but in the case of iran, which i know well i know the stories of many others, i m in touch with them, with theirfamilies, and i knew others inside i am yet to see an example where somebody whose case has been kept quiet has actually benefited from that. the iranians, you know. i don t see an evidence base to suggest that, a, you are punished more in prison because your situation is in the media or because people publish in a foreign country on the other side of the world to iran something about your prison conditions or situation. in fact, my experience shows that actually the prisoner has benefited from that, from that transparency, from that spotlight which is shone on their prison conditions access to medical care, potential psychological or physical torture, these kinds of issues when foreign media as well as foreign governments focus on it. actually, the prisoner s situation improves.
one night when i was asleep and have woken up the next day, and i still have those memories of that nightmare lingering with me. but because i m in the same familiarspaces, back at my home that i was in before i went to iran, sometimes i have to pinch myself and remind myself that i ve actually gone through that terrible ordeal and that experience in real life. you did say a little while ago, you said when you first released, you think that you re going to be shattered, you re going to be broken but actually, that s not really true. from my experience, at least, you say the real problems come further down the track and i haven t processed through it all yet. so this, i mean, it s a funny word, processing, but you re still processing, are you? that s absolutely true, at least in my case that when i first came back from iran, i wasjust on cloud nine, i was ecstatic. i was so happy to be free. i was on this incredible high
after such a shattering ordeal? kylie moore gilbert in melbourne, welcome to hardtalk. thanks so much for having me. it s a real pleasure to have you on the show. it is pretty much a year and a half now since you were released from imprisonment in iran. how much distance do you now feel from that whole experience? it feels sometimes like it never happened. it feels like it was a very lengthy, especially vivid nightmare that ijust dreamt
he was born in russia, migrated to australia, lives in australia, so it s not as though i was coming straight from israel, and that s where he was living. and, you know. no, kylie, icompletely take all of that. but the context, i mean, the context is a country you intended to visit, which clearly, you know, has a government and an overall sort of governing philosophy, which is extremely suspicious of the west, indeed hostile to the west, and you knew the context, of, for example, nazanin zaghari ratcliffe, a british, dual national british citizen as well as iranian, who d been to visit her family and was arrested in 2016 and was in prison when you, you know, in 2018 made yourjourney. ijust, again, i m just wondering. i actually didn t know. i actually didn t know much about nazanin at all. i d never actually heard of hostage diplomacy. i d never heard that the iranian regime takes
of freedom, and that day that you get on that flight and you leave iran and you land back on home soil. you don t spend much time thinking about what happens next, and that goes for my family, the government officials involved, everybody. everybody s focused on that really important moment of getting you out, and obviously it s the most important thing, your freedom. but then what comes next? it s. it is often confusion, it is often a sense of dislocation, a sense. i had the sense that, i m coming out of one world and entering another, or i ve time travelled in some sort of way, because in my mind time had stood still. i imagined the world to be as it was in 2018, when i essentially left it, when i was thrown into prison, and everything froze for me. but the world moved on in that two and a half years. and other than losing, you know, two and a half years of pop culture and history and world events and