
Following the March 2019 Christchurch mosque shooting in New Zealand, in which 51 people were killed in a terrorist attack driven by white supremacy, Alinejad criticized New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern for wearing a hijab in solidarity with, sympathy, and respect to the Muslim victims. She said she "felt that you are using one of the most visible symbols of oppression for Muslim women in many countries for solidarity, and it also broke my heart".
Chess championship boycott In 2016, Alinejad launched a boycott campaign against the 2016 women's chess world championship, to be held in February 2017 in Tehran, Iran. The campaign was incited by Nazí Paikidze, a Georgian-American chess player. Paikidze, a non-Iranian, refused to attend world championships in Tehran because, according to Iran's religious law, female players are obligated to wear a hijab. Alinejad supported Paikidze, and co-wrote an op-ed with Indian-American Asra Nomani in The Washington Post.
U.S. residence and citizenship Alinejad moved from London to New York City and took up permanent residence in the United States in 2014."Iranian Influential Women: Masih Alinejad (1976-Present)"; IranWire, September 25, 2023 She became an American citizen in October 2019."Iranian American activist defiant over Iranian plots to kill her, Trump"; Associated Press; November 9, 2024.
Meeting with U.S. Secretary of State
In February 2019, Masih Alinejad met with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. According to Alinejad, the 35-minute meeting covered opposition to the Iranian government, human rights in Iran, and the consequences stemming from the Trump administration's travel ban on students and activists. State Department spokesperson Robert Palladino said that Pompeo thanked Alinejad for her "bravery and continued dedication".
Women, Life, Freedom movement During the Mahsa Amini protests, an internet blackout followed by a cyber attack targeted "the Covenant", the movement's initial leader, leaving the protesters without direction. In the aftermath, key Iranian opposition figures outside the country—Reza Pahlavi (the son of the former Shah), soccer player Ali Karimi, dentist Hamed Esmaeilion, and Alinejad—formed a coalition. They amplified their message through media outlets such as BBC and Iran International, assuming leadership of the movement.
On 27 September 2022, Alinejad published an op-ed on The Washington Post criticizing the silence of Western feminists regarding the ongoing protests, that "Western women seem only too happy to succumb to the standards dictated by the male tyrants in countries such as Afghanistan and Iran" despite support for feminist movements in their home countries, such as the 2017 Women's March. Then on 30 September, Alinejad appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher to talk about the ongoing protests. When discussing international support for Iranian women, she remarked that "the first group who came to the streets were women of Afghanistan, can you believe that? The Western feminists who actually went to my country, wore a hijab, and bowed to the Taliban—they didn’t take to the streets." Continuing to speak about Western feminists, she added that "they never go and live under Sharia law, but they don't even let us talk about our own experiences.... Here they tell me, ‘Shh! If you talk about this, you're going to cause Islamophobia.' Phobia is irrational, but believe me, my fear and the fear of millions of Iranian women and [women] in Afghanistan is rational."
Despite concerns from many, including members of the Covenant, who believed the movement had been "hijacked" or "emotionalized," the protests persisted for several more months before eventually collapsing. A few weeks later, the coalition itself disbanded.
In response to the June 2025 Israeli strikes on Iran, Alinejad stated: "Removing a terrorist is not a tragedy, it is a step toward justice for all the innocent lives they destroyed."
In January 2026, she appeared before the United Nations Security Council as a representative of Iranian civic society in a discussion on the January 2026 Iranian protests.UN Security Council holds emergency meeting on deadly protests in Iran In her remarks, Alinejad paid tribute to those who lost their lives during the state crackdown on protesters and called for a stronger international response, criticizing what she described as "empty condemnation."
Harassment and threats Arrest and harassment of family members