[5][6] Alinejad works as a presenter/producer at Voice of America Persian News Network, a correspondent for Radio Farda, a frequent contributor for Manoto television, and a contributing editor for IranWire.

[11] She released a book in 2018 called The Wind in My Hair that deals with her experiences growing up in Iran, where she writes girls "are raised to keep their heads low, to be unobtrusive as possible, and to be meek".

Some supporters of Ahmadinejad expressed their sense of outrage and offense, eventually forcing the director of the newspaper Mehdi Karroubi, himself a relatively popular and very powerful establishment politician and cleric, to publicly apologize.

"With original video from inside Iran, Tablet profiles ordinary citizens and connects them with Americans through short interviews on common themes illustrating both similar and different experiences.

The program also has a weekly "timeline report", tracing the development of issues such as the international women's rights movement and relations between Washington and Tehran", the press release states.

Musa Ghazanfarabadi, the head of Tehran's Revolutionary Court, told Fars News that those sharing protest videos with Alinejad could be imprisoned for up to a decade under laws relating to cooperating with an enemy of the state.

[29] From 2012 to 2019, Alinejad created and promoted multiple campaigns including #WhiteWednesdays, #MyCameraIsMyWeapon, #MyPenIsMyWeapon, #MenWithHijab to mobilize anti-mandatory hijab movement in Iran.

However, postcolonial feminists criticized the campaign for invoking the old "Orientalist cultural imagination" in the West, which was based on stereotypes of oppressed women in the Orient who need to be liberated by adopting Western ideals.

Paikidze, a non-Iranian, refused to attend world championships in Tehran because according to Iran's religious law, female players would be forced to wear a hijab.

[40] In the aftermath, key Iranian opposition figures outside the country—Reza Pahlavi, Crown Prince of Iran, soccer player Ali Karimi, dentist Hamed Esmaeilion, and women's rights activist Masih Alinejad—formed a coalition.

[43] On September 23, 2019, Islamic Republic security forces arrested three of Alinejad's family members as retribution for her women's rights activism, according to Amnesty International.

Alinejad responded that her family was forced to say such things by the authorities, a common tactic employed by the Iranian government aimed at discrediting dissidents.

Iranian state-run media have run numerous fabricated stories, such as her being an MI6 agent serving directly under then-Queen Elizabeth II, false quotes attributed to her saying such things as "to be a journalist in Western countries, it is compulsory that you also work for the spy agencies", that she is a drug addict, and that she was a victim of rape on the London subway.

[59][60] In July 2021, the U.S. Department of Justice claimed that four Iranian intelligence officials and a fifth assistant were planning to kidnap a New York-based journalist critical of Iran, as well as four further people in Canada and the UK.

In a detailed e-mail, Kiya Sadeghi, another of the four indicted Iranian intelligence agents, even instructed the private investigators to take pictures of the envelopes in Alinejad's mailbox.

"[59][61][62] On July 28, 2022, a man named Khalid Mehdiyev approached Alinejad's residence in Brooklyn, looking inside the windows and attempting to open the front door.

[64] In an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal, Alinejad quotes a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as saying, "This time their objective was to kill you.

[66][67] In 2023, Niloufar Bahadorifar was convicted for having willfully violated sanctions and knowingly provided financial support to Iranian intelligence assets, who in turn were engaged in a plot to kidnap Masih Alinejad.

[69][70] In November 2024, three other men were charged in a separate plot by Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps of Iran to kill Alinejad and United States president-elect Donald Trump.

[73] The New York Times wrote that the book paints a vivid portrait of modern Iran, saying that it was written with a "blunt honesty" that it considered to be a characteristic of Alinejad's life and writing.