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She was the target of an Iranian assassination plot. She now lives in its shadow
Iranian rights activist Masih Alinejad speaks during a press conference in March in association with the World Liberty Congress to urge action on political prisoners around the world, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
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Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
Masih Alinejad is lucky to be alive.
In late July 2022, a hitman was standing on the front porch of her home in Brooklyn, N.Y. The man, bearded and wearing a black T-shirt and baggy black shorts, had allegedly been hired as part of a plot hatched in Iran to assassinate Alinejad, a dissident and outspoken critic of the Iranian regime.
The only thing separating him from Alinejad was her front door.
Alinejad was home at the time, on a Zoom call with the Russian chess champion and political activist Gary Kasparov and the Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez.
“I was in a very deep conversation. It was very tense, and we were talking about initiating a new organization, so that’s why I didn’t want to leave the meeting,” Alinejad said. “So when I heard someone knocking at the door, I was like, OK, after the meeting, so I didn’t open the door.”
That Zoom call likely saved her life.
When she didn’t answer the door, the suspect returned to his car and drove off, running a stop sign near her house. The police pulled him over and found an AK-47-style rifle in the back seat of his car. He was arrested, and from there the FBI unraveled what prosecutors say was a murder-for-hire scheme directed from Iran to assassinate Alinejad.
“I actually asked the FBI what happened that I’m alive now,” Alinejad told NPR. “They said ‘You were lucky.’ “
She was lucky, in part, because the FBI was aware Iran was targeting her, but the bureau didn’t know that the man on her porch was part of the alleged assassination plot or that he was armed with a gun, she said.
The murder-for-hire scheme to kill Alinejad is one of at least four state-sponsored plots that the Justice Department says it has foiled in the past several years. It is part of a growing trend in which foreign governments look to silence critics overseas.
The threats against her have turned her life upside down
Alinejad was recalling her ordeal over dinner in downtown Washington, D.C., in May. She had just arrived from New York for a brief visit following the death of Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, in a helicopter crash.
Alinejad, who was born in Iran and now lives in exile in the U.S., is a journalist, activist and outspoken critic of Iran’s government. For the past decade, she has waged a campaign against the country’s compulsory headscarf, or hijab, for women.
She has gained a massive audience on social media — some 10 million followers across platforms. Her activism has angered Iran’s leaders and put her in the regime’s crosshairs.
The U.S. Justice Department said in 2021 that it had foiled an Iranian plot to kidnap Alinejad in New York City, whisk her by speedboat to Venezuela and then transport her to Iran, where she most likely would have faced trial.
Two years later, the department announced that it had foiled another plot directed from Iran, but this time to assassinate Alinejad. A federal indictment charged four alleged members of an Eastern European criminal organization with ties to Iran of being tasked with killing her. It was one of those four men, Khalid Mehdiyev, who was on her front porch and later arrested.
Mehdiyev and two of his codefendants are in U.S. custody and have pleaded not guilty. A trial is scheduled for next year.
Since the kidnapping scheme was first exposed, Alinejad and her family have moved from one FBI safehouse to another — almost 20 over the past four years, she said. Sometimes they have advance warning; sometimes they only have an hour or so to pack their bags.
It is a temporary, disorienting way to live.
“Sometimes, during the night, I wake up and I don’t know where I am,” she said. “It’s like I wake up and I don’t know, this is my house? This is a hotel? It’s a safehouse? So it’s not easy.”
She and her husband, Kambiz Foroohar, had to sell their Brooklyn house after the foiled assassination plot. It was too well known and no longer safe, the authorities told them.
The couple is now looking to buy a place in New York City, but it’s hard to get past a co-op board, Alinejad said, when a quick Google search reveals that the Iranian government is trying to kill you.
“Who is going to sell a co-op to a person being followed by killers?” she said. “So we are getting our reference letters from neighbors, from colleagues to actually convince the members of the board, members in the co-op that please, accept us, we are good people, ignore the killers.”
The threat against her life did not end with the foiled plots. American officials have told her that Iran is still actively trying to kill her, she said.
The FBI declined to comment for this story. Iran’s U.N. mission did not respond to a request for comment.
The threat against Alinejad doesn’t just affect her. It affects her friends. It affects her family, including her husband.
Like Alinejad, Foroohar said that the constant moving from safehouse to safehouse has been one of the toughest challenges.
It has meant, at times, that he’s been separated from his children, who are Alinejad’s stepchildren. It feels like they are living in an Airbnb all the time.
The couple doesn’t hang artwork on the walls or put out family photos, he says, because they never know how long they’ll be in one place.
“Every location that we are in is sterile for us,” Foroohar said over coffee at a New York café. “And I want that messy, chaotic feel of a home where albums are everywhere, pictures are everywhere, books are everywhere, you know? It’s just, like, a mess that is your mess and it’s your home.”
Foroohar said that when the FBI first showed them photos that they were under surveillance by Iranian operatives, he and Alinejad were in shock. It felt like they themselves were characters in a movie, he said.
He knew Iran’s leaders didn’t like Alinejad’s activism, but Foroohar said he never thought they’d try to kill her.
“That’s a very radical step to take,” he said.
Still, the couple has been able to find humor in their predicament.
“You can’t really talk about it on a day-to-day basis with people because it doesn’t happen to everyone,” he said. “You can talk about the Knicks game. You can talk about the Yankees, or you can talk about the weather. But, ‘Oh yeah, by the way, there’s a guy with a machine gun outside my house’ — that’s a conversation killer.”
Foroohar knows better than anyone how the threat on Alinejad’s life has taken a toll on her. He tells a story to illustrate how.
He and Alinejad were out together in New York one day, he said, when a man threw liquid into her face.
“For a brief moment, she thought, ‘Oh my god, this is acid,’” he said. “She thought, ‘My face is going to burn.’ And she rushed into a shop, got some bottled water and was just pouring water over her face.”
It turned out the liquid wasn’t acid. It was coffee. But Alinejad lives with the fear that anywhere she goes, he said, danger may lurk behind every door.
“Sometimes someone walks too closely behind us, she gets nervous,” he said. “Or she gets in the elevator, someone else walks in and she walks out. These have small effects.”
He calls these “moments of nervousness.” Still, most of the time, he said, Alinejad is “ready to fight the good fight.”
How will it end?
Alinejad said she knows her work has taken a toll on her family. It’s forced Foroohar to spend less time with his children. Some friends have distanced themselves from Alinejad out of fear for their own safety.
“I always carry the guilt on my shoulder when I see that my husband doesn’t have a normal life, when I see that he misses his children, he doesn’t have his art, when I see that anywhere I go, he gets almost a heart attack if I don’t answer his phone call,” she said.
Sometimes she asks herself whether it’s worth it — putting herself, her family and friends in potential danger. And the answer she comes back to, she said, is yes.
“I’m not carrying any weapon. I don’t have guns and bullets,” she said. “But the regime, they have guns, bullets, everything, they are scared of me. That gives me power, you know? It gives me hope.”
Alinejad doesn’t know how this all ends, or whether it ever does.
But she says right now, she still has her voice and she is going to keep using it.
One observer of the current Senate race in Louisiana noted that Sen. Bill Cassidy could lose his reelection bid.
Annie Flanagan for NPR
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Annie Flanagan for NPR
Sen. Bill Cassidy lost Saturday’s Louisiana Republican primary according to a race call by the Associated Press.
Cassidy, who served two terms in the Senate, was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict President Trump after the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol. That vote put him at odds with Trump and his MAGA coalition, ultimately leading Trump to push Rep. Julia Letlow to run against Cassidy.
Cassidy’s bid for a third term was viewed as a test of Trump’s grip on the party–and of what voters want from their representatives in Washington. The primary pitted Cassidy, a veteran lawmaker, former physician and chair of the powerful Senate health committee, against Letlow, a political newcomer and a millennial MAGA loyalist.
A detailed view of a hat that reads, Run Julia Run, is seen at a campaign event for Rep. Julia Letlow (R-LA) on May 6, 2026 in Franklinton, Louisiana.
Tyler Kaufman/Getty Images
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Tyler Kaufman/Getty Images
A former college administrator, Letlow won a special election in 2021 for the House seat her late husband, Luke, was set to assume before he died from COVID in 2020.
In Congress, Letlow sponsored a bill to collect oral histories from the pandemic and has focused on education and children. She introduced the “Parents Bill of Rights Act,” which would allow parents to review classroom materials like library books and require schools to notify parents if their child requests different pronouns, locker rooms or sports teams.
She also serves on the powerful appropriations committee and has embraced Trump’s agenda.
Letlow, who came first in Saturday’s primary, will face Louisiana state Treasurer John Fleming in the runoff on June 27. Cassidy came in third.
The election result is a victory for President Trump who has put Republican loyalty to the test on the ballot so far this year in Indiana state senate primaries and in Cassidy’s race.
Another major test of Trump’s influence comes in Kentucky’s primary on Tuesday when Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, who has found himself at odds with the president, faces a challenger endorsed by Trump.
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Brass bands in Beijing make way for sticker shock at home as Trump returns to escalating inflation
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump returned from the spectacle of a Chinese state visit to a less than welcoming U.S. economy — with the military band and garden tour in Beijing giving way to pressure over how to fix America’s escalating inflation rate.
Consumer inflation in the United States increased to 3.8% annually in April, higher than what he inherited as the Iran war and the Republican president’s own tariffs have pushed up prices. Inflation is now outpacing wage gains and effectively making workers poorer. The Cleveland Federal Reserve estimates that annual inflation could reach 4.2% in May as the war has kept oil and gasoline prices high.
Trump’s time with Chinese leader Xi Jinping appears unlikely to help the U.S. economy much, despite Trump’s claims of coming trade deals. The trip occurred as many people are voting in primaries leading into the November general election while having to absorb the rising costs of gasoline, groceries, utility bills, jewelry, women’s clothing, airplane tickets and delivery services. Democrats see the moment as a political opportunity.
“He’s returning to a dumpster fire,” said Lindsay Owens, executive director of Groundwork Collaborative, a liberal think tank focused on economic issues. “The president will not have the faith and confidence of the American people — the economy is their top issue and the president is saying, ‘You’re on your own.’”
The president’s trip to Beijing and his recent comments that indicated a tone-deafness to voters’ concerns about rising prices have suggested his focus is not on the American public and have undermined Republicans who had intended to campaign on last year’s tax cuts as helping families.
Trump described the trip as a victory, saying on social media that Xi “congratulated me on so many tremendous successes,” as the U.S. president has praised their relationship.
Trump told reporters that Boeing would be selling 200 aircraft — and maybe even 750 “if they do a good job” — to the Chinese. He said American farmers would be “very happy” because China would be “buying billions of dollars of soybeans.”
“We had an amazing time,” Trump said as he flew home on Air Force One, and told Fox News’ Bret Baier in an interview that gasoline prices were just some “short-term pain” and would “drop like a rock” once the war ends.
Inflationary pain is not a factor in how Trump handles Iran
Trump departed from the White House for China by saying the negotiations over the Iran war depended on stopping Tehran from developing nuclear weapons. “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said.
That remark prompted blowback because it suggested to some that Trump cared more about challenging Iran than fighting inflation at home. Trump defended his words, telling Fox News: “That’s a perfect statement. I’d make it again.”
The White House has since stressed that Trump is focused on inflation.
Asked later about the president’s words, Vice President JD Vance said there had been a “misrepresentation” of the remarks. White House spokesman Kush Desai said the “administration remains laser-focused on delivering growth and affordability on the homefront” while indicating actions would be taken on grocery prices.
But as Trump appeared alongside Xi, new reports back home showed inflation rising for businesses and interest rates climbing on U.S. government debt.
His comments that Boeing would sell 200 jets to China caused the company’s stock price to fall because investors had expected a larger number. There was little concrete information offered about any trade agreements reached during the summit, including Chinese purchases of U.S. exports such as liquefied natural gas and beef.
“Foreign policy wins can matter politically, but only if voters feel stability and affordability in their daily lives,” said Brittany Martinez, a former Republican congressional aide who is the executive director of Principles First, a center-right advocacy group focused on democracy issues.
“Midterms are almost always a referendum on cost of living and public frustration, and Republicans are not immune from the same inflation and affordability pressures that hurt Democrats in recent cycles,” she added.
Democrats see Trump as vulnerable
Democratic lawmakers are seizing on Trump’s comments before his trip as proof of his indifference to lowering costs. There is potential staying power of his remarks as Americans head into Memorial Day weekend facing rising prices for the hamburgers and hot dogs to be grilled.
“What Americans do not see is any sympathy, any support, or any plan from Trump and congressional Republicans to lower costs – in fact, they see the opposite,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York said Thursday.
Vance faulted the Biden administration for the inflation problem even though the inflation rate is now higher than it was when Trump returned to the White House in January 2025 with a specific mandate to fix it.
“The inflation number last month was not great,” Vance said Wednesday, but he then stressed, “We’re not seeing anything like what we saw under the Biden administration.”
Inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022 under Biden, a Democrat. By the time Trump took the oath of office, it was a far more modest 3%.
Trump’s inflation challenge could get harder
The data tells a different story as higher inflation is spreading into the cost of servicing the national debt.
Over the past week, the interest rate charged on 10-year U.S. government debt jumped from 4.36% to 4.6%, an increase that implies higher costs for auto loans and mortgages.
“My fear is that the layers of supply shocks that are affecting the U.S. economy will only further feed into inflationary pressures,” said Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon.
Daco noted that last year’s tariff increases were now translating into higher clothing prices. With the Supreme Court ruling against Trump’s ability to impose tariffs by declaring an economic emergency, his administration is preparing a new set of import taxes for this summer.
Daco stressed that there have been a series of supply shocks. First, tariffs cut into the supply of imports. In addition, Trump’s immigration crackdown cut into the supply of foreign-born workers. Now, the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz has cut off the vital waterway used to ship 20% of global oil supplies.
“We’re seeing an erosion of growth,” Daco said.
Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, the Food and Drug Administration’s top drug regulator, said she was fired from the agency Friday after she declined to resign.
She said she did not know who had ordered her firing or why, nor whether Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. knew of her fate. The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The departure reflected the upheaval at the F.D.A., days after the resignation of Dr. Marty Makary, the agency commissioner. Dr. Makary had become a lightning rod for critics of the agency’s decisions to reject applications for rare disease drugs and to delay a report meant to supply damaging evidence about the abortion drug mifepristone. He also spent months before his departure pushing back on the White House’s requests for him to approve more flavored vapes, the reason he ultimately cited for leaving.
Dr. Hoeg’s hiring had startled public health leaders who were familiar with her track record as a vaccine skeptic, and she played a leading role in some of the agency’s most divisive efforts during her tenure. She worked on a report that purportedly linked the deaths of children and young adults to Covid vaccines, a dossier the agency has not released publicly. She was also the co-author of a document describing Mr. Kennedy’s decision to pare the recommendations for 17 childhood vaccines down to 11.
But in an interview on Friday, Dr. Hoeg said she “stuck with the science.”
“I am incredibly proud of the work we were doing,” Dr. Hoeg said, adding, “I’m glad that we didn’t give in to any pressures to approve drugs when it wasn’t appropriate.”
As the director of the agency’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, she was a political appointee in a role that had been previously occupied by career officials. An epidemiologist who was trained in the United States and Denmark, she worked on efforts to analyze drug safety and on a panel to discuss the use of serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the most widely prescribed class of antidepressants, during pregnancy. She also worked on efforts to reduce animal testing and was the agency’s liaison to an influential vaccine committee.
She made sure that her teams approved drugs only when the risk-benefit balance was favorable, she said.
The firing worsens the leadership vacuum at the F.D.A. and other agencies, with temporary leaders filling the role of commissioner, food chief and the head of the biologics center, which oversees vaccines and gene therapies. The roles of surgeon general and director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are also unfilled.
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