I often forget after the fact, but life as a content creator isn’t normal in this country. Two years ago, I was arrested by the Cyber Police when one of my videos went exceptionally viral. It wasn’t the first time I got into trouble for my channel, but put lightly, it was quite the learning experience.
The room was cold and depressing. There was an abundance of windows, but yellowed, uneven plastic shutters suppressed the light to a suffocating minimum—an ironic, almost poetic display of how the system treated anything that shone too brightly.
I sat in the unforgivingly hard chair, looking down while the investigator stared at me. Though my fingers played some new team sport they’d invented, the rest of me was less perturbed than it had been the last few times. I knew this dance all too well.
Once he was done with his one-sided staring contest, he dropped his eyes back to the tablet on his battered wooden table and flipped to a new video, watching for way longer than necessary as I—a woman the age of his daughter—danced in a tiny dress.
He slowly slid the tablet to me, taking all the time in the world to peel his gaze away from my picture and level it on me. “Do you think this content is appropriate?”
“This is my personal account,” I argued. “It’s in my home.”
“Are we in your home, Ms. Namdarian? Am I your father?”
I shook my head.
“And yet, I have easy access to this content. You’re aware of the rules of this country, aren’t you, Ms. Namdarian?”
“What if I made that account private? Would it be enough?”
“Private.” He collected his tablet and resumed browsing. After a while, he showed me my main Instagram account and pointed at the top. “Read this number for me.”
“56K.”
He retracted the device again and tapped a few times. “Fifty-six thousand people see you as a role model. Then they go to your page and watch . . . this.”
When he turned the screen to me, it was one of my getting-ready videos, where I showed my routine, from coming out of the shower, to styling my hair, to applying makeup.
He hit pause just after the video me removed the towel from her hair. “If some damsel in the street shifts her hijab back a little, it’s defiance by a misguided individual, and she’ll be dealt with as such. But when you, Sepideh Namdarian, with fifty-six thousand followers, repeatedly post content like this, it’s promotion of indecency. It’s a declaration of war on our Islamic tenets. It’s corruption on earth.”
My heart pulsed in alarm as my gaze snapped back up. In Iran’s criminal code, corruption on earth is a capital crime, and its vague definition enables any willing prosecutor to send you to the gallows on account of disliking you personally. “I’m not at war with anyone. I don’t promote anything. I’m a makeup artist. My tutorials . . . they’re about techniques, colors; about how to apply products. I need to be hijabless in some videos to demonstrate what I’m teaching. It’s art, not some sinister act of rebellion.”
He huffed. “I see. So, the millions of views, the lucrative sponsorships, the fame, they’re all by-products of your art?” He produced a printed sheet of paper with my estimated yearly earnings highlighted in yellow. “You profit from this. You exploit the minds of hundreds of thousands of impressionable young women for money.”
When I read the staggering numbers, I chuckled mirthlessly. “These are far from reality. I barely made a tenth of this last year.”
He let out an exasperated sigh. “It’s not about the amount, Ms. Namdarian. You’re inviting people to break the law.”
My throat tight, I managed, “I never asked anyone to break any law. I only share my work. My passion.”
“Passion.” He gave that a second. “I don’t know you, Ms. Namdarian. I don’t know what your passions are. I don’t know if you’re just an idiot, or a spy hired by adversarial governments to sabotage our country. I’m going to look into all your sponsors to find that out.”
My stomach churned. He was quickly escalating my innocent vice to unimaginable levels, painting me as a dangerous criminal over a few reels.
“But let me tell you something I do know,” he continued. “This is your third arrest in two years, and there’s no sign of remorse in your online presence, which makes sense for someone who’s never faced real consequences. You haven’t seen the inside of a prison cell despite being a repeat offender. Well, that ends today. Once we’re done here, you’ll be transported to Evin, where you’ll stay until your court hearing. Meanwhile, I’ll find every shred of evidence and get this file to a judge, and he’ll give you anything from fines to the death penalty.”
“Death penalty?” I squeaked, genuinely scared now. “For a makeup video?”
He shrugged. “Don’t ask me. I’m not the prosecutor or the judge. My job is to investigate, and given your persistent criminal behavior, I’ll go as deep as the rabbit hole goes. Somebody has to stop you, Ms. Namdarian, and I’ll be that person.”
Yeah, this was how my interrogation went the last time I was in custody. Needless to say, I didn’t get the death penalty—yours truly is still alive. I did get seventy lashes, a fine equal to twenty percent of what they claimed I’d earned from my channel, and six months’ imprisonment with the possibility of bail after two weeks. Dad paid the fine and used the Kordan villa as collateral to bail me out. He also wanted to appeal and reduce the lashes to a fine, but I decided to just take them and put the whole thing behind us.
That’s right. Sepideh Namdarian wasn’t invented overnight. For the American influencers I follow, it takes some tinkering and trial and error to find their voice and their audience. Well, my trials were different from theirs, and my tinkering involved finding that fine line on the edge of the law where I could still resemble myself, and mastering the art of being popular and invisible at the same time.