Cult leaders use a wide range of deceptive tactics to exert sexual and psychological control over their female followers. They often exploit women’s vulnerabilities and create an environment of dependency and fear. These methods are insidious and gradually destroy members’ psychological and intellectual independence and self-awareness.
In a recent article titled “The Complex Intersection of Sex and Cults,” American researcher Stephanie Elias argues that cult leaders often use sex as a tool for power and control, presenting themselves as divine or clairvoyant figures with whom sexual contact is essential for spiritual or personal growth. This manipulative tactic is often framed as part of a broader mission, whether that mission is to bring followers closer to “enlightenment” or fulfill some divine purpose. The leader becomes the ultimate arbiter of sexual relations within the group, determining who sleeps with whom, when, and why.
Documents and accounts from women who defected the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) indicate that Massoud Rajavi, as the leader of the cult, also used sexual exploitation of women as a means of exerting power and control and creating dependency.
By focusing on sexual relations within the group structure, as Stephanie Elias writes, cults create an environment in which members come to believe that their emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being is tied to following the leader’s rules. Members may become conditioned to believe that abstaining from sex with the leader will lead to spiritual or personal failure. This creates a dependency on sexual “privileges” granted or withheld by the leader.
Sima, Another Witness to Rajavi’s Sexual Corruption
Batoul Soltani was the first woman to speak out after fleeing Rajavi’s destructive cult about Massoud Rajavi’s mass marriages with women of the leadership council, the “Liberation Dance” sessions, and the sexual relations of these women with Massoud Rajavi. Batoul Soltani’s horrific but courageous revelations were only repeated in quotes from other male defectors, such as Siamak Naderi, Iraj Mesdaghi, and Mohammad Reza Torabi, who they likely heard in private conversations with other former female members of the MEK.
Until the publication of the famous Intercept article in 2020, in which two journalists named Murtaza Hussain and Matthew Cole interviewed six former members of the MEK, no other female former member of the cult had spoken out openly about Massoud Rajavi’s sexual abuse of women and the practice of sterilization. Sima is the second female ex-member of the MEK to speak out in this investigative report about Massoud Rajavi’s sexual corruption.
In the Intercept article, “Defectors Tell of Torture, Forced Sterilization in Iran’s Militant Sect,” published on March 22, 2020, the authors state that their report contains the following: “Interviews with six defectors, including several who held senior positions, provide the most detailed account yet of life inside the MEK.”
Reza Sadeghi, Batoul Soltani, Issa Azadeh, Ghorbanali Hosseinnejad, and “Sima” were the five who allowed the Intercept to record their experiences in the MEK. Sima is the only person whose real name is not given in the Intercept report for ethical reasons, and is introduced as follows:
Another female member of the High Council at Camp Ashraf, whom The Intercept agreed to identify only as Sima, said she joined the MEK in the 1980s and left it in 2014. Unlike other former members, Sima asked that her real name not be used because she feared retaliation from current MEK members. She now lives in hiding in a European country and agreed to meet privately in a place where other local supporters of the group were unlikely to see her.
Sima explains her fear of the MEK to The Intercept: “You must know the organization and the psychological warfare that they start against you. They assassinate your personality and you will lose your closest friends; even your family wouldn’t trust you. This is the reason that these people are scared.”
According to the Intercept, Sima’s background in activism is that she joined the MEK in Iran after becoming disillusioned with other leftist movements that seemed hesitant to confront the Shah or the Islamic Republic. But unlike other interviewees, she said she never felt fully committed to the MEK ideology, and it was very difficult for her to find a way back to her old life after being caught up in the organization.
She moved to Camp Ashraf in Iraq after marrying another MEK member, where she realized she had nowhere else to go. At that time, caught up in Rajavi’s cult, the world outside of Rajavi’s control seemed both unreal and frightening.
Like other members of the MEK, Sima underwent years of military training at Camp Ashraf to prepare for what she saw as an imminent attack on Iran and the installation of Rajavi as the country’s leader. They carefully studied maps of possible attack routes and received weapons and intelligence training. Sima was also aware of the large amounts of money flowing to the MEK from Saddam Hussein’s intelligence services.
She was among those who managed the group’s finances in the years leading up to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. “I was managing the money for the hundred people in my section,” Sima said. “We received sacks full of Iraqi dinars every month.”, Sima told The Intercept.
Over the years, she began to clash with the group. In response, they monitored her and forced her to attend grueling self-criticism sessions that she described as psychologically challenging. Around 2000, Sima was nearing breaking point. She and another woman plotted an escape from Camp Ashraf. They mapped out their escape in meticulous detail, but the other woman betrayed her to the leaders of the MEK. Sima was not only punished, but also severely ostracized and subjected to psychological torture.
For most of the next 14 years, Sima was confined to a section of Camp Ashraf, unable to move freely. Like Batoul Soltani, Sima spoke of an intense form of psychosexual manipulation by Rajavi, which she said had become an integral tool in controlling the female cadres. Sima recounted that years earlier, in 1998, “Rajavi gave every woman in the organization a pendant and told us that we were all dependent on him and no other man.” She was eventually forced to divorce her husband and, like Batoul Soltani, eventually was coerced to sleep with Rajavi.
The Sterilization Project
The Intercept reports on a more shocking directive that Rajavi gave to the organization’s female members, based on testimonies of Sima and Batoul Soltani. “I see some obstacles which have prevented us from reaching our goals and achieving victory,” Rajavi told members of the group, Soltani recalled. “That obstacle is hope for the future. We want to eliminate any kind of hope for the future from your mind. You are either with us or not!”
Sterilization was a tool to capture the full mental focus of women. “They said that this organ of the body, the womb, has made women want to be mothers someday and return to domestic life,” Soltani told the Intercept. “And so, meetings with women began, to get them to go in groups of 20 or 30 to have a hysterectomy.”
The women were to be examines at the MEK hospital in Camp Ashraf. The procedures were to be performed by a female MEK member trained as a physician, with the assistance of a local Iraqi doctor. At first, Soltani resisted. But eventually, “the pressure was so great that it broke my resistance and I too, should make an appointment. In other words, they gave so many and varied arguments for me to go to the hospital that I had no choice.”
Rajavi later asked at a meeting, referring to what he called “women who have abandoned the last vestiges of their sexual world and have undergone surgery,” “How many women have reached the peak?” The doctor replied that there had been 50. Soltani eventually left the MEK in 2006, before the operation could be performed on her.
And here’s Sima’s story in the sterilization project: After much insistence from the MEK leaders, Sima finally agreed to have her ovaries surgically removed in 2011. “When you’re brainwashed, you do anything. You would do any military operation, you would go and have sexual relations with your leader, you would sell information and intelligence. We were under constant control by the leader,” she told The Intercept.
Sima in the Free World
When Sima finally left the MEK, she said, “I felt like a lost person.” The United Nations arranged a meeting between her and her brother, whom she had not seen for 30 years. At first, Sima was reluctant to hug or kiss her brother, because she had become so alienated from her closest relative. Her brother taught her how to shop and use money. Sima said she told her brother, “I haven’t seen anything like this in about 30 years. I have completely forgotten what real life is like outside the MEK.”
“They destroyed my life,” she says quietly.
According to The Intercept, when she first spoke out against the group, current members requested a meeting. They offered her several thousand euros not to criticize the group, which Sima says she declined. “I told them, ‘You cannot return what I lost, my family, my husband. You cannot return that.’”
Mazda Parsi