‘I’d lost my marriage. I’d lost my career’

People often tell Kylie Moore-Gilbert that if they went through what she went through – 804 days in an Iranian prison on bogus espionage charges – they wouldn’t have survived.

“And I say, ‘Yes, you would have, because you have no choice.’ You find reserves of inner strength that you never knew you had,” says Moore-Gilbert, the Middle Eastern studies academic who spent more than two years in prison between 2018 and 2020 and has written a book, The Uncaged Sky, about her ordeal. “I’ve seen dozens of others survive even worse than what was done to me.”

Good Weekend senior writer Jane Cadzow, who was given the first interview with Moore-Gilbert for our recent cover story, Prisoner 97029, says the complete isolation appeared to be one of the hardest things for Moore-Gilbert to have had to endure.

“If you think nobody knows what’s happening to you, that’s soul-destroying,” says Cadzow. “And it’s a tried and true technique of interrogators to say to the person they’re interrogating, ‘Nobody knows you’re here. Nobody cares about you.’ How do you keep up your spirits and your hope when you’re told that?”

In this special longer-length episode, hosted by Good Weekend editor Katrina Strickland, Moore-Gilbert talks about everything from the psychotic Revolutionary Guard who fell in love with her, to the federal government’s campaign to get her out of prison via quiet diplomatic means (she argues it only worked after the media started reporting her case), to the difficulty of rebuilding her life at home in Australia.

“I came back and I had to grapple with losing the life that I had known before my incarceration. I’d lost my marriage. I’d lost my career,” Moore-Gilbert says. “I also had to mentally grapple with the fact that support for me didn’t always come from those I would have most expected it to come from. When you go through a difficult situation in life, you really find out who’s got your back and who doesn’t.”

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For the full feature story, see Saturday’s Good Weekend, or visit The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.