Iranian news anchor flees country after exposing sexual harassment

Iran’s state-run, English-language news channel Press TV suspended two executives after news anchor Sheena Shirani this week posted a message exchange and a recording documenting her boss, Hamid Reza Emadi, demanding sexual favors from her.

Shirani, a divorced mother, reportedly fled the country with her son after describing the nature of her employer’s sexual harassment on Facebook.

She also posted a recording of a conversation in which Emadi, the channel’s news editor, is heard asking her for phone sex. As the conversation ends he’s heard asking her to perform a sexual act on him.

In the recording, Emadi insists that he has “always helped” Shirani, and begs her to have phone sex with him “just for five minutes,” after telling her he is lying on the bed naked.

Shirani also posted screenshots of explicit messages sent to her by Emadi. In one of the pictures – a selfie – Emadi describes himself as a “hot” and “perverted” boss.

Emadi continued his explicit advances despite Shirani begging him to leave her alone.

The second man suspended from the news channel is Payam Afshar, Shirani’s studio manager. Shirani described how Afshar encouraged other colleagues at work to report her as a single mother, a status that bears a social stigma in Iran.

Shirani began working at Press TV in 2007, at first as an editor. She later became a producer, and finally worked a news anchor until the incident with Emadi became public.

This is not the first time Emadi’s name has been tied to controversy. In 2013, he was put on the European Union’s human rights sanctions list by the European Court of Justice, after Press TV broadcast forced confessions obtained from tortured detainees. Maziar Bahari, an Iranian reporter and documentary maker, identified Emadi as the man who forced him to make a false confession while imprisoned in 2009.

Press TV, in a statement on its website in Persian, did not identify the two suspended officials.

Sexual harassment is not mentioned, and the statement stresses that the release of the recording “with cooperation of the regime’s opposition” was done in order to damage Iran’s political system.