Iranian-born but living in the West since college, Bahari is in Iran to cover the 2009 presidential election and staying with his elderly mother in Tehran.
[3] Bahari is taken to Tehran's notorious Evin Prison, given a small, bare cell which he leaves only for short exercise periods and much longer interrogation sessions.
"[5] Using psychological or "white" torture, Rosewater threatens Bahari with the possibility of "every tactic necessary" to make him talk, including interrogation up to fifteen hours a day for four to six years.
Bahari is told he will rot in prison (until the jailers "put your bones in a bag and throw it at your mother's doorstep!
[9] On a couple of occasions his jailers proudly proclaim their "Islamic kindness," and on another he is asked rhetorically after weeks of beatings by Rosewater, "have I ever tortured you?"
He promises his jailers he will help spy for the Revolutionary Guard (who arrested and interrogated him) after his release, and is given a "partial list" of dozens of journalists and opposition activists inside and outside Iran to monitor.
Back in London enjoying his newborn daughter and no longer suffering from nightmares of prison, Bahari begins a series of interviews for television, radio, print, emphasizing that The Guard respond with threats to his family, although his mother's resolute contempt for these ashghals (garbage) makes her a difficult target.
[19] Bahari ends by giving his thoughts on Supreme Leader Khamenei (the one Iranian now blamed "for the rapes, tortures, and murders" rather than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad); non-violence (the only effective tactic against the regime); a possible US or Israel attack on Iran (a "nightmare scenario" that would destroy the democratic movement in Iran and damage Western interests); the two main weak points of the regime (information and the economy); whether the Iranian Green Movement is dead (no); and what he has learned from "friends and more than a few strangers with connections inside the government" who have contacted him in London.
His brutal interrogator Rosewater is a colonel in the revolutionary guards from a traditional religious Isfahani family whose organizational name is "Javadi".
[21] Jon Stewart of The Daily Show commented on the book, "Your ability to connect the story to your family, and the nuances you pick up, even from your captor, is incredible.
"[22] "Mr. Bahari's ordeal, which he has chronicled in his moving and, at times, very funny book Then They Came for Me, is more than just a random event in Iran's spiral from authoritarianism into totalitarianism.
His arrest in June 2009 was one of the first organized government responses to a wave of grassroots protest movements that would soon sweep across most of the Middle East and North Africa.
Because of Mr. Bahari's superb personal knowledge of Iran’s government, he was able to produce an account of exactly how, and why, he was tormented, and the larger context of a fast-changing regime.
… Especially timely given recent events throughout the Middle East, this book is recommended for anyone wishing to better understand the workings of a police state."
It was filmed in June and July 2013 and was directed and written by Jon Stewart,[29][30] with Gael García Bernal starring as Bahari.