CANBERRA, Australia – A British-Australian scholar arrested by Iran on false accusations of spying for Israel said in a television broadcast on Tuesday that she suffered “psychological torture” during her more than two years behind bars.
Kylie Moore-Gilbert, 33, who is married to a Russian-Israeli national, returned to Australia in December after serving 804 days of a 10-year sentence. She was released in exchange for the release of three Iranians who were detained in Thailand.
“It is an extremely lonely confinement room designed to break you. It is psychological torture. You go completely crazy. It is so harmful. I would say that I felt physical pain from the psychological trauma I had in that room. It’s a 2 meter by 2 meter box, ”Moore-Gilbert told Sky News.
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“There were a few times in that early period when I felt broken. I felt that if I had to endure another day of it, you know, if I could, I would just kill myself. But of course, I never tried and never took that step, ”she added.
The discovery that Kylie Moore-Gilbert, a professor at the University of Melbourne on Middle Eastern studies, had an Israeli husband caused the Iranian authorities to stop her at Tehran airport as she prepared to leave the country in 2018 after participating in an academic conference. Authorities sentenced her to 10 years in prison for spying for Israel and sent her to the notorious Evin prison in Tehran. She vehemently denied the accusations and maintained her innocence.
Iran tried to lure her husband to Tehran, the Australian Herald Sun reported in February.
Kylie Moore-Gilbert and her husband Ruslan Hodorov. (Screenshot: Twitter)
In a letter from Moore-Gilbert to the Australian Prime Minister, smuggled out of Evin prison in Iran in late 2019, the imprisoned academic revealed how Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps tried to set a trap for her Russian husband- Israeli Ruslan Hodorov.
“The Revolutionary Guard imprisoned me in these terrible conditions for more than nine months to extort me both personally and from my government,” wrote Moore-Gilbert to Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
“They also tried to use me as a hostage in a diabolical conspiracy to attract my husband, a permanent Australian resident, to join me in an Iranian prison,” she wrote.
At the time of her arrest, Iranian media reported several times that Moore-Gilbert’s father was a Jew, that she had converted to Judaism in the United Kingdom in 2007 and that she had visited Israel many times since, Channel 12 reported.
Iranian reports claim, without evidence, that she learned Hebrew and connected with an employee of the internal security service Shin Bet while in Israel. Iranian reports have not been corroborated.
Moore-Gilbert married Hodorov in a Jewish ceremony in 2017, although, since her return to Australia, she has been asking for a divorce because of his alleged affair with a close colleague of hers, reported the Herald Sun.
