Italian Reporter’s Ordeal in Iranian Prison: ‘I Was Trapped in a Game’

After Iran elected a more moderate president last year, Cecilia Sala, an Italian journalist, thought something may have changed in the country, which she had been covering from afar.

For two years, Iran had rejected her application for a journalist visa, but it granted her one after the election. Colleagues and friends told her Iran’s new government seemed more open to foreign reporters as it sought to repair relations with Europe.

Ms. Sala, 29, had not traveled to Iran since 2021, before an uprising led by women and girls demanded an end to clerical rule. So she took a plane to Tehran, the capital.

“I wanted to see with my eyes what had changed,” she said in an interview recently in Rome.

Instead, she got firsthand experience of what had not changed.

On Dec. 19, as she was preparing an episode of an Italian podcast that she hosts every day, two agents from the intelligence wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps came to her hotel room in Tehran. When she tried to grab her phone, she said, one of them threw it to the other side of the room.

They blindfolded her, Ms. Sala said, and took her to the notorious Evin prison, where most of Iran’s political prisoners are held and some are tortured.