Kylie Moore-Gilbert has revealed harrowing details of her 804 days in an Iranian prison, where she was subjected to brutal solitary confinement and interrogation.
Kylie Moore-Gilbert has revealed the “psychological torture” she endured as a prisoner of the Iranians turned her “completely crazy” — but accessing her intense inner anger became her secret survival weapon.
The Australian academic, who was held for 804 days on trumped-up spying charges, has given candid details of the harrowing ordeal in her first interview since being freed late last year.
The torment began immediately after Dr Moore-Gilbert’s capture in Tehran in September 2018, as her captors tried to “break” her with four weeks of brutal solitary confinement in a tiny, freezing cell with no daylight, no respite or distractions, the lights on around the clock and constant noise.
“The first room I was put in, I would say is the extreme solitary confinement room designed to break you. It’s psychological torture. You go completely insane,” she says in the frank Sky News world exclusive interview.
“It is so damaging. I would say I felt physical pain from the psychological trauma I had in that room. It’s a two-by-two-metre box. There is no toilet, there is no television. There is nothing whatsoever other than a phone on the wall for calling the guards. There’s no window.
“There had been a window in my room and it had been boarded up with a piece of sheet metal. So I could hear some sounds from outside and sometimes I had a kind of a sliver of light coming through a crack in the sheet metal and reflecting on the wall opposite, so I could tell when the sun was out.
Read the article by Justin Lees in The Daily Telegraph.