Several women have accused a prominent British-Iranian anthropologist who recently fled Iran from being a sexual predator who should not be allowed to continue working with women or with vulnerable groups who are the focus of his research.
Kameel Ahmady, known for working on child marriage, female genital mutilation and LGBT communities in Iran, denies allegations of assault and sexual harassment, which led to his suspension from the Sociology Association of Iran.
But in a post now deleted on social media addressing the charges, he apologized for “mistakes” in the workplace and for “hurting people with my relaxed attitude towards relationships”.
Four women separately claimed to the Guardian that he had beaten them, and others made allegations of repeated sexual harassment.
Friends and colleagues of the women support their reports, saying they were informed of three of the alleged assaults and several cases of alleged persecution before the survivors made their stories public.
The women spoke to the Guardian after Ahmady, recently sentenced to nearly a decade in prison on unrelated national security charges in Iran, escaped bail, fled the country and gave several media interviews in the UK, including the Guardian, telling a story of his escape from the clutches of a brutal regime.
They say they fear that when he resumes research, other women may be at risk. Although he is unable to return to Iran, many of the issues he studied affect cross-border communities in the region, where he could continue to work.
“When I heard about each other [alleged] victims, and the fact that they were being largely, if not completely ignored, I could no longer hold back, ”said a woman, who is speaking publicly about her experience for the first time.
“Every thing I know about [Ahmady] makes your testimonies reliable. He is a predator and a serial abuser. I am so afraid that he will have other opportunities to work with vulnerable women and he will hurt them as he hurt me ”.
Ahmady said in a statement that the charges were “baseless slander”, organized by professional rivals and the Iranian state in an attempt to defame him and undermine his work.
He also said that two accusers maintained consensual relations with him. He did not say which or how he identified them from anonymous accounts.
Some of the allegations were first released last year, when the global #MeToo movement found a voice in Iran in a barrage of accusations against prominent figures, including Ahmady. At least seven charges against him were published anonymously on social media accounts in August and September last year.
This led to an investigation by the Sociological Association of Iran, which suspended its membership and ended its role as secretary of the Child Sociological Studies Group after discovering that “at least, there was some abuse of power”.
“His behavior resulted in the sexual abuse of several young researchers and violated the ethical codes that govern scientific and research activities,” said the group, which has no political affiliations, in the statement.
Ahmady said the charges were not tested in court and described them as part of a campaign to “silence my voice”, which involved Iranian security forces and also personal enemies at the academy.
“Since my flight from Iran, rival individuals and groups have been brought in to attack me with the sole intention of destroying me, my research, as well as my professional and personal position,” he said in the statement, which did not address any specific details of the allegations. .
“The press is now being manipulated by them and those who are afraid of them, and those who seek to replace me as a scholar in my field.”
A woman the Guardian spoke to described allegations of serious assault that she said occurred more than 15 years ago outside Iran. All the others detailed alleged attacks that they said occurred while he was doing fieldwork in Iran in the past decade.
Golshan * says she was nervous when Ahmady started a sexually explicit conversation over lunch on her first day at work as a researcher, and then tried to offer her an alcoholic lemonade on the second day.
She was working for a man she admired, who was on a self-proclaimed mission to “protect the vulnerable”, so it never crossed her mind that she might be at risk. She says she only understood when it was too late, after he led her to an empty apartment for what she thought was a business meeting, locked the door and took out the key. She was a college student, about 36 hours in her first job.
“When I found out what was going on, it was too late, there was no way out of that building. He was drunk and I didn’t really fight back because I thought he was going to hurt me, ”she said.
In a statement that Ahmady posted on social media shortly after the first allegations surfaced last year, he admitted “mistakes” and apologized to “anyone I ever hurt”, but said that all of his sexual relations were consensual.
“There are huge differences between inadvertently hurting someone and raping, abusing and forcing someone into a non-consensual relationship. I want to say unequivocally that I am not a rapist or abuser, ”he said.
He went on to state in the same statement that cultural differences and his “relaxed attitude” led to accusations of inappropriate behavior.
“I now accept all justified criticism, especially in cases where I did not have the correct understanding of the culture and failed to observe the appropriate social protocols because of my different views on relationships and relaxed attitude in the workplace.”
The women who allege aggression and others who have worked with him suggest that this argument is familiar. Ahmady used to make sexual jokes, direct the discussion to sexually explicit matters and ask intrusive questions about their sex lives, they say.
According to several of them, if they protested, he said that feminists should support sexual liberation and insisted that sexualized conversations reflected their modernity. When women resisted his sexual advances, he mocked them for being “conservative”.
A woman described her shock when Ahmady excused herself to go to the bathroom during what she thought was a business meeting and reappeared naked.
“He started to laugh and said ‘what are you afraid of, this is something really natural, if you are afraid of me when I’m naked it means that you are conservative, provincial and petty’,” he said. “After that, he said ‘if you want to be a real feminist and want to resolve your contradictions in your mind, you must accept looking at me when you’re naked’.”
Samaneh Savadi, a UK-based gender equality activist, said she received threats from Ahmady’s Twitter and WhatsApp accounts after linking him to an anonymous allegation against “KA” on social media.
At the time, Ahmady faced national security charges for cooperating with a “hostile state power” in his research projects. He described the Iranian state as ideologically opposed to his work on sensitive topics.
However, the messages to Savadi suggested that he would tell security forces details about the accuser and his work in one of these sensitive fields, which could lead to her facing charges if the post was not removed.
“In my previous interrogation, they asked me about her,” said the message, indicating that he recognized the incident and knew the woman’s identity – although the message described his account as “incomplete”.
“Now I am in a very difficult situation, if I decide to tell them the truth, it will hurt us all. Please delete the post before it goes viral and causes problems for all of us. We can also talk tomorrow. Thanks.”
Among the activist and research communities where he worked, anger over the allegations was compounded by disgust at the suggestion that he exploited feminism and the idealism of young women to create situations in which abuse could occur.
“He took advantage of the confidence of these young women who are idealists … they thought working with him was a way of promoting his broader cause for women’s rights,” said Sussan Tahmasebi, a leading women’s rights activist. “His access to a vulnerable woman, like an academic who claims to be concerned with women’s well-being and empowerment, has to end.”
It may also have the potential to delay research in critical areas. Negative stereotypes about feminists and activists can make it difficult to win the trust of conservative communities, such as those who practice FGM and child marriage.
The charges against Ahamdy could reinforce the worst of them, said Savadi, which could lead them to cut off access to others who need to conduct vital research in the future.
“We trusted him to work on a very sensitive issue and he cheated on us,” she said. “And I ask myself: did he choose these specific themes in order to build a relationship with women, and then take advantage of them?”
Another woman who worked with Ahmady said she did not witness sexual violence, but ended her professional relationship because of what she said was his inappropriate behavior.
She claimed that this included highly sexualized language, the use of alcohol and hashish and sexual relations with young researchers who she considered an abuse of power, all in a workplace.
She also stated that, despite describing himself as committed to social issues, he repeatedly failed to fully credit his partners for their contribution to their work.
Ahmady said he would like the allegations to be tested by a jury of his peers. There is little chance that he would be tried in Iran, even if he had not fled; the women who claimed to have been beaten said they did not think they could press charges within the Iranian judicial system.
Iran criminalizes consensual sexual relations outside of marriage, so if rape victims report the assault, but the authorities do not believe it, they risk being prosecuted. And if a case goes to court, the mandatory punishment for convicted rapists is execution, placing a heavy burden on survivors seeking justice.
There is a pattern of behavior in alleged attacks in Iran that were described to the Guardian by the survivors. They all claim that Ahmady was targeting young women he worked with.
They claim that he would create situations when he was alone with women, on the pretext of meeting for work. They hoped to be part of a group, but arrived to find only Ahmady. Several said he offered them illegal drugs in Iran, including alcohol or hashish, or tricked them into consuming them.
Most women continued to work with Ahmady for a period after being assaulted or harassed, they said, because there were few other professional options available to them in the small, sensitive camps where they worked.
They said they tried to alert other women where they could, but part of the reason they made the difficult decision to tell their stories in public, at the risk of being identified, was to help protect others.
“What can moderate my pain is that, at least, even if a person believes what has been done to me, he is prevented from doing something like that to another woman,” said an accuser.
* They are not your real names.