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Masoumeh " Masih" Alinejad-Ghomikolayi (; born September 11, 1976), is an Iranian-American journalist, author, and political activist. Alinejad works 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 among its 2023 honorees for Women of the Year.
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.
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 parliament, 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 an exceptionally critical piece in Etemad, called "Song of the Dolphins", in which she compared Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's followers to hungry dolphins that make sounds and perform entertaining acts to grab a morsel of food from their trainer. 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 very hard to get an interview with Barack Obama; however, she was refused the interview, 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.
On June 13, 2022, she was awarded the American Jewish Committee's Moral Courage Award for speaking out fearlessly in support of the Iranian people being oppressed by the Iranian government.
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.
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.
From 2012 to 2019, Alinejad created and promoted multiple campaigns including #WhiteWednesdays, #MyCameraIsMyWeapon, #MyPenIsMyWeapon, #MenWithHijab to mobilize anti-mandatory hijab movement in Iran.
Some feminists have supported Alinejad's campaign because, in their view, the Hijab 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 feminism, 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 insisting that it is religious laws (Sharia) which scare her, and that it is that same religious fanaticism that 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."
After the Christchurch mosque shooting in March 2019 in New Zealand, Alinejad criticized New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern for wearing a hijab ostensibly in 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".
On 27 September 2022, Alinejad published an op-ed on The Washington Post criticizing the silence of Western feminists regarding the then-ongoing Mahsa Amini 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.
Alinejad was a guest speaker on Mark Dubowitz's podcast, The Iran Breakdown, in its fourth episode entitled "Women, Life, Freedom".
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 UNSC 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."
She wrote in a New York Times op-ed published two weeks later: "The truth is that before the show aired, I got a call from my mother – a tiny, illiterate woman who has the toughness that comes from being abandoned at an early age by her own mother and married off at 14 years old. She was sobbing. The intelligence service had tried to pressure her and my father to participate in the show. And the local Friday prayer leader had called them out in public and urged them to cooperate. She refused – a show of loyalty that I can never repay." Also refusing to participate was her brother Alireza, who was imprisoned after intelligence agents raided his home and blindfolded and handcuffed him in front of his two small children, and dragged him away. He was sentenced to eight years. US District Judge G. Michael Harvey concluded Alireza was held hostage until August 2021 and tortured during his detention.
By this point, Iranian authorities had been conducting a concerted smear campaign against Alinejad for a decade, even going to such extremes as doctoring photos to make it look like she engaged in sexually provocative behavior, and showing them to her elderly, poorly-educated father. She told The Guardian in 2013 that her father had refused to speak to her for three years as a result. Iranian state-run media have run numerous fabricated stories, such as her being an MI6 agent serving directly under then-Queen Elizabeth II, false quotes attributed to her saying such things as "to be a journalist in Western countries, it is compulsory that you also work for the spy agencies", that she is a drug addict, and that she was a victim of rape on the London subway.
"According to the DOJ announcement, the plotters had identified travel routes from Alinejad's home to a Brooklyn waterfront, researched a service offering military-style speedboats for maritime evacuation out of New York, and studied sea travel from New York to Venezuela, which has close ties with the Islamic Republic. In a detailed e-mail, Kiya Sadeghi, another of the four indicted Iranian intelligence agents, even instructed the private investigators to take pictures of the envelopes in Alinejad's mailbox. The FBI stated that it had foiled Iran's scheme in the United States. 'Not on our watch,' William Sweeney, the head of New York's FBI office, said."
Mehdiyev, who is from Yonkers, waived his Miranda rights and told police that he was looking for an apartment. Mehdiyev, unprompted, volunteered that he did not know about a gun and claimed the suitcase was not his. On August 11, 2022, Mehdiyev was indicted on one count of possessing a firearm with an obliterated serial number. In an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal, Alinejad quotes a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as saying, "This time their objective was to kill you." On January 27, 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed an indictment charging Mehdiyev and two other men in a plot to assassinate Alinejad.
In 2023, Niloufar Bahadorifar was convicted for having willfully violated sanctions and knowingly provided financial support to Iranian intelligence assets, who in turn were engaged in a plot to kidnap Masih Alinejad.
In October 2024, Iranian general Ruhollah Bazghandi, along with six other Iranian operatives, was charged in an alleged plot to kill Alinejad.
In November 2024, three other men were charged in a separate plot by Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran to kill Alinejad and United States president-elect Donald Trump.
On March 20, 2025, Rafat Amirov, 45, and Polad Omarov, 40, were convicted in the Southern District of NY Federal Court of numerous charges, including "murder-for-hire, conspiracy, and money laundering." On October 29, 2025 they were sentenced in a New York courtroom, to 25 years in prison. According to the United States Department of Justice, both Rafit Amirov (born 1980, Iran) and Polad Omarov (born 1984, Dmanisi Municipality, Georgia), who resided in both the Czech Republic and Slovenia, are high ranking members of an Azerbaijani faction of the Russian mafia.
She has published four books in Persian language:
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